Page 2129 - Week 10 - Thursday, 26 October 1989
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There are penalties for not doing so which are quite severe. Welfare, though, crops up as well. It crops up in three areas in clause 27: in clause 27(1) and 27(2)(a)(ii) and further in 27(2)(b)(i). In relation to that, Mr Speaker, this is a Bill dealing with occupational health and safety. Welfare, I think, adds an additional and completely unnecessary component to this debate.
The employer should be concerned with ensuring that the workplace is safe, to enable workers to work there safely. He should be concerned with their health at work. But their welfare is an additional point entirely and, I would submit to this Assembly, is outside the whole gamut of this legislation. Welfare connotes something quite different from mere health and safety. I do not think that that should be included in this legislation. An employer cannot and should not be expected to look after the actual welfare of his employees.
Welfare could connote all sorts of personal problems. Welfare connotes a wide range of areas totally irrelevant to the workplace and totally unreasonable to put on an employer. The employer can suffer if he does not take practical steps. There are quite severe penalties - $20,000 if he is a natural person, or $100,000 if he is a body corporate - if, at present, he does not take practical steps to protect the welfare at work of his employees.
I think that is quite unnecessary. The aim of this legislation will be well and truly achieved if employers take all the steps they have to take to look after the health and safety in the workplace of the employee. "Welfare" is totally inappropriate and really should not have been there to start with. I submit that, where it appears, it should be taken out.
MR BERRY (Minister for Community Services and Health) (12.16): Mr Speaker, I will speak against the amendment. I think it is a bit late to raise the issue now. Apart from the point of its relevance in the Act or not, the Occupational Health and Safety Bill, of course, is a Bill for, as it says in the lead-in to the legislation, "An Act to promote and improve standards for occupational health, safety and welfare and for related purposes". That is on the first page of the legislation.
On page 2, in clause 3 of the legislation in relation to the objects of the Act, it talks about securing the health, safety and welfare of employees at work. That is subclause (a). At subclause (d) it says "to foster a co-operative consultative relationship between employers and employees on the health, safety and welfare of employees at work".
So, Mr Speaker, to remove the word "welfare" from the clause, as Mr Stefaniak is attempting to do, of course, would be completely inconsistent with the objects of the Act, which have already been dealt with in a previous debate. I think it would be most appropriate that members
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