David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to offer a brief contribution on these fair work legislation bills. In doing so, I want to acknowledge my crossbench colleague Senator Lambie and her team for their work and for sharing a commitment to work constructively on the legislation before us. These bills represent four simple measures that could make a big difference to our communities right now. They are straightforward, have broad support, and can literally change lives.

The first bill, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (First Responders) Bill 2023, would better support our fireys, ambos, police, and emergency services to access compensation for PTSD they've developed as part of their job. Our first responders come into monthly, weekly and sometimes daily contact with death, violence, and injury. They witness tragedies on a regular basis that many of us may only witness once or twice in our lives. This extends to the phone operators in our emergency services, who I think are underrecognised for the extremely important service they provide to our communities. In speaking with some operators, I've been told some truly awful stories about the calls they need to take on a daily basis, and this clearly takes a toll.

The prevention of mental health injury should always be the priority, but we know that that's not always possible, given the nature of the work our first responders do. So early intervention has to be the next most important goal, and I believe our services are getting much better at this. But it won't work for everyone, and that's because trauma is a complex thing and is very individual. For one person, exposure to one traumatic event may be enough to precipitate into post-traumatic stress disorder. For some, PTSD could develop after repeated exposure over a 20-year period. It's a complicated illness, but we know that our first responders shoulder a very high burden of PTSD.

For those who've had family members with PTSD, you'll know just what a toll it takes on the entire family. It is a huge thing for a family to go through to support a family member with PTSD. If you take paramedics, some studies show that the prevalence of PTSD is as high as 10 or 11 per cent. That's one in 10 paramedics.

For our first responders, PTSD is an occupational disease, so our compensation system must stand ready to support them and to fund the services that will put them on the possible pathway to recovery. Unfortunately from the moment I was elected I've heard from first responders that our compensation system is not working in this way. It's not recognising them and supporting them in the way that it should. What I've heard is that first responders are being left to fight with insurers, such as Comcare, for access to compensation that would fund their treatments for PTSD. This happens because it's difficult to prove that PTSD develops as part as someone's job. It's difficult to point to one moment in a person's career and say, 'That was the moment where I developed PTSD.' It's difficult for a person to trawl through their memory at all the loss they may have seen throughout their career and tally the moments that have contributed to them developing PTSD. The very task of listing the dates of those traumatic events would be daunting, if not impossible. It would be harder still while you're struggling with PTSD, knowing the toll that it's taking on your loved ones as well, working each day to keep your mental health in check.

When you start out in one of the services you need to have a physical and mental health clearance, so it seems rather obvious that if a first responder has PTSD then it has developed as part of their job. This bill flips the equation. When this bill passes, insurers will need to presume that PTSD was caused by a first responder's job. If an insurer disagrees then it's on them to prove that it wasn't. This was a key recommendation of the 2019 Senate inquiry, The people behind 000: mental health of our first responders. I want to acknowledge Senator Anne Urquhart, the senator for Tasmania, for her role in establishing the committee and for driving forward those recommendations over the last few years. Clearly there's a lot of support for first responders from Tasmanian senators.

I will take the opportunity to remind the Senate that there were 12 other recommendations in the report that we should not forget. They include reforming how insurers order independent medical examinations. I've heard too many stories of first responders having to front up to three, five, or in one case nine, different independent medical examinations. These examinations are by their nature confronting, and they can feel combative. By necessity, they also require people to speak about and recount their traumas, which can retraumatise people in the grips of PTSD. They are necessary—you can't eliminate them from the system—but clearly insurers need to be careful in ordering them.

Finally, on this provision, I want to give a shout-out to the Heart2Heart crew, who recently completed an almost-3,000-kilometre journey across Australia to raise awareness of first responder mental health and to push for the recommendations of the 2019 Senate inquiry report The people behind 000 to be implemented in full. Today is the first step towards doing that. It's the least that we can do for their service to our communities and to our country, for being there for us in our greatest, most terrible hours of need.

I'll finish off on this bill by saying thank you to our police, our ambos, our firefighters, our emergency services and the operators sitting behind triple 0.

Thank you for putting your health and wellbeing on the line for our communities, and thank you for having our backs. I hope this measure goes some way to looking after you as well.

I'll try and keep my remarks on the remaining three bills very brief. The small business redundancy exemption provision is a longstanding feature of our workplace relations system. Senator Lambie, in her contribution, highlighted the loophole and the statistics here. This is a very welcome change. I would also highlight the need for the parliament to deal with security of payments. That's an area where politicians are failing our tradies and are failing subcontractors who do work and then don't get paid for that work. It's something we have to take more seriously.

The Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Strengthening Protections Against Discrimination) Bill 2023 corrects an oversight on the part of all of us when we were establishing the family and domestic violence leave entitlement last year. While it is illegal for an employer to discriminate against someone for taking family and domestic violence leave, it's not technically illegal for an employer to discriminate against someone on the basis that they're experiencing domestic violence. This bill fixes that by making a subjection to family and domestic violence a protected attribute under the Fair Work Act. In practice, women's legal services have told me it will be a nuanced but very important protection that will ensure people are protected from discrimination before they're ready to access their family and domestic violence leave entitlement. Sadly, we know that, despite the new national plan, family and domestic violence is on the rise.

Finally, the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency) Bill 2023 will add silicosis to the remit of the Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency. If this bill passes, the ASEA will develop and maintain a national silicosis plan and help to coordinate efforts across all levels of government. Silicosis, predominantly from working with engineered stone, is killing workers. It is killing Australians. We know the dangers, and yet still governments—state, territory and federal—have failed to ban it. We need more courage from policymakers to step up on the issue of engineered stone. It is not acceptable to have the evidence and to have recommendations to ban it, and not to have the political courage to follow through with that in order to protect workers in Australia.

These are four bills that, from my read of this chamber, have multipartisan support. I thank the government for drafting the legislation. I thank Minister Burke for including the PTSD provisions. It was a surprise to everyone who'd been pushing for these provisions for years—including the Australian Federal Police Association and others—that they were part of this omnibus bill. I know that they want to see it passed in full this year. The omnibus bill is a beast of a bill, and the Senate is rightly taking its time to work through the 20 sections in total. Here are four. There'll be another 16 to work through in detail, and I understand there will be a number of amendments, including a number of government amendments. They are welcome, but there is clearly still more work to do.

I'll continue to do my bit and uphold my commitment to the people of the ACT, when it comes to the larger omnibus bill, to take each element on its merits and work on it in good faith. But that should not stop us from passing elements of this bill which have broad support and which—as Senator Cash pointed out—have an earlier start date than many of the elements in the much larger omnibus bill.