Page 2620 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 11 August 2015
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In addition, workers and employers will benefit from better integrated and more coordinated claims management and rehabilitation services, creating a more holistic approach to recovery and return to work. This benefit is able to be better achieved by creating a new scheme that is within our own jurisdiction. Furthermore, legislating a scheme within the ACT will allow for better monitoring of scheme performance. This will allow the government to ensure it continues to meet the expectations of workers and the broader ACT community and achieve positive outcomes.
When it comes to supporting our injured workers, we acknowledge that cultural change is needed at a whole-of-government level. In effect, the way we do things needs to be recalibrated so that the current practice of agency responsibility to find suitable employment is remodelled into a whole-of-service approach. We invest significantly in our public service workforce to ensure they are appropriately trained and capable of meeting the needs and demands of our community. We cannot afford, on both a social and economic level, to have our valued workers injured and then unable to return to work.
There will be a transformation in the way the ACT public sector manages the rehabilitation and support of its injured workers in the next 12 months, culturally and legislatively, with the ability to better control the outcomes for our injured workers.
The government’s decision to leave Comcare is a significant social reform initiative that we are committed to and I look forward to reporting to the Assembly on the development of a new scheme in the coming months.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (5.17): I rise to talk about the government’s transport reform agenda, which is contained within the Chief Minister’s economic development directorate. The Chief Minister and I are leading this agenda, myself specifically in the recently created portfolio of minister assisting on transport reform.
The transport reform portfolio recognises that transport challenges and transport opportunities are integral to how our city grows and develops into the future. Our approach to transport is intertwined with city planning, with its economy, with its sustainability and with its social fabric. An integrated transport network—such as, for example, a light rail system that integrates well with buses or good pedestrian and bike networks that link people into public transport—has a vast impact on the way a city works and the way people can live in that city.
To ignore that is to condemn Canberra and Canberrans to a bleak future. Unfortunately, that is what I see from the Liberal Party in this place—an obsessive focus on short-term politics, basely trying to undermine the capital metro project and at the same time ignoring all of the actual challenges that need to be addressed for the future of Canberra.
As an example, Mr Hanson literally said these words this morning: “Any objective look at light rail shows the project does not stack up.” In fact, the opposite is true. An objective look at light rail, like the business case undertaken to best practice standards by world-leading experts, shows that the project does stack up. It is only the subjective analyses that attempt to say it does not stack up. Mr Hanson is a subscriber to that approach.
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