Page 5730 - Week 15 - Thursday, 10 December 2009
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The amendment that the ACT Greens are offering to this element of the bill permits the chief executive, at their discretion, to seek recovery amounts from culpable executives regardless of the status of the company. In short, if a company director is deemed to be largely responsible for the failure of a company to provide workers compensation insurance, recovery amounts can be sought directly from the director. We believe that this is a special circumstance in which a director should not be immune to direct civil liability.
Failure to provide basic insurance cover incurs civil penalties to the company under the Workers Compensation Act. This, when solely directed at the company, perversely harms the interests of workers and shareholders. We believe that this element of our amendments firmly entrenches providing insurance as a basic responsibility of a company director and is one to which they will be held directly accountable.
Furthermore, this measure will hopefully improve the disappointingly low rate of recovery by the default insurance fund of claims made against it due to illegally uninsured employees. This direct accountability provides a stronger incentive than the one provided in the unamended bill to ensure that no company director will ever think it is a good idea to not properly insure Canberra workers. I would emphasise that the amendments we offer do not have any impact on responsible employers; rather, they ensure that the few irresponsible employers and the directors behind the decisions are held to account for their failures to protect employees.
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Deputy Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Health and Minister for Industrial Relations) (4.37): I will speak to each of the amendments. We will not be supporting any of the amendments. In relation to the first amendment, No 3, where a claim is lodged against a now uninsured employer two discrete liabilities arise: the penalty associated with not having a compulsory insurance policy and that for the injured workers compensation costs.
The provisions I tabled in the Assembly in the November 2009 sitting proposed to establish a civil liability for culpable executive officers for the first of these liabilities, that is, for a debt that arises out of a failure to maintain the insurance policy or for avoiding paying the correct premium. It is intended that a culpable director would only face liability for a debt arising from failure to comply with these statutory obligations where the employing corporation was unable to pay or was being wound up.
The injured worker’s compensation costs are the second of the discreet liabilities. As drafted, the Workers Compensation Act confers powers on the default insurance fund to recover this liability through imposing a penalty on the non-compliant employer. That penalty is limited to three times the compensation to which the injured worker is entitled. The punitive measure of three times the compensation amount is reserved for the recalcitrant employers who demonstrate no regard for their injured workers, in contempt of their responsibilities under the ACT workers compensation scheme.
Every workplace incident is one incident too many. Collectively, employers across the ACT should be working hard to stop workplace incidents. By preserving the
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