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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 13 Hansard (27 November) . . Page.. 4855 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

working for a supplier of a particular fresh food, who has a contract by a major retail outlet, who shall be nameless, like Woolies or Coles or any corporation of that size. The owner/driver is then pressured to deliver the stuff at 3 o'clock in the morning. He has an off-sider in the truck to help him offload it. Off he trots to Sydney, and he is under pressure. "If you don't deliver that by 3 o'clock, your contract's gone."He is an owner/driver, so he needs the contract. This scenario is not that far from a real case. What happens is an accident on the Hume Highway, halfway between here and Sydney.

According to our stats at the moment, that is a motor vehicle accident. Nothing more is said. Under this legislation, the head contract, the Woolies/Coles-sized company, will be held responsible if their corporate culture contributed significantly to the death of the off-sider in that truck-provided, and I underscore this, provided that the burden of proof is satisfied that their action is either deliberate or significantly negligent. The rules of testing that are pretty tough. No DPP in the world will charge someone unless those criteria have been satisfied, and even then the court has to be satisfied that significant negligence and/or deliberate action contributed.

At the moment there are a lot of furphies running around business saying that the world is going to end tomorrow. I can assure you it is not going to end tomorrow. But with the passage of this legislation, hopefully, we will wake up people. We will be able to maintain the ACT's great record of lack of death in the workplace. We will set an example to our Labor colleagues in the states and perhaps-I may hold my breath a bit too long and go blue-the federal government will understand that this is the will of the people talking here.

We are giving expression to the expectations of young people coming on in the future who want a safe workplace. They do not want to go onto a building site and worry about falling off and killing themselves for the sake of a $40 harness. They just want to go to work and earn a quid and have a nice future. In my view, this is a courageous piece of legislation, and I want to give some credit to a couple of people for this.

First, I credit the Speaker, Mr Berry, with kicking it along early on in my term here. I would like to pay the courtesy to Mr Corbell, the former minister, for booting it along a bit further, and to our current minister, Katy Gallagher, who has really taken charge of it. I thank members who are going to vote for this for their support, and I particularly wanted to acknowledge Ms Tucker's role in this.

This was not an easy report for us to consider. This was not an easy inquiry for us to do. It was fraught with a lot of difficulty, and a lot of fact and emotion were all mixed up. But at the end of the day we have a responsibility to legislate for the future, not to protect the bank balances of people who have been frightened to death by a stack of furphies.

I want to pay tribute to Sue Exner, to the CFMEU for running the charge-that has been absolutely brilliant-and to the young people who have joined us in the gallery for coming this far to support the bill. I urge members to look into their souls when they vote on this bill.

MS DUNDAS (5.12): The ACT Democrats will be supporting this bill before us today. My Democrat colleague the Hon. Arthur Chesterfield-Evans has introduced a similar industrial manslaughter bill in the New South Wales parliament, and Democrats have

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