Page 1946 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 14 May 2013

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MS GALLAGHER: I will see if I can provide you with that information, Mr Doszpot, around the allocation of the budget. What I have got is $166,000, which is the contribution over and above the $172,000 to commission it, for operation, licensing, insurance, test flight, photography, videography, education kit, social media, website, travel costs for a flight crew. So that is included in the $300,000. Again, I go back to the fact that this was never commissioned as a project that was to only be shared with Canberrans. We are the national capital. The centenary has a national focus. And part of the agreement with the owner is to take the Skywhale to other parts of Australia and have it seen as a centenary of Canberra project.

Work safety

MR GENTLEMAN: My question is to the Minister for Workplace Safety and Industrial Relations. Minister, can you please tell the Assembly about the new campaign, speak up about safety, that was launched recently?

MR CORBELL: I thank Mr Gentleman for the question. Yes, the speak up about safety campaign was recently launched by the Work Safety Commissioner, Mr McCabe, along with industry and union representatives. This campaign is designed to encourage workers and supervisors in workplaces in the ACT to actively engage in discussions about workplace safety.

It is an ongoing initiative designed to help change the culture in workplaces in the ACT, particularly in the construction and civil sectors in the ACT, about the importance of safety, about not making it taboo to talk about safety, about making sure that workers and their supervisors feel able to speak up and talk about safety in the workplace, to identify problems before they become accidents and before someone is injured or worse on a worksite in the ACT. The campaign is just one of the responses to the Getting home safely report, a report that looked into safety on construction sites in the ACT.

The initiative recognises that one of the best ways to prevent workplace accidents is through the active engagement of workers about their safety concerns up-front. Often we know that it is workers who understand the safety issues present in the workplace better than anyone else and that they may understand workplace safety problems that managers simply have not noticed. Supervisors, for their part, may be aware of procedures or controls to mitigate risks but they may not fully understand where the risks are.

So the purpose of the campaign is to get material out and get the message out into the workplaces that it is okay to speak up about safety. We want to encourage a culture where that exists because that is one of the key ways in which we are going to work to reduce the rate of workplace injury and, tragically, workplace death that unfortunately does exist on construction sites here in the ACT.

MADAM SPEAKER: A supplementary question, Mr Gentleman.


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