Page 261 - Week 01 - Thursday, 16 February 2006
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authorised representatives under the Occupational Health and Safety Act has led to an improvement in the administration of that act. I would have thought that all of us here would be interested in ensuring that the act was more effectively administered.
Mr Mulcahy’s amendment is merely a restating of the same tired, ideological argument that the Liberal Party make in attempting to remove union officials from acting, for example, as authorised representatives under the OH&S act. Given the upheaval of recent days, it is refreshing to see the Liberal Party acting with consistency and cohesion for once. It is disappointing that, despite the success of union-authorised representatives under the OH&S act, they continue to sprout the same, ill-conceived, narrow-minded arguments such as those we have just heard from Mr Mulcahy.
Not only are union-authorised representatives beneficial for employees and insurers; they also provide benefits for all those employers who comply with their obligations. It is ultimately other compliant employers who will bear the costs of employers who are either not insured or who are underinsured. As the administrative costs of the certificates of currency scheme have been minimised, providing unions with access to this information would not impose a significant additional burden on either employers or insurers. In short, there is no reasonable argument to oppose this clause, except the ideological fixation of Mr Mulcahy and those opposite.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (5.08): Again, I do not suppose Mr Mulcahy would be surprised that I am not supporting the amendment either. I am sure that Mr Mulcahy feels that he needs to put his amendments because of the constituency that he speaks for. I have the sense that Mr Mulcahy wants unions to be a tea club or a social club and that the minute that people start organising for better working conditions they become undesirable. At the moment he has got the federal government on his side.
The Greens have consistently recognised the concrete benefit to employees in having workplace union occupational health and safety officers. Whatever the legislative framework in place to protect the health and safety of employees, you would have to be wilfully blind to imagine that unions do not play a vital role in ensuring that those protections are maintained and improved.
I see ideology as a kind of wilful blindness. Certainly it leads to blinkering. I believe that the Australian Liberal Party has taken an ideological stand on minimising the influence of unions and on limiting the capacity of employees to organise collectively. The underlying presumption of that stance is that business is more competitive and flexible when unconstrained by unions or organised labour, and that a more profitable, inflexible business is, by very definition, better for everyone.
There is an increasing array of employment arrangements developing throughout industry, although the concept of principal contracts with a number of subbies is not new. These provisions allow occupational health and safety officers to ask subbies or whoever for a certificate of currency. The employer in that situation would need to ring their insurance company. The onus would then be on the insurance company to respond within a specified timeframe. If the arrangement is good for WorkCover staff and principal contractors who would be responsible for the subbies’ workers, then it is also reasonable for union occupational health and safety officers to have that capacity.
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