Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

It is the premise upon which group insurance is based, but that's the premise that you're trying to dismantle here, if I can point that out to you. The point of group insurance is to help provide that safety net. That was why your previous Prime Minister put this in place. What I'm suggesting is that we are about to pass legislation on the government policy that, I think, both the Labor Party and the Greens feel is unworkable and is fundamentally removing a safety net for vulnerable Australians, and it could be done in a better way. Once again, I understand the political realities of what we're dealing with here. You want to get this legislation through. You've committed to it; it is your policy. Even though you carved it out under a deal with the Greens, you've brought it back and we have it here before us today. You are going to be making hundreds if not thousands of public servants and others enact a policy that doesn't appear to be workable. You do not appear to have done the research and collected the data necessary to understand the implications of this policy.

I go back to the point that $600 million of payouts have been occurring. You don't even seem to know what occupations those payouts have occurred under. The reason I raise this issue—I will get to a question in a second—is that for the four-fifths of this cohort who will go to opt-in, so they won't be under the status quo of a default, there doesn't seem to be any understanding of whether they're just as much at risk outside the workplace as the high-risk occupations are. As far as I can tell, no work has been done on whether, if I work in a call centre, I'm as likely to die tragically up a ladder on the weekend doing some home renovations as if I'm a tradie or a construction worker who might be considered to be high risk. In fact I would say, conversely—I suppose I am being opinionated here—that a tradie in a high-risk occupation would probably have a better idea about what they were doing if they were renovating their home on a weekend than somebody like me who doesn't know about that stuff.

There just doesn't seem to be any logic behind what you're doing. There's no evidence of a correlation between claims. You don't seem to even have the data on who has and hasn't been claiming. Are the majority of people who've claimed the $600 million a year falling in the cohort of high-risk occupations, or are they not? That to me is the most telling thing. That data is available, and I would have at least expected Treasury to have done an analysis on that. If you could come in here and say, 'Senator, this is the breakdown of claims under group insurance for this cohort, and we can prove to you without a doubt that the most likely occupations to be claiming are these'—but you can't do that. On what basis should we be voting for your legislation today if you can't provide that kind of simple information?