Page 5927 - Week 18 - Wednesday, 11 December 1991
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Bill goes part of the way to making some of the reforms. It avoids wide swings either way. There is a little compromise in it. I am not going to bore the house with all the background, which long preceded self-government in some respects. Mr Berry, from his competent advisers, is well aware of that background.
The issues I want to address are the core concepts of where we are going with workers' compensation in this Territory. We have seen the disasters interstate of Workcare and so on, and we have seen the at times excessive publicity given to lump sum redemption rorts in the workers' compensation area. When you mention a workers' compensation pay-out, you often tend, given the prejudice of this community, to think it has been paid to someone whose name ends with a vowel and it has been part of a rort. I have acted for workers with genuine injuries. I have also acted for a worker who allegedly had to be helped into my office for years while we pursued a claim. At the end of it I was shown by an insurer a film of my client carrying great big stones, building his own rockery. I have gone through all of that, so I speak from no ideological position. I want to put that on the record.
One of the problems about the workers' compensation scheme is the lack of definition for termination of payments for insurers and the natural temptation upon them to offer lump sum redemptions. When the word got out that you could get this lump sum redemption - in other words, your big pay-out, your compo payment - the market became greedy. A process of leading a worker off a settled wage - keeping him on a wage for a while and then leading him down, if he is in an irrecoverable situation, to long-term national health and social security benefits - led the worker to think that there was a pot of gold at the end of that damaged, prematurely osteoarthritic limb and that there was to be a very large lump sum payment. The insurers have some of this on their own heads because of the pressure, particularly within my profession, to get lump sum payments. Lump sum payments produce higher rewards generally for the legal profession. Mr Stefaniak smiles, but I think we should put a few cards on the table in this debate.
I have difficulties with the time period in Mr Stefaniak's amendment. In effect, it takes the worker off after 12 weeks. A schedule 5 notice can be given, stating baldly that his payments are terminated. What it says is, "Your payments are terminated; see you in court", or "See you at the arbitration". I point out to Mr Stefaniak that heaps of workers were injured on the Jolimont Centre, where there was a disgraceful situation involving a now defunct firm - I will name them - Tasmanian Bricklayers. Those special fire-compressed blocks for the Jolimont Centre were extremely heavy, well beyond the weight limits for normal bricklaying, and the scaffolding did not match the floor levels, under OH and S requirements. So, many workers were working down at their ankles and above a safe height for placing bricks.
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