Page 5934 - Week 18 - Wednesday, 11 December 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
issue was the worker, the one that works at a job and gets compo as well. He did not even mention the genuine people, the people who are fully and totally incapacitated, are in bed and cannot work, and then the employer cuts off their benefit. He did not mention what was going to happen to them. There was no mention of it at all. I think that is disgraceful.
Mr Stefaniak: I do not think that is going to happen, Wayne.
MR BERRY: Well, let us hear what is going to happen. Tell us what is going to happen to them after 12 weeks. What are you going to do for them?
Mr Stefaniak: They will continue on workers' compensation, obviously.
MR BERRY: No, they are going to be terminated.
Mr Stefaniak: No, they are not going to be terminated. This is the power to terminate them. Read it.
MR BERRY: It is only the power to terminate. So, all of the employers are so generous that none of them will terminate.
Mr Stefaniak: You just automatically assume that all employers are wrong.
MR BERRY: Yes, that is right. There is an important precedent in workers' compensation and termination of payments, and I have mentioned that in relation to the Barbaro case. The introduction of a termination clause will allow workers to be terminated from compensation, as I said, forcing them to appeal to the Magistrates Court before benefits are reinstated. This is a process that presently takes, on average, six months. It would cause unnecessary cessation of payments for many workers and leave them without sufficient financial support. Many would be forced onto sickness benefit.
Termination clauses, as I have said, must be linked with rehabilitation procedures. To argue that it will reduce insurance premiums is merely ignoring the facts. There are no hard figures to show how premiums will be reduced, or by how much, if a termination clause is introduced. The monitoring committee I previously mentioned has been successful in reducing premiums; but it has done it by consultation, Mr Stefaniak, not by beating people around the head. Their approach of consultation has triumphed over that cold-hearted approach that you are going to take, the divisive approach.
In the last financial year, the overall average rate of premiums dropped from 3.07 per cent to 2.09 per cent. The average rates payable for individual work categories fell by varying amounts. For example, the building industry rate fell from 19.17 per cent to 14 per cent; the hotel
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .