Page 3884 - Week 10 - Thursday, 27 August 2009
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procedures, meet statutory requirements for responsible action and behaviour and establish processes and records that can demonstrate to authorities or the courts how this responsibility has been met.
Generally, it is about extending our duty to accept legal responsibility for the wellbeing of others where our work or decisions we take in our work can impact on them. The work safety legislation, in common with other acts, needs to give legal weight to these everyday responsibilities. It also needs to give a range of people some authority in scrutinising, testing and assessing how those responsibilities have been met and powers to do so.
Consequently and obviously, this legislation also sets up a number of offences, defences and penalties. As has already been outlined by others here, this bill does a number of formal and necessary things. Significantly from our perspective, it brings all public and private sector employers under this one regime. Having different work safety practices and requirements for different sectors is confusing at best. New provisions in this bill that are of wider interest include part 1.9, which inserts proposed new section 55A, giving the chief executive the power to direct all employers in an industry to establish health and safety committees, and changes to confidentiality provisions that enable protected information to be shared.
I understand the concerns that some small businesspeople might have about a requirement to establish a formal work safety or health and safety, committee. An instruction for a workplace to create, organise and service a work safety committee could be onerous, even where that workplace deals with hazardous substances or activities. However, the whole notion of a setting up such a committee is predicated on the reasonable grounds that not only is the work being done hazardous but that the establishment of a committee will improve work safety. This is a matter of some sensitivity, however, and it is for that reason that the Greens will be supporting an amendment that the Liberal Party will move in the detail stage making any such direction made by the chief executive under this section disallowable in the Assembly.
The other issues of substance centre on privacy. In particular, this bill will allow protected information to be made available more widely between safety regulators. I note the detailed discussion of secrecy and data matching in the scrutiny of bills report, and we appreciate the timeliness of the government’s response. We welcome the amendments that take on board scrutiny comments.
The issues around secrecy are more complex and we accept that some care has been taken to consider the legislation’s effect from a human rights perspective. We also acknowledge the broader debate being led nationally by the Australian Law Reform Commission on this matter. It may be that we will need to review ACT legislation more generally in this light further down the track.
I note the reference to the ACT Human rights Office issuing a compatibility statement. Given the complexity of these matters and their sensitivity, this might have been an occasion where Human Rights Office analysis was released with the compatibility statement.
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