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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 1007 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I certainly have not gone into this with barely a second thought. We have considered it very carefully. We wanted the original debate adjourned so we could consider it. We have spoken to the insurance industry about this as well as to other stakeholders, including, obviously, the group training scheme people, and what we should do is by no means clear or simple.

Mrs Burke spoke of the concern that putting a cap on a premium is a disincentive for improving workplace safety. That obviously is a concern to any kind of capping, but when you look at it more carefully you see that it is not as simple as that.

The reason why the premiums are going up is disputed. That is what I found so interesting when I looked at this matter and spoke to all the different stakeholders. The insurance companies on one hand will claim that there are increased payouts, but we do not see any evidence of that. The evidence has not been compiled in a way that can make me clearly see where the increase in incidents or claims is occurring. The insurance companies were not able to give us that. They say themselves that there is a huge issue about under-declaring by employers in terms of the number of employees that they have. Clearly, the under-declaring is an issue for premiums. This has to be unpacked.

We then have the other stakeholders, the group training schemes and others, saying that premiums are decided by insurance companies based on criteria that do not necessarily have to do with any real analysis of the claims. It is to do with other payouts they have had to make in other areas. For example, one person suggested to us that it was related to the Sydney storms and payouts there. I do not know whether that is correct or not.

What became very clear to us over the last couple of weeks when we have been looking at this is that nobody knows. I do not mean to misrepresent what Mr Humphries said, but I think at one point he said that he did not have the evidence to know about some of these issues. Well, I am in the same situation, and everybody in this place must be too because the evidence is not there. It is not as simple as saying that workplace incidents have increased. That is not what the industry that is working with these apprentices is telling us. So we do not have that information to make a decision.

Mr Kaine's proposal is that this go to the pricing regulator. I am interested in that. I do not know whether it is within his jurisdiction to do that sort of investigation. I think the problem for the pricing regulator would be the same problem we have experienced here, which is that we do not have data being compiled or evidence of the real situation in terms of under-declaring by employers versus workplace incidents and so on. Clearly, that is what you have to have.

The other concern, of course, about how well we are reducing accidents in workplaces has to be linked to how well we monitor and regulate the compliance of the industry. I have heard consistently over the last number of years that WorkCover is under-resourced, so I am hoping we will hear Mrs Burke speak about that at budget time and that we will see a commitment from this government to resource WorkCover in the way it needs to be resourced. It's a joke. If you talk to anybody in the industry now who is working in the area, as a builder, as a person managing construction sites, unionists or other people in all sides of the industry, the one consistent message I get is that WorkCover is under-resourced. They are not able to do the work.

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