Page 537 - Week 02 - Thursday, 9 March 2006
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aspects, despite the very clear objective of the CFMEU to change the balance in the territory’s industrial arrangements.
The opposition certainly will listen with enthusiasm to what the minister is going to do to address some of the problems I have outlined. As I have indicated, we are supporting this bill.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (12.05): I look forward to reading Mr Mulcahy’s very detailed, informed and, I think, probably even scholarly speech in Hansard later. I understand that the ACT private workers compensation scheme is not a scheme that echoes or is borrowed from other jurisdictions. It was developed to address the particular limits of the ACT. After a long and elaborative process between all stakeholders, the scheme was designed with an emphatic focus on rehabilitation, a more simplified claims process, the protection of common law rights and a broad definition of “worker” under the scheme.
It is an example, in my view, of the benefits of minority government in that the Liberal government, in wanting to get a complex scheme through this Assembly, knew it would have to work with the range of stakeholders and that many careful modifications were then made to the bill through the combined efforts of the opposition and the cross bench. I am pretty sure that the workers of Tasmania would be happier with the ACT’s scheme than the one being imposed upon them by the Lennon Labor government. This is basically a fix-up bill which addresses discrepancies and difficulties that have recently emerged. Given this is unique legislation that has been quite groundbreaking in Australia, that should not be any surprise.
The most interesting of these amendments, in my eyes, is the specific inclusion of family day care and in-home carers. The Workers Compensation Act, if unamended, probably puts the onus on carers to provide the workers comp coverage for childcare workers where those workers are not otherwise covered by their employers or agencies. As it happens, only one out of five agencies in the ACT do not employ their workers under the family day care award, and that agency is Communities@Work, the Tuggeranong and Weston Creek community service.
It is worth recounting the sequence of events. When it became clear that Communities@Work might need to take out insurance to cover family day care and in-home childcare workers and it asked for those workers to be excluded from the requirements of the act, it would have meant that those workers would not have had any entitlements to workers compensation. Apparently, that is how it works in most places around the country. Workers need to pay $1,000 a year from their own quite small wages for income protection; something else again, presumably, for medical coverage; and, maybe, something else again when it comes to rehabilitation. Indeed, that is why the ACT scheme was structured to try to ensure that those workers are covered.
It would have been interesting to see whether the courts would have found Communities@Work responsible if one of their workers suffered a workplace injury. However, that was a risk that the ACT government did not feel inclined to take. So the amendment in this bill puts the issue beyond doubt.
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