Page 1728 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 17 October 1989
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MR WHALAN: The ACT scheme has also been criticised by the trade union movement for delays and inequities. I shall return to these criticisms later. Furthermore, unlike other schemes now in operation throughout Australia, the present ACT scheme contains no legislative requirements for the rehabilitation of injured workers. This Government believes that any modern scheme should incorporate the dual arms of injury prevention and management, with the emphasis being on the prevention of workplace accidents through workplace occupational health and safety arrangements.
In the unfortunate event of those arrangements failing and accidents occurring, there must be provision for immediate and effective injury management through rehabilitation. This rehabilitation must be more than just piecemeal or token efforts at placement of injured workers on "light duties" but instead must involve serious efforts, where necessary, to retrain workers and redesign their work and workplaces. Concurrently, there must be provision for adequate workers compensation arrangements to safeguard the financial interests of injured workers and their families.
In the interests of ACT industry, such compensation must be delivered at the lowest possible cost to ACT industry. This Government believes that the current scheme is deficient in at least some of these respects and must be reviewed as a matter of urgency. There has been growing concern, Australia-wide, for a number of years with existing workers compensation arrangements. They have been perceived to be too costly to employers, to fail to deliver adequate assistance to injured workers when they need it, and to provide insufficient encouragement or assistance to a worker to be rehabilitated for a return to work.
Those concerns have resulted in the introduction of sweeping changes to arrangements in Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. New arrangements in each of these jurisdictions resulted in reduced premiums and greater benefits to workers overall. We are, of course, mindful of reported problems being experienced in some States and will need to ensure that those problems are avoided in the ACT.
As I mentioned earlier, the opinion that the current ACT workers compensation scheme is deficient is not new, nor is it confined to this Government. To understand some of the problems with the current scheme it is necessary to look at the history of the scheme in the ACT and then to compare the situation here with the recent developments throughout the rest of the country, to which I have already referred.
Private industry workers compensation arrangements in the ACT are set out in the Workmen's Compensation Act, which was established in its current form in 1951. Some amendments have been made to the legislation since that time, but these changes amount to finetuning only, and the 1951 scheme is largely unchanged.
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