Page 4104 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 22 October 2019
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Securing sustainable compliance with work health and safety laws is critical to protecting the health and safety of workers now and into the future. This requires a contemporary regulator that strives for excellence and is innovative, flexible, respected, trusted and client focused. This bill lays the foundation for such a regulator, and transparency and accountability are key to those foundations. I commend the bill to the Assembly.
MS ORR (Yerrabi—Minister for Community Services and Facilities, Minister for Disability, Minister for Employment and Workplace Safety and Minister for Government Services and Procurement) (11.28), in reply: Madam Assistant Speaker Lee, I, too, welcome you back today. By amending the Work Health and Safety Act 2011, the Work Health and Safety Amendment Bill 2019 would establish the foundations for a more effective, transparent and independent work health and safety regulator.
The need for more intensive and effective education, compliance and enforcement in the area of work safety is an urgent one. Members might be surprised to learn that more than 1,600 ACT private sector workers were injured so badly at work last financial year that they had to take time off. SafeWork Australia estimates that injuries and diseases caused by people’s work cost the ACT economy $1.8 billion per annum. SafeWork also estimates that this impact is disproportionately borne by the workers who are injured—in the order of 77 per cent.
The ACT’s past experience and expert advice show us that investment in more effective education, compliance and enforcement can have a strong, positive impact on the number and severity of work injuries. The bill before us today will pave the way to making such improvements and is part of the suite of mutually supporting reforms designed to assist industry to raise its safety performance.
Our government is committed to continually improving the health and safety of Canberra’s workers. That is why in May 2018 we announced an independent review of the ACT’s work health and safety compliance infrastructure. The review was conducted by Claire Noone of the Nous Group, an expert in the field of work health and safety compliance. Her mandate was to evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of our work health and safety compliance and enforcement infrastructure and strategies. The review made 27 recommendations about how we could act to make Work Safe ACT a more effective work health and safety regulator, all of which were agreed in principle.
One of the review’s findings was that there is an opportunity to improve the regulator’s governance model by making legislative changes to the Work Health and Safety Act 2011. This bill will make those legislative changes. Making use of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development best practice principles for regulatory policy, the review considered two features to be critical in the government’s design of WorkSafe. These were role clarity and independence. A number of governance structure models were identified and, ultimately, the review concluded that a single accountability governance model would best achieve role clarity and independence for the territory’s work health and safety regulator.
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