Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Just at the outset I note that Senator Canavan would not be a true Nat if he was not always in the doldrums. Nothing much has changed in relation to this bill over the Christmas break. He may have wished them all Christmas cheer, but this bill does not bring workers any cheer. The purpose of this bill is to amend the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1988, which provides for the rehabilitation and compensation of injured employees of the Commonwealth, its agencies and statutory authorities and of eligible corporations. What this government has not owned up to is that it has brought this bill in by itself. This bill is really one part of three; it is a trio of bills through which this government is seeking to implement changes to Comcare and which will, when put together, significantly and adversely impact workers in this country. This particular piece of legislation concerns the exit arrangements for a declared Commonwealth authority which decides to exit the scheme. The Australian Capital Territory announced back in February last year its intention to leave the Commonwealth scheme and design its own scheme after a six-week consultation process.

The problem with debating this bill in isolation is that we are not privy to the two other bills that the government has been trying to bring through this parliament. They sought to claim that they are not interrelated and to claim that they are not part of a trio of changes which will negatively impact workers under this scheme. What Labor continues to be concerned about is that this government should own up to this. They should declare that it is one of three bills; they should deal with them concurrently; they should deal with them appropriately. But I do not think they are game to do that. They want to be able to introduce this as a noncontroversial piece of legislation and then to persuade the Senate that we should adopt this one—it is not a trouble—and let it pass, but the true aim of the coalition is to gut Comcare and to adversely affect workers compensation schemes. They want to do—or try to do—what they did in Queensland many years ago, and that was to move to self-insurance; that is, they want to put it into the market so that workers' rights would no longer be covered by schemes that would give them a fairness opportunity and protect their legitimate compensation rights. That happened in Queensland: a previous coalition or Liberal-National government allowed self-insurance to occur, but around 21 large companies, including the Brisbane City Council, opted out of the scheme. That meant that the pool of white-collar workers significantly decreased and the remainder were left with high premiums. Further, they were left with some challenging industries that needed to improve their workers compensation and the safety outcome for workers.

Those with lower premiums exit the scheme and that makes the remainder even less viable. The whole idea in Queensland was to junk the state scheme, and in this case the Commonwealth scheme, and allow the private market to flourish. It all sounds laissez-faire, but it means Commonwealth workers lose out. They end up in poor and overly watched schemes; they end up with compensation payments that are not related to their income and so they lose out. Underpinning all of this is the coalition's intention to head towards what the Queensland government tried to achieve back then. Thankfully, that was reversed by an incoming Labor government, which implemented a much stronger state based scheme—a scheme which looked after workers' interests but which adopted a carrot-and-stick approach to ensure that employers were rewarded with lower premiums if they looked after the safety of their employees. However, a number of self-insured entities remain in Queensland. I do not think the coalition have a stronger scheme as their root cause or their root desire here. What they ultimately want to do is put it out into the field to the detriment of workers more broadly.

The impact of these bills would be to reduce the premium pools in state workers compensation schemes. Labor's priority is, however, to ensure that workers are looked after and their rights and entitlements are maintained. If a worker is injured on the job, they must be properly compensated; they and their families must be able continue as before during this difficult period. Labor remains concerned that, with the introduction of this legislation, the government does not have the workers' best interests at heart; it is also concerned that there has been a lack of consultation.

This government has not come clean with its aim by serving up the three bills, by claiming them to be unrelated and by arguing them one at a time. It smacks of a concerted effort to drive workers compensation down into the hands of self-insurers. The government has said that these changes to the Comcare scheme are designed to make the scheme more sustainable over time. That seems to mean cutting money out of schemes, which would mean a worse outcome for employees. I do not think you can look at it any other way. The government certainly have not claimed there is going to be any significant administrative saving that they can pass on. These bills, if passed, will see cuts to lump-sum compensation payable for permanent impairment for the vast majority of injured workers and they will remove the already modest pain-and-suffering payment. These bills will also mean changes to eligibility requirements, where injured workers may be locked out of schemes altogether. There will be a reduction in incapacity payments and an expansion of sanctions against workers, including: the removal of medical support if a worker fails to attend a medical appointment and harsh job search requirements for injured workers if they say they have no suitable employment, in which case they will need to find a job with a new employer or take up self-employment. There will be a new, punishing approach to workers with psychiatric injuries. Employers will have the right to impose health related and work capacity decisions. Workers will have no independent right of review when an employer orders them back to work. That is the direction that this government wants to take, with this bill being the first of the related bills. I think they should be highlighted for the path and direction they are pursuing.

In dealing more broadly with this bill, I think that Labor senators in the Education and Employment Legislation Committee made some very apposite remarks in their additional comments. Whilst Labor senators support legislation to ensure that an exiting employer does not leave the Comcare scheme without contributing an appropriate amount to cover any current or prospective liabilities that are not funded by premiums the employer has paid before exit, the real heart of this issue is that we must ensure that no workers will be worse off under this legislation and that the passage of this bill will not provide an incentive for employers to disadvantage workers. Ultimately, the majority report did not address this in any significant way.

