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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 991 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

I heard an official of the Master Builders Association on the radio recently drawing attention to skill shortages in the construction industry. It is this type of skill shortage that we have to be particularly careful about in the ACT with the ebb and flow of the economy. We noticed it particularly with the Sydney Olympics, when a lot of our tradespeople left the ACT and went to Sydney. Some will come back, or come and go, as conditions ebb and flow in the ACT.

But inevitably, it is our responsibility to make sure that there are young trained tradespeople making themselves available for the industry in the ACT. If we do not do that we let ourselves down, force costs up and the impact will affect our society generally. Mr Osborne's proposal is for the government to set, and I quote from his motion, "a maximum rate of 15 per cent as the workers compensation premium payable by the group training companies".

This is not something that is new, and it is not a problem that has just cropped up. It is something that the government has been well aware of for some time, and it is disappointing that we have not heard anything from the government in relation to the matter. Therefore, of course, there has been a reaction from people in the community, and Mr Osborne has quite rightly responded to pressure from within the community, and particularly the training company community, to deal with this issue.

Members should be aware that the training company that most affected at this stage is the construction industry training company, CITEA, and its insurance company is HIH. HIH has been in the news lately because it did take over FAI and, I think, the last I heard about HIH was that it had been delisted from the stock exchange and so on. So it is in a bit of financial trouble. But, all of that aside, the policies that these companies have been setting for CITEA, and the policies that are generally flowing into construction companies, are problematic because of their impact on training.

Now you might ask, "What will this cap do?" I think it will focus people's minds. I think that is the most important thing. We have to focus people's minds on this as a problem. The insurance companies did not care much about it, because all they were doing was running a book on the risk in the construction training companies and other training companies, and setting their premiums at whatever they calculated was the risk in respect of those particular employers.

The difficulty for the training companies is that their trainees end up on job sites with host employers and that is where they are being injured. I have a particular difficulty with the employer on whose job the injury occurs not bearing some responsibility for the injury. This cap does not deal with that issue, and I would say to the government that, while we intend to support this motion today, it does not relieve the government of the responsibility to look for other innovative arrangements to deal with this.

I do not have any particular visions about how you might deal with that, but I can give you one example that you might look at anyway, and that is in relation to the Nominal Insurers Fund. Arrangements could be developed that would use a fund like the Nominal Insurers Fund, or indeed the Nominal Insurers Fund, to deal with the insurance premiums for workers compensation in training companies. This would mean that the whole of industry would bear the responsibility for the insurance premium pool.

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