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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 1008 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I came across a site just by accident in the last month. It was closed, I understand, as an unsafe workplace. I was there and attention was brought to that situation. It was a shocking situation in many respects. It was a very dangerous situation, not only for the workers but for the public as well.

We also have the question of how the insurance companies are ensuring compliance. How well are they doing that? The other thing that I am hearing consistently is that they do not do that very well either, so this is not just a simple question of the premium reflecting the problem. If you are really serious, and I believe everyone in this place is committed to not seeing workplace accidents, then you have to look at all these aspects of how you reduce the number of accidents that are occurring. Find out how many are occurring to start off with because, from the claims of people, it does not appear as though these premiums do actually reflect the reality of workplace incidents and claims.

The private sector's workers compensation in the ACT is run by insurance companies competing in a fairly small market, and they aim to recover their costs and to cover their exposure and to make their profits from the companies for whom they hold policies. The rates used to be set on an industry base but are now calculated enterprise by enterprise, so the risk is not shared these days as much as pointed. One could argue, and some probably do argue, that capital and the market automatically sort out a fair price, but what is fair to some will be unfair to others. As there are a lot of shareholders to keep happy, no insurance company will carry the cost of injury and rehabilitation any more than it has to, and that's the bottom line in the private insurance market. As workers compensation is mandatory, I think insurance companies are said to be able to shift costs onto workers comp in order to make up past losses, and that is where we have had the allegations about the Sydney storms.

What we have ended up with here today anyway is that the group training companies are at risk. Now, we did try to work with the government on this. We were more interested in seeing some kind of subsidy as a response to this particular crisis. I must say that Mr Humphries' presentation was not very inspiring of confidence because basically he seemed to be saying we should not do this, but he has not got a better idea. So what is he saying? Do we just let these training companies go? Obviously people in this place do not want to see that happen.

I am disappointed that I could not work with government to come up with an alternative way of dealing with this because, as I have said, we do have some concerns about this motion, although it is going to be better than nothing, which is what the government is doing. I note that the government is prepared to indulge in corporate welfare when it suits it to a degree that many of us in this place and the community find quite disturbing. We are not talking about the millions and millions of dollars that we see the government providing to subsidise car races. We are not talking about those sorts of amounts. We are talking about much smaller amounts and for only two years, while, hopefully, we start getting some real interest in collecting the information that we need to collect in order to understand what needs to happen to improve this situation.

I would suggest, just from the research that we have done over the last couple of weeks, that that is about lifting the game of the government through WorkCover, and also the insurance companies themselves through how they check and monitor compliance, as well as trying to educate the broader community and make sure that there is this

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