Page 5712 - Week 15 - Thursday, 10 December 2009
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laws which are harmonised right across Australia. The ACT has signed this intergovernmental agreement on achieving harmonised OH&S laws.
I think this is going to be a balancing act between the employee associations and the employers. I think the employers will welcome it because, in their view, it will reduce red tape and will standardise, particularly for those employers that are working across a number of jurisdictions, the process for them.
However, we are one of those jurisdictions that have very progressive occupational health and safety laws. Under the OH&S harmonisation there is a risk that our framework could be seen to be wound back, and that is going to be a challenge and a balancing act that I have to navigate over the next few months. But having said that, our legislation does sit us well in terms of the harmonisation and the introduction of a national regime in 2012. But I will continue to discuss our approach to this with affected stakeholders—employees, unions and employers—over the next few months.
In the public sector, as an employer we in the ACT government are expected to set high standards of work safety. The introduction of the Work Safety Act saw amendments to schedule 3 of the Public Sector Management Act. As a consequence, all employers, public and private, are required to comply with the one work safety law. The government is committed to ensuring that workers in the ACT continue to be protected by robust OH&S laws.
Our commitment to this is borne out in the development of the ACT public sector workplace health strategic plan 2008-12, which was launched in 2008. The overall goals in the five-year period are to establish and maintain a systematic continuous improvement approach to the management of workplace health and safety risks and to achieve a reduction in the workers compensation premium. The strategic plan focuses on activities in three key result areas: leadership, injury prevention and injury management.
Agencies are required to provide biannual reports to the OH&S Rehabilitation Advisory Committee, HR council, management council and cabinet on their progress against specific targets. The first whole-of-government progress report will be considered by government early in 2010.
Considerable work has been undertaken to determine the state of the workplace health and safety environment in each agency. From the results of these baseline gap analyses, agencies have developed specific local improvement strategies that will be implemented and reported over the next three years.
In addition, we have made funds available to re-invigorate the safety first program. Indeed, in the Assembly on Tuesday, I tabled the instrument for WorkCover. I think it provided $120,000 for a free, early intervention physiotherapy service for injured ACT government workers, certificate IV training and accreditation for 25 rehabilitation staff in ACT government agencies and a whole-of-government injury management database to more efficiently and effectively monitor return-to-work processes.
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