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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (27 November) . . Page.. 4869 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

something went awry and the off-cut hit my co-worker. He was taken away to hospital and had to have it removed. He was sewn up and came back to work several days later. That was considered to be routine.

That was just an intolerable situation which occurred in workplaces many, many years ago. But since then there has been this incremental change, and the incremental change has occurred, regrettably, as a way of treating the symptoms. Each time there was a workplace injury somebody was affected by it financially; so there was a move to fix the problem so the financial effects of it weren't felt, in the business usually.

The state or the insurance scheme usually looked after the injured worker, and the cost of it was a burden that was carried by everybody. Time and time again we heard of incidents where workers were killed or seriously injured and the same thing happened; it was treated as quite routine that we would tolerate these things.

Even in those days in the mining industry and in my own industry, in the fire service, there were calculated risks taken which were intolerable by today's standards. But there is no point having one particular workplace being very safe and not the rest though, and that is where government comes in. We need to regulate to ensure that there is a level playing field for workplace injuries so we don't get the situation where some employers are able to trade at a lower rate because they have got an unsafe workplace and they don't put the resources into safe workplaces, to the disadvantage of their workers but to the advantage of their business.

That is why we have seen later on of course the development of occupational health and safety legislation. The aim of that was to create a level playing field for everyone. I recall, in the first days of this Assembly, the very first bill that was introduced into this Assembly was an occupational health and safety bill. This is an Assembly that since 1989 has had a lot to do with improving workers safety in the ACT. That piece of legislation was designed to create a level playing field for all employers, to create a new culture in the workplace to make sure that workers were safe. Of course it did improve things, but there is more to be done. That is what this legislation is about. Regrettably it too is a treatment of a symptom.

Workers and other people continue to be killed in the workplace. I must say that over time we have tried in the ACT to improve things. I personally had the good fortune to be involved in things like the development of on-the-spot fines and an independent OH&S commissioner. Of course those developments have made it a little better.

The genesis of this legislation is a tragedy in the ACT when the hospital implosion occurred. That implosion was accompanied by a litany of negligent recklessness. A young person was killed, and many other people narrowly avoided serious injury or death. There was a long and involved legal process and there were some charges laid under the occupational health and safety legislation, but it seemed to me that that just wasn't enough, that we had to put in place a regime which gave rise to a stronger defensive culture against workplace injuries.

I am not somebody who routinely supports laws which could lead to somebody being incarcerated, because I just don't think that law-and-order campaigns work. But there is a time when you have to make a stand on some issues and you have to send a strong

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