Page 2243 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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regular and timely payments in the building and construction industry in the ACT. It is intended that this scheme provide a cost-effective dispute resolution mechanism for payment of claims by those undertaking work or supplying goods in the industry.
I would also like to highlight the ACT’s safety first project. There will be $539,000 worth of funding over two years as part of a renewal of our safety first project. The project aims to minimise the human and financial costs of workplace injuries in the public sector, reducing the human impact of injury on the lives of Canberrans and their families. Through a range of targeted interventions, the program assists the return to work of affected employees and reduces the community impact of high-cost injuries, including psychological injuries.
This funding will enable interventions, including case conferencing for all workers with significant injuries, involving appropriate medical experts at the earliest stage, the creation of a database to assist better management of rehabilitation and prevention activities, and improved training for rehabilitation case managers. Through the appropriation for the Office of Industrial Relations, we will be seeing two significant pieces of work that have a particular impact on the business community in the ACT and also on all employees. I refer specifically to the workers compensation scheme review and the preparation of a new Occupational Health and Safety Act. I will be tabling the first stage of that review of the OH&S Act on Thursday.
In the case of the workers comp review, the review has been completed and it has been forwarded to me. Shortly I will be forwarding it to the OH&S Council for their consideration of the issues. A number of options have been put forward as part of the review. It was pleasing to note that some of the initial views and evidence that the ACT’s system was perhaps one of the least efficient and most costly of all the states and territories has proved not to be the case on further analysis. However, that does not mean there are not changes that can be made to improve the efficiency of the scheme and to provide a better outcome for both employers and employees. That is a major piece of work that we will be getting on with throughout the rest of this calendar year and into 2008. In terms of the OH&S legislation review, I will be bringing in the first piece of legislation on Thursday. We look forward to having a fulsome debate on that down the track, but there are further steps in this overall process.
There is a lot of important work going on within the Office of Industrial Relations. I would particularly like to pay tribute to the team that has been negotiating all of the enterprise bargaining agreements across the public sector. Robert Gotts, Gary Williamson and others have worked very hard to ensure that that process went as smoothly as possible. I put on record my thanks to Liesl Centenera and all of the team at OIR. They are a very small unit within the Chief Minister’s Department but they work very hard to deliver terrific outcomes for the territory.
Finally, I refer to Mr Mulcahy’s remarks about our intervention and joining with the other states and territories in the High Court case over WorkChoices. Whilst the states and territories did lose the case, it was certainly an interesting judgement inasmuch as—
Mr Mulcahy: They got it wrong, did they?
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