Page 248 - Week 01 - Thursday, 15 February 1990
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benefits. A recommendation is soon to be made to the Government on a consultant to conduct this review which will be far-reaching and exhaustive. The review will be completed, we hope, by the middle of this year.
Going back to the Occupational Health and Safety Act, as I said, I have instructed my department to fill the important position of registrar. Once that position is filled and the registrar is appointed and the rest of the Act gazetted, work will commence on absorbing and restructuring the existing safety inspectorate into a new occupational health and safety inspectorate, including where necessary retraining and recruitment of some new inspectors. An amount of $200,000 has been provided for the implementation of the Act this financial year.
There will also need to be a comprehensive review of all existing legislation, scaffolding and lifts and so on, with the objective of updating it and bringing it under the umbrella of the Occupational Health and Safety Act as regulations. In that area alone there is an awful lot of work to be done. The registrar will also be involved in recommending on the adoption of standards as provided for under the Act. In this area it is likely that the ACT with its limited resources will rely heavily on Worksafe and Standard Australia standards, which I believe will be satisfactory to all members of the community.
As Assembly members may know, the ACT Government has a seat on the management committee of Worksafe Australia and we endorse its standards and recommendations. It will be necessary to interrelate with other ACT Government bodies, for example, environment protection and eventually the Health Inspectorate, to ensure an optimum use of resources and a minimum of bureaucratic intrusion into business operations. The registrar will also be an avenue of appeal against an inspector's decisions, although it is envisaged that in the long term there will also be a right of appeal to the Industrial Commission on some matters.
The Government's aim is to develop an integrated, occupational injury prevention and management strategy for the ACT as exists in all other States and Territories, involving occupational health and safety, updated workers compensation and rehabilitation of injured workers, with the initial objective of minimising occupational injury through workplace safety arrangements. Where that fails and injury occurs, the objective is to get the injured worker back to work as quickly as possible for a whole number of reasons, both social and psychological, for the sake of the worker and to minimise the currently exorbitantly high workers compensation premiums that apply in the ACT.
As I said, I have already instructed my department to proceed to implement the Act, including filling that position of registrar and canvassing nominations for the Occupational Health and Safety Council. For my part I will
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