Page 3435 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 11 October 1994
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR LAMONT (Minister for Urban Services, Minister for Housing and Community Services, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport) (8.39), in reply: I do thank members who have spoken during the in-principle stage of this debate this evening. Madam Speaker, it is somewhat propitious that Mr De Domenico and I stand this evening as the Minister and the Opposition spokesperson on this matter. Mr De Domenico and I were part of a team that in 1983 undertook a tripartite assessment of workers compensation in the ACT, and that committee bespoke great change that was necessary to the Workmen's Compensation Act. If my memory serves me correctly, there were some 32 amendments that we specifically proposed in 1983. It is appropriate, Mr De Domenico, that this evening you and I are involved in possibly the final act in the reformation of the Workmen's Compensation Act, as it then was, which is the final raft of amendments being debated in this house; for that is where we are at.
The great dissension between employee organisations and employers and their insurers over the years has been on the continuing relevance of the Barbaro decision as far as termination provisions under the Workers' Compensation Act, as we have come to know it, are concerned. Those Barbaro principles basically required that an insurer - or the employer, through their insurer - proceed to court to seek the termination of workers compensation payments to an injured worker. The amendments that are proposed tonight are groundbreaking, in as much as it is accepted that there is a unilateral right, given sufficient evidence, for an insurer to cease workers compensation payments upon eight weeks' notice to the injured worker. The quid pro quo, or the counterbalancing trade-off, if you like, in this legislation is that an occupational rehabilitation scheme will be introduced. The protocol that is outlined within the amendments that are proposed to be moved this evening will put in place an occupational rehabilitation scheme that will provide an impetus, if you like, for employers and their insurers to provide occupational rehabilitation; to rehabilitate injured workers; to ensure that they return to work as soon as practicable, and possible, within the limitations of their injury or within the limitations of their rehabilitation.
In assessing where the Workers Compensation Monitoring Committee had progressed these matters to, I was aware that an impasse existed between the Insurance Council, the employers and the trade unions - the members of that committee - and I took a decision that that impasse needed to be broken. I took that decision on the basis of trying to establish a reasonable, controllable, recognisable and verifiable regime that will exist over the next year for the termination provisions allowed under the Act. I established a year as the appropriate period after which this legislation would be reviewed, for two reasons. First of all, I proposed that there be an amendment that the payments of workers compensation to an employee cannot be terminated where that employee has been in receipt of workers compensation for longer than a year. That was the first principle. The second principle was that the legislation would be reviewed in a year's time. In trying to come to a compromise between the conflicting positions, I believed that giving a guarantee that the legislation would be reviewed, in terms of how it has been working, would satisfy the insurance industry and the employers that they had nothing to fear from the provision that I have outlined; that is, they would have nothing to fear from a provision that any employee in receipt of workers compensation for in excess of a year
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .