Page 3679 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 23 November 2022
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workplace, a penalty of $10,000 may apply for individuals and $50,000 for body corporate organisations.
The expansion of the incident notification provisions to include workplace sexual assault will better empower the work health and safety regulator to use these penalties as a deterrent to employers not meeting their legislative obligations. Employers who have poor health and safety practices which are not focused on the effective prevention and management of sexual assault incidents are not meeting their health and safety duties. Measures have also been made within the amendment bill to ensure that employers who are in breach of their WHS obligations are not able to cover infringements by insurance claims. This acts as a further deterrent to poor WHS practices.
The ACT government is taking action to address sexual assault and sexual violence across a range of portfolios. ACT Labor, the ACT Greens and the Canberra Liberals all joined together to support the work of the steering committee to address sexual assault and sexual violence in Canberra. We were the only jurisdiction in Australia to have made this shared commitment.
Following this commitment, members will recall that the ACT government established the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Steering Committee in 2021. The steering committee released its final report in December 2021, outlining 24 recommendations for the ACT government to consider. Recommendation 21 focuses on workplace reforms, including the use of “legislative, policy and funding mechanisms to place a positive duty on organisations to prevent sexual harassment and sexual violence” and providing support to the regulator, WorkSafe ACT, to “regulate the prevention and responses to sexual assault in ACT workplaces”. The sexual assault incident notification reforms in this bill will provide WorkSafe ACT with the tools to do just that.
In June this year the government released its formal response to the recommendations from the steering committee. The government has agreed to a number of the recommendations, including the workplace reforms identified in recommendation 21. The amendment bill will be instrumental to the implementation of this recommendation.
In 2021 I issued a ministerial statement of expectation to the Work Health and Safety Commissioner which outlined my expectation that WorkSafe ACT should continue its work to address the impact of psychosocial hazards in the workplace, including work-related violence, sexual harassment and sexual assault, by educating duty holders of their obligations and ensuring compliance with these obligations. In meeting these expectations, WorkSafe ACT has developed a Strategy for Managing Work-Related Psychosocial Hazards 2021-2023, and an associated Managing Work-Related Sexual Harassment Plan 2021-2023.
Safe Work Australia is the national policy body responsible for maintaining the work health and safety laws and codes of practice. Safe Work Australia has released a model code of practice on managing psychosocial hazards at work, and we are now considering how best to adopt this code locally. A draft code is currently being considered through stakeholders on the Work Health and Safety Council, and I look
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