Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Legislation Amendment (Exit Arrangements) Bill 2015. The purpose of the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Legislation Amendment (Exit Arrangements) Bill 2015 is to amend the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1988. That bill provides for financial and other arrangements for a Commonwealth authority to exit the Comcare scheme, clarifies that premiums should be calculated so that current and prospective liabilities are fully funded, changes the appointment process and membership of the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Commission and makes consequential and technical amendments.

The Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1988 provides for the rehabilitation and compensation of injured employees of the Commonwealth and its agencies and statutory authorities, and of eligible corporations. To do this it establishes the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Commission. This commission makes policy and oversees the operation of Comcare. It also establishes Comcare, which operates the scheme. Most of the Commonwealth agencies and statutory authorities pay premiums to Comcare and are referred to as 'premium payers', but some Commonwealth authorities have been granted self-insurance licences. Eligible corporations which join the scheme are also granted self-insurance licences. On 25 February this year the ACT government announced its intention to leave Comcare. It was also announced that the territory government would conduct a six-week consultation period before taking a decision about designing a new scheme. That consultation only ended on Friday, 8 May. Of course, the design of any new scheme will take a significant period of time, and the ACT government has made a commitment to work with stakeholders. So there is no need to rush this legislation, as the Abbott government seems to be doing.

Labor's first priority is to ensure that no workers will be worse off under the government's proposed bill. Unfortunately, what we have seen from this government ever since it has been in power is a shift of responsibility back to the states, a shift of responsibility back to local governments and a shift of responsibility back to individual citizens of this country. This is not about simply shifting responsibilities; this is about cost-shifting—cost-shifting from the Commonwealth government back to the states, back to local governments and back to individuals. This is all in the ideological approach from this Commonwealth government that the individuals should look after themselves.

When it comes to workers compensation, when it comes to the rights of individuals to be to properly compensated for an injury at work, Labor is uncompromising. Workers need to be looked after and workers need to have benefits to ensure that they can look after their families or their individual needs if and when a workplace accident takes place. We are not sure that the same concern for workers rights in this country is underpinning this government's approach—and this is workers rights that do not just go to industrial rights but also to their rights to be properly compensated if they are injured at work. As a former union official I have seen too many people's lives destroyed because of injuries, accidents or chemical exposure at work. We are very concerned that, if we have a system at the Commonwealth level, that system is a sustainable system, it is a system that looks after workers rights and it is a system that the Commonwealth employees and other corporations who are a party to it can understand will provide decent compensation for workers if and when they are injured at work.

We have to be certain that this bill will not provide an incentive for others to make workers worse off. We do not want this bill—this legislation, if it is passed—to be used as a cost-cutting exercise by some of the most profitable and biggest corporations in this country. That is an unacceptable proposition for us. The opposition wants to ensure that workers who are covered by the Comcare scheme are covered appropriately, and we want to ensure that if we then allow people to move out of the scheme they are not moving to inferior schemes simply based on cost-cutting or simply based on reducing workers rights to compensable claims. That is why we took the responsible decision to refer this bill to a Senate committee for a thorough investigation. That Senate committee will consider the bill.

The opposition is concerned that the government has not undertaken a proper consultation with all stakeholders in constructing this bill. I would have thought that the coalition would have learnt a lesson, over the last 18 months, about ensuring proper consultation on legislation that comes to this parliament. The fiasco of the last budget demonstrates that not consulting properly with the community and not consulting properly with people who have an interest in a range of issues, is a recipe for legislative failure.

And we have a government that has had more than its fair share, in such a short time, of legislative failure. The lack of consultation that we are worried about in terms of this bill has led, in other areas of the budget, to pensioners having 18 months of uncertainty in terms of how their pensions will fare in the future. They were simply advised in the first budget that they would be $80 a week worse off, over a 10-year period. Families on $65,000 a year were $6,000 a year worse off. And all this was done without proper consultation. All this was done with an arrogance from this government that beggars belief. That arrogance and lack of consultation, and the ideological focus of this government, came home to roost when they could not get their budget through this Senate.

So my message to the government is that if you are going to make changes you should make them after proper consultation, and you should not hide what you are about to do, as this government did. No-one knew this government's agenda until the first budget. The community was told that there would be no cuts to health, no cuts to education and no cuts to the ABC. And people voted on the basis of promises that were never real promises. That is why, when we are dealing with legislation by this government, we need to be absolutely certain that what they are saying and what they are proposing is what they really mean. They have, now, a reputation in the broader community, of not being trustworthy and not being in a position to—