Page 3575 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 24 November 2021
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We are quite thin, and members are suffering mentally and physically because of it.
The mob opposite are always talking about workers—how they will stand up for workers, how they will do what they can for workers—but in the two portfolios that I have, police and education, both unions, the Australian Education Union and the Australian Federal Police Association, are saying the opposite. I spoke yesterday about teachers, and how they are spread so thin. I read out a whole bunch of quotes which were quite devastating about the impact on teachers.
We hear from police, again, how thinly spread they are. As their association says:
We are quite thin, and members are suffering mentally and physically because of it.
Our teachers and our police are suffering, mentally and physically, because of you, because of your failure to provide sufficient police across this territory to deal with the very difficult job that they have to do.
In the committee report on estimates from JACS, recommendation 26 goes to this point, in part. The recommendation is:
The Committee recommends that ACT Government explore the feasibility of presumptive legislation to accept and treat a mental health injury for police and emergency services workers without requiring an element of proof of injury in the workplace.
This is something that the police want to see. We would be aware of the case of Sergeant Jason Taylor. He has been in this place, and I have spoken about him before. Sometimes police officers break down. They have problems with their mental health as a result of their service. This happens in other areas of service delivery as well. With respect to the Defence Force, it does not ask for a detailed explanation or justification that you have a mental health condition arising from a particular incident, because often it involves a series of incidents, and re-litigating it all is not necessarily helpful. You should just say, “We accept that you do a difficult and dangerous job.” If you think about the job that police do, often, their interaction with you, with the public, with our community, is when that person is having their worst day. The police, every day, are dealing with people having their worst day. They could be cleaning up after a traffic accident or dealing with someone who has committed a violent crime. We all know that they have a dangerous, difficult job.
I am encouraged that the government have responded positively to that in their response to the report. I would say to Mr Gentleman: you certainly have our bipartisan support on that issue. I accept that, with ACT Policing, it is complicated, because they come under commonwealth employment law, because they are AFP officers. I would encourage the minister to continue pursuing that issue both for Emergency Services, which falls under the remit of the ACT government, and for ACT Policing. He should continue to work with the commonwealth to achieve that goal; certainly, we on this side support it.
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