Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) | Hansard source

by leave—I move opposition amendments (1), (2), (4) to (6), (8) to (11) and (13) on sheet 8767 together:

(1) Amendment (1), omit "November 2019", insert "January 2020".

(2) Amendment (4), item 3A, paragraph 68AAF(1)(c), before "the member", insert "it is reasonable to conclude".

(4) Amendment (6), omit "November 2019", substitute "January 2020".

(5) Amendment (7), omit "November 2019", substitute "January 2020".

(6) Amendment (8), omit "December 2019", substitute "February 2020".

(8) Amendment (10), omit "November 2019", substitute "January 2020".

(9) Amendment (11), omit "November 2019", substitute "January 2020".

(10) Amendment (12), omit "November 2019", substitute "January 2020".

(11) Amendment (13), omit "November 2019", substitute "January 2020".

(13) Amendment (15), omit "November 2019", substitute "January 2020".

I should indicate, just from a procedural perspective, that I move only these items to avoid duplicating the matters that have been dealt with in the One Nation amendments that we just considered.

These amendments from Labor go to the issue that I've been exploring this morning with the minister. The government's proposed approach to deal with high-risk workers assumes that trustees will have complete information about the occupational risk associated with each of the individual fund members' occupations. This is not the case. It is not the case now and it is unlikely to be the case in the future. It is very unlikely that funds will be able to obtain this information with this level of certainty as defined in the scheme laid out by the minister. The funds at the moment only have information that the employer gives them. That information is, in any case, often incomplete, but the legal obligation is merely to provide the worker's name, the date of birth and the address. Most funds are able to supplement that, and Senator Hume has made reference to the process by which the funds engage with their members to do that, but this is a time-consuming and imperfect activity, and the mechanism imagined by the government to protect high-risk workers as a consequence is quite inadequate.

The frustration that I have and that Labor has about this is that there are alternatives available. And so what the industry funds have said to us is that they are already engaging with the ATO. There is a relevant data set at the ATO which could be used to provide more complete information about members and their occupations and thus allow funds and trustees to establish the risk profile of each of their members. But, as Senator Hume told the chamber earlier, this was not contemplated by government, for reasons that haven't really been explained, and so we are left with a quite imperfect model.

We're not the government. We can only respond to the agenda set in the chamber here by the government. To that extent, we are now in the second-best position of trying to improve upon a government proposal which we are not entirely satisfied with but which we are prepared to work on together. And the amendments that I am moving now just seek to make one key difference. We seek to change the government mechanism so that, if a trustee makes a decision, they may make that decision under a reasonable belief about the risk profile of their members.

Our concern is this: without this protection that the trustee must only establish a reasonable belief, our concern is that trustees are at risk of legal action—being sued by either a member or a dependant of a member—because the trustee made the wrong decision as to whether or not to provide cover. As I've indicated, there are other means by which we could address this problem. If the government were willing to do so, the provision of ATO data would also be an alternative pathway by which we could solve this unsatisfactory situation where the truth is that trustees do not have enough data about their members. There are other means, but the government has indicated that it's unwilling to consider this; in fact, it's been unable to explain why it hasn't considered it so far. And so our proposal before the chamber now is that we insert a provision that the trustee must have a reasonable belief that an individual member is in a high-risk occupation and therefore can be switched into a category where they continue to be provided group insurance on an opt-out basis.

This is a compromise, but it is an attempt to reach agreement with government to allow their mechanism, which they are proposing, to work as it is intended to work. Based on the feedback that we are receiving from funds and trustees, we present this argument, and we hope that it will enjoy support from others in the chamber.