Wood MichaelHon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): Thank you Madam Chair. I thought I'd just take a fairly brief call at this stage to address a couple of the specific points that were raised earlier on in the debate by the Hon Michael Woodhouse relating to the relationship to the Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA) in terms of the bill that the committee is considering. I take the point of the member on board that the Health and Safety at Work Act remains the primary vehicle that we have in place that places a primary duty of care on employers in respect to the health and safety of workers for whom they are responsible. The assurance that I would give the member is that that does remain and that is not affected in any way by the provisions of this bill. In fact I'd note clause 33AB on page 11 of the bill. I'll just quote directly from it which might provide some assurance and clarity here: To assist a PCBU in meeting their primary duty of care under section 36 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 the PCBU may in accordance with the assessment tool conduct an assessment of the work carried out by workers". So we have a very clear link here between this piece of legislation and that primary duty of care that employers do owe.Just to delve further into that point: the issue that the Government is attempting to address here through the creation of the vaccine assessment tool is not to replace any requirements under HSWA but to give greater support and clarity to employers who are trying to exercise their duties under HSWA.We've heard a very very clear message from actually interestingly both employers and unions largely in unison around this that while there are existing health and safety assessment tools that employers can use and some are—particularly larger employers are making use of them at the moment—that especially for smaller employers who might have more limited access to HR and legal resources a simplified assessment tool will be extremely helpful for them in terms of coming to reasonable judgments about whether it is reasonable to require a vaccine for certain kinds of work. That is the intention of the vaccine tool that is enabled by this piece of legislation. Again I just affirm that that links through to the primary duty of care under HSWA as set out by clause 33AB.The second point that the honourable member raised related to the definition of "affected worker". I think he was really just seeking clarification as to whether the definition of "worker" that we are using within this piece of legislation is consistent with the definition of "worker" that we use under the Health and Safety at Work Act and I can confirm that that is the case. We do want to have consistency between the legislative regimes. If I can just point out why that's important if we think for example about the provisions that we're working towards when orders come into effect that will require workers in COVID-19 vaccination certificate worksites to be vaccinated we would most certainly want there to be a consistency of application by someone who might be employed as an employee or a contractor. If for example we're talking about a hospitality venue regardless of whether you as the customer are being served by someone who is an employee or if for some reason that person is a contractor we would want consistency in terms of the way that the vaccination requirement plays out across both of those people. So that's why the definition of "worker" consistent with HSWA is the one that we have used there."