Page 3678 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 23 November 2022
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Services) (11.21), in reply: I thank colleagues for their input today. I particularly want to thank Mr Cocks and Dr Paterson for their personal stories. It does make an incredible difference to workers and has a tremendous impact on them, and it is how we can make change as well.
The Workplace Legislation Amendment Bill 2022 makes a number of amendments to legislation within my portfolio. The bill amends the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, the Workers Compensation Act 1951 and the Long Service Leave (Portable Schemes) Act 2009. These laws all play a vital role in ensuring that our workplaces are safe and that the lives of working Canberrans are valued and protected. The amendments to the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 implement nine of the 34 recommendations from Marie Boland’s review of the national model work health and safety laws undertaken in 2018. Those recommendations were agreed to by the Australian work health and safety ministers in May 2021.
Under the amendment bill, work health and safety incident notifications are extended to require employers to report sexual assault incidents at their workplaces to the regulator, WorkSafe ACT. This feature of the bill is particularly important when considered in light of the increased prevalence and awareness of workplace sexual assault and harassment which has been in the public discourse since the Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s Respect@Work: Sexual Harassment National Inquiry Report and the independent review into the commonwealth parliamentary workplaces. According to Safe Work Australia, one in three people, or 33 per cent, have experienced sexual harassment at work in the past five years.
These amendments are positive duties in the work health and safety laws that require employers to do all that they reasonably can to prevent sexual harassment or sexual assaults from occurring at work, in the same way as other risks to health and safety. While there are existing work health and safety duties, the amendment bill strengthens the employer duties and obligations by requiring them to report to the regulator when they become aware of an instance of sexual assault, or a suspected instance, in their organisation. This includes circumstances where a report is made directly or indirectly to the employer. It would not be necessary for there to be a conviction or a court finding recorded, or for court proceedings to be underway.
The change strengthens the regulatory compliance and enforcement powers, allowing workplaces to be investigated when these incidents occur, and providing greater detection of poor systems of work, poor work design and poor work safety practices. It provides an appropriate level of oversight of employers and ACT workplaces in an effort to prevent or reduce the incidence of workplace sexual assault and to contribute to more effective work health and safety outcomes.
The changes to the notification of sexual assault in the workplace expressly take into consideration privacy and human rights concerns in the information to be reported when notifying the regulator. Under the amendment bill, an employer must not give information disclosing the identity of any person involved in the sexual assault incident when notifying the regulator. Financial penalties apply to employers not complying with obligations to notify the regulator of workplace sexual assault incidents. As a result of changes introduced in the amendment bill, if an employer does not comply with the requirement to notify the regulator of a sexual assault in a
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