Page 3899 - Week 10 - Thursday, 28 August 2008
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legislation introduced into the Assembly, virtually at the death knell of this Assembly. Various stakeholders have had significant concerns in relation to parts of the legislation; yet the government seems absolutely adamant in terms of ramming through legislation which has some significant issues—I will come to some of those shortly—against the wishes of some very relevant stakeholders.
There are some good things in this bill which we would see come back. We have no problem in going to the in-principle stage or probably even supporting the bill in principle. But I will flag now that if you do not adjourn it there is no way that the opposition will be supporting this legislation today when you come to the end of it. Get it right; do it properly. I know that there has been an exposure draft, but people have had very little time to digest the full bill.
Again we see concerns in that no-one has seen the regulations. I know that it is not intended to commence until 1 July next year. If that is the case, there is even less reason for you not to go in and listen to the concerns. You might not agree with them all, but at least listen to them, address them and then come back. You can be damn certain that if you do that and you bring this back in February or March, there will be a number of changes that you will make to the bill as a result of those concerns.
I want to read from an interesting article from the Financial Review in relation to safety reform in the workplace. No-one is going to quibble with safety reform in the workplace; there is still much that needs to be done and it is still unacceptable. It is always unacceptable that a worker can go to work and perhaps face critical safety issues and not necessarily know if he or she is going to go home in one piece. We want to do all we can to ensure that there is safety in the workplace. But you have to take people with you, you have to do it right, and you have to give proper time for reasoned discussion by various groups to come up with legislation. In an article on 22 August, the Financial Review said:
The federal government’s planned national workplace safety reforms have hit a new hurdle, after the expert panel responsible for drawing up the laws asked for a delay in making its first report on key findings until next year.
The potential delay will be discussed at a meeting of Australia’s workplace relations ministers today, along with calls from states to retain control over key elements of their IR systems.
In another vote of no confidence for the federal government’s occupational health and safety (OH&S) harmonisation plans, ACT Industrial Relations Minister Andrew Barr warned that the national reform timeline was “very optimistic” and could be delayed beyond federal Labor’s 2011 deadline.
The chair of the expert panel on national OH&S reform, Robin Stewart-Crompton, has lobbied states and territories to delay its first report on the laws from October 31 to January 30 next year.
Some of the submissions received from industry groups have been premised on the basis that they want this legislation amended because the report on the law was not due until 31October. Now we are told that is going to be delayed further, until 30 January.
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