Page 1128 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 May 2020
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integrity in respecting the standards of an ethical work environment. Applicants will have to demonstrate that they have a history of compliance with labour hire industry laws, including industrial relations pay awards, tax laws and workers compensation laws, and that they can continue to maintain this history.
A suitable person test will also verify which applicants have previously held licences that have been cancelled, suspended or had conditions imposed. The labour hire licensing schemes successfully operating in Queensland and Victoria have similar assessments as a key feature of their respective schemes, and a suitable person test is seen as essential in maintaining the integrity of the labour hire scheme outlined in this bill.
Compliance enforcement mechanisms will also be critical in safeguarding the integrity and objectives of the labour hire licensing scheme. To ensure this, the scheme will be regulated by the Work Health and Safety Commissioner. This will facilitate an immediate capacity to administer the scheme, and will utilise the regulatory and enforcement expertise in WorkSafe ACT to effectively respond to specialised workplace and industrial legislative compliance matters.
The bill before us today also has provisions on what regulatory action can be taken, such as imposing or amending conditions on a licence, suspending a licence, disqualifying licensees from applying for other licences and cancelling a licence altogether. This bill will also implement a range of appropriate penalties to deter labour hire providers from operating if they are unlicensed. A publicly available register will be created, detailing all appropriately licensed providers of labour hire in the territory. This will enable businesses and individuals that use labour hire to easily identify reputable providers.
In order to further strengthen this new regulatory scheme, there will be strong financial disincentives, with a maximum penalty of 800 penalty units for individuals and 3,000 penalty units for corporations operating without a labour hire licence. Similar penalties will also apply to users of unlicensed labour hire service providers. Labour hire workers must be protected and users of unlicensed labour hire must be subject to appropriate disincentives that support the regulatory intent of this scheme.
However, in order to support users of labour hire, this bill allows for users who have a reasonable excuse for engaging labour hire services. An example would be if an individual were to engage someone to perform domestic work, such as cleaning their residential home. It could reasonably be expected that the user may not be aware that a labour hire worker was performing this task. In this case, a penalty would not be applied to the user.
The COVID-19 outbreak has impacted all facets of the Canberra community. Together we face the challenges of responding to this health emergency and its impacts on the economy and our community. The ACT government’s commitment to assist our community through these difficult times includes making the protecting of our workers a priority. This scheme is designed to do exactly that. It will ensure that our most vulnerable workers can expect the same workplace standards as any other worker in the territory.
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