We have dealt with this bill as a bureaucratic piece of legislation which will allow the ACT to exit the Comcare scheme, but ultimately we have not dealt with it as an instrument of how workers will be worse off if it is passed. Ultimately, the aim of this coalition government is to pass the costs of workers' compensation not onto employers but back onto employees themselves. We note, as outlined in senators' additional comments, that the reason for referring this bill to the committee was to ensure a thorough investigation of the bill and to allow sufficient time to consider the bill. However, since this bill was referred to the committee, the government introduced what I referred to earlier as the third substantive bill relating to Comcare. Given we do not have that bill before us, I think it means ultimately that there is nothing stopping the government, now that those bills have been introduced, from bringing them all together, laying out this strategy and telling us in no uncertain words what their intentions are. When you look at the related bills, it seems to be crystal clear that the legislation is all about attacking workers' rights. Labor senators remain unconvinced by the Department of Employment submission that the passage of this bill would not result in a reduced premium pool in state workers' compensation schemes, about which concerns were raised by the ETU and the Victorian government.

If you were going to improve the outcomes for Comcare workers and broadly allow for exits out of the Comcare scheme into state based schemes, you would not do it this way, by simply allowing the ACT government to exit the scheme, reducing the premium pool, and allowing others in state systems to exit Comcare and jump into less onerous state schemes. You would deal with states and territories more holistically to ensure that workers did not lose significant benefits on the way through. I do not think this government has any intention of doing that. When you look at the range of parts to the bills that are not before us, the picture becomes a lot clearer. This is simply the first tranche in that direction that this government is pursuing. When you look at the proposals that have been put forward—that employees who have been injured would not be allowed to choose their own doctor under Comcare, that approval of doctors and amounts payable would be set by regulation, and that it is Comcare that would determine what is and is not considered reasonable treatment, not an employee's treating doctor—you then get a flavour of the direction in which this government wants to take Comcare. To suggest that any person other than the treating doctor should determine the necessary treatment for an injured worker is quite frankly beyond belief. The bill also proposes severe cuts to incapacity payments for all workers. This would be particularly detrimental and would have the toughest impact on those employees with injuries which take longer to resolve or those who are permanently and significantly disabled. You can see that this is simply an attack on workers' entitlements to workers' compensation.

The government has sought the support of Labor and the crossbench for this legislation. I would urge the crossbench to reject this bill as part of a trilogy of bills through which this government is seeking to cut compensation outcomes for workers. Our first priority should be to ensure that workers will not be worse off under the proposed federal government bill. There is no such clear guarantee coming from this government on that point. We have heard speakers talk about this bill but not give a guarantee that workers will not be made worse off as a consequence of its introduction. It is within the minister's power, in her summing up speech on the second reading, to state that it is not the intention to rip money out of workers' pockets, to short-change them on compensation payments, to make it difficult or impossible to achieve a reasonable workers' compensation outcome. It is important that this government does not make adverse changes to the Comcare scheme, because those proposed changes would directly and indirectly risk the workplace health and safety of Australian workers.

In the first Comcare bill that the government introduced it sought to hollow out state schemes by opening up the Comcare scheme to private sector companies by applying a very liberal definition of what a national employer is. The reduced premiums pools in state workers compensation schemes would mean increasing premiums for remaining businesses in those schemes and would add significant pressure on workers' entitlements. This bill, if constructed incorrectly, may provide leverage for the federal government to force entities to stay in the Comcare scheme, which the now Turnbull government is going to try and make further adverse changes to. We know that the government has more bills to come. It has at least made its plan more transparent than it was when this bill was first introduced. I think the time is now right for this government to lay out its entire plan of how it is going to address Comcare from go to whoa and what its intentions are, because we can only now glean it from the trilogy of bills it seeks to have passed in this parliament. This government should make plain what its intentions are in relation to workers compensation, particularly Comcare itself, when you look at its intentions more broadly. But I do not think they will. I think they will continue to say, 'This is one single bill. This is about allowing the ACT to exit the Comcare scheme and nothing more.' I do not think that is a reasonable answer to this.

When you look at self-insurance issues, these bills will widen the pool of employers' eligibility for self-insurance. It will enable an employer with employees in more than one state to apply for a self-insurance licence, which exempts them from paying premiums in those states where it is currently registered, and will allow an employer to be responsible for managing its own workers compensation claims. This occurred in Queensland in the nineties. It was unsuccessful and it did not last. It did have a significant adverse impact on the existing workers compensation scheme in that state. I think it would have ultimately driven it into oblivion. I think that is the underlying direction that this government wants to take—to drive workers compensation into self-insurance markets, drive it away from properly funded compensation schemes for employees and put it in the employers' hands so that they can drive premiums down. They can do that by driving outcomes for workers down by making it harder and harder for employees to be fairly compensated for when unfortunate injuries do occur in the workplace. Ultimately it will do nothing to improve and incentivise employers to provide good safety outcomes for their employees in the first instance, because, of course, the best way to avoid an injury is to have a safe place of work in the first place and not have to ultimately pay workers compensation.

But I think the employers who have the ear of this government want the best of both worlds. They want the ability to not spend their money on ensuring a safe place of work and then not spend their money on premiums to assist workers should they be injured as a consequence of their own inactions or neglect. Of course, the most concerning aspects of these bills is the absence of a robust regulatory framework for managing self-insurers. What this government would do, if it was serious about dealing with this in a broad way, would be to also implement a regulatory framework for managing self-insurers. It would not be a trilogy of bills. There would be four bills to deal with this.