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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2398 ..

alter it so that it provides a fair framework that ensures the proper protection of employees at work.

The ACT Democrats are approaching this bill from a perspective of workplace safety, and all sides of this debate have agreed that workplace safety is both important and could be improved. I believe that this issue should be kept foremost in our minds as we debate this bill. It should be our focus. We are trying to improve workplace safety.

The first point I would like to make is that, through my discussions with various stakeholders, it became clear to me that there is a general belief that WorkCover does not have adequate resources to properly enforce OH&S laws. No matter how often agreement is reached between employers and employees, the centrepiece of any OH&S education and enforcement regime will always be a well-resourced public regulator.

I have raised the issue of WorkCover resourcing previously and the topic was recently pursued through estimates. No amount of new laws and penalties will make up for an under-resourced inspectorate. This is the first issue that the government should be addressing if it wishes to improve workers’ safety and I, again, repeat the calls on the government to examine the issue closely and ensure that WorkCover is properly resourced to help make the ACT a safe place to work.

The bill before us does not contain a complete reworking of the Occupational Health and Safety Act, and there are a number of parts of the act that remain unamended, despite clearly being in need of review. During my examination of the bill before us, I realised that the appeal body for decisions under the act is not the AAT, but a body called the Occupational Health and Safety Review Authority. Despite being discussed in the act when it was passed in 1989, the authority has never been convened, so we continue to be in a situation where our appeals mechanism under OH&S law does not function.

While the government assures me that this will be covered in a further review of the act in the second half of this year, it is clear that the Assembly has been presented with a half completed project, and it would have been far better to complete this work and present the Assembly with a full investigation, rather than addressing issues in a piecemeal way. This is one of the reasons that I have an amendment for a complete review of the act in three years time, so that we can do it all at once, altogether, once these changes have been put through.

Although the bill before us only looks at some of the issues within the act, it does cover a range of different issues. It increases a number of the penalties for not complying with occupational health and safety laws. These penalties are the same as those previously inserted in the Dangerous Substances Act and are broadly consistent with those in other jurisdictions.

However, it is interesting to note that when we were debating the dangerous substances legislation, it was stressed that particularly high penalties were necessary because of the specific threats posed by dangerous substances. The minister spent a lot of time talking about terrorism and the need to control various materials. It was in that context that we saw the penalty regime increased for dangerous substances.

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