Page 1549 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 June 2022
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This morning I released an exposure draft of a bill that would enhance the treatment of our frontline workers who incur mental injuries, such as post-traumatic stress injury, in the course of their work. This is some unfinished work for me in this place. I have been working on the bill for over a year. Ideally, I would propose a bill that would flip the onus of proof, so that if you serve in our city in a traumatising frontline job and incur a mental injury, it is assumed that you have been traumatised by work. This is what has recently been done in the Queensland legislation and in the Australian Defence Force.
Here in the ACT it is not possible because the ACT holds a self-insurance licence under the commonwealth’s Comcare scheme. Despite the territory being able to administer its own workers compensation scheme since 1994, the territory has chosen to engage EML as its claims manager. This is the same claims manager that was embroiled in the icare debacle in New South Wales.
My bill would therefore require the minister to impose, on the territory’s claims manager, in law, transparent expectations about how the claims manager deals with certain aspects of claims management, including claims for PTSI by frontline workers. It would also require an independent review to be conducted periodically to ensure that claims for mental injury are being managed appropriately.
I suspect that the ACT’s self-insurance licence was a great idea for protecting the finances of the territory. My bill would also go some way to making sure that it is also brilliant for the injured workers. I ask all of you in this place to take carriage of this issue for our frontline workers, some of whom are here today, and to make sure that it, or something like it, is implemented.
Another much-needed reform is the reform of the administration of this Assembly. Specifically, I believe that clerks must be term limited. It is not right that a kingdom is built here that lasts longer than the longest-serving government. I am not aware of any other parliament in Australia in which the Clerk’s appointment is now not for a finite term. That should be something that this place works on, for the culture in this place and for all our sakes.
More broadly, I would like to offer a reflection about all of us here, and please note that this is not actually a partisan comment. I have been in this chamber for almost a decade. I am speaking to all sides, all parties, when I say that we are not serving the people of Canberra as well as they could or should be served. Canberra is the national capital, yet the territory lags behind the rest of the country in virtually every independent measure of service provision. Whether it is waiting lists in hospitals, the culture in our health system, education, the availability of rental accommodation, the cost of housing or police numbers, we underperform.
Despite this, I believe we have become too comfortable in here. We need to be striving harder for the people of Canberra. The starting salary for an MLA is a senior executive service wage for the average Canberran in the public service. The federal bureaucracy makes us a company town, with the company being the biggest economic entity in Australia, and one that can practically never go bust. But Canberrans accept,
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