Roche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 25 August 2015. Volume:708;Page:6111. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a call on Part 5 which I think the previous speaker Stuart Nash said is fairly innocuously titled “Miscellaneous Provisions” and you know there are quite a lot of other matters in here. The one that strikes me as quite interesting is the one around the regulations. The regulations start I think quite a way back in the bill and cover an enormous amount actually. The bill starts with the regulations in clause 221. But the one that I was wanting to focus on for the discussion that I want to add to this part of the proceeding is around the regulations that are specified under clause 224 “Regulations relating to worker engagement participation and representation”.Iain Lees-Galloway has already talked about the whole issue of work groups. I want to focus my attention on clause 224(iva) which is the regulations around “specifying high-risk sectors or industries for the purposes of sections 65(3)(b) and 86A(3)(b):”. When you go back and have a look at it what that means is that it is the regulation around the exemption of workplaces with fewer than 20 workers from having health and safety reps. That is what is covered in clause 65(3)(b) and what is covered in clause 86A(3) is the exemption for persons conducting a business or undertaking (PCBUs) with fewer than 20 workers from having a health and safety committee.I think that this is actually what we have been talking about in the last few days or since last Wednesday when the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety released his idea of what he considers to be high-risk industries and industries that are low risk. There has been an enormous amount of concern about the way some sectors have been determined at this stage to be high risk and others deemed to be low risk and the low-risk ones of course under the provisions in clause 86A and clause 65 would therefore be exempt from having health and safety reps or health and safety committees. There has been concern particularly about agriculture. We know that agriculture is a dangerous industry and we know this because of the number of deaths and injuries. You just have to say “quad bike” and you immediately evoke all the accidents that have happened on farms with quad bikes over the last 5 years—and there have been heaps. And yet agricultural places where they use quad bikes—dairy farming cattle farming sheep farming—are deemed to be low-risk industries.You have got to think about how these regulations get made. It does say I guess further on under clause 226 that there is to be consultation. However this just talks about how the Minister must not recommend making any regulations under some of the previous sections “without first consulting persons and organisations that the Minister considers appropriate”. This sounds well and good but actually it goes on to say in subclause (3) of that clause that “A failure to comply with this section does not affect the validity…”. I would really like to hear from the Minister who says that he is going to consult around the regulations that will be determining what are high-risk industries and what are low-risk industries. But in the meantime he has kind of skewed it a bit by saying: “We’re using these criteria to determine it and we’ve decided that worm farming is a high-risk industry. And we’re determining that alpaca farming is a low-risk industry and cattle farming is a low-risk industry but butterfly breeding and cat breeding are all high-risk sectors.” It just does not make sense.But I get back to that duty to consult which is outlined in clause 226. When it talks about what the Minister will consult on—even though he does not have to consult because it does not invalidate the regulations that will be made as a result—one of the things that it says the Minister will consult on is clause 221 which talks about the welfare of workers. It has got quite a lot in it actually but it does actually—yes it is in clause 221 “Regulations relating to health and safety”. In clause 226 “Consultation requirements for making certain regulations” it also specifically says that some of those things that the Minister will consult on are around regulations on accommodation. I went on a bit about accommodation for workers as part of their remuneration packages in a previous part that we were discussing last week but I do note that the Minister does not have to consult about what is adequate housing for people but there is the ability to have that regulated for.This part seems to me to be the yeah nah part: “Yeah we’ll do that but nah we don’t have to.” Yes we will have health and safety reps in some industries but not in the ones that we think are low risk despite the fact that everybody else thinks they are high risk. And we will consult if we feel like it but not consulting does not make it invalid. So it is a yeah nah kind of situation. It worries me that there are these kinds of “get out of jail free” clauses consistently through parts of the bill. I think that when we do look at regulations there does have to be excellent consultation and if we are looking at changing health and safety culture then that consultation has to be widespread. It has to be with more than the employers. It has to be with more than just the industry peak bodies. This is where workplace representatives or health and safety committees could have been really useful particularly in the high-risk categories—the ones that are actually high-risk industries—because that is where you can get real consultation get the real solutions about what is happening on the job and start to make part of the culture change in the workplace.So we are a bit concerned about this whole thing about how you develop regulations how you do not and exactly what we will have in them because those are the powers that are handed to the Minister and are not necessarily in the body of this legislation that we are discussing now. That concerns me as well because it seems to me that we should actually rely on a wider range of viewpoints to get to a place where we do create good workplace health and safety culture.I think that is all I will contribute at the moment. Thanks.