Moroney Sue: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 25 August 2015. Volume:708;Page:6125. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): It is a pleasure to rise and speak to Part 6 now of the Health and Safety Reform Bill. This is the part of the legislation that deals with the very many amendments that need to be made to other Acts. I guess we can probably say at the outset then of Part 6 that this does show the widespread effect of the legislation that the Government is enacting because there are so many amendments to so many other Acts. The parts that I really want to focus on are the amendments that have been made to the Accident Compensation Act 2001. As Labour’s ACC spokesperson it was obviously an area that I was paying particular attention to when the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee was dealing with these issues.It is interesting to think about health and safety in the workplace our very precious ACC system that we have—which is unique in the world actually—and how ACC and workplace health and safety interact and intersect with each other. Because Part 6 makes so many amendments to the Accident Compensation Act it is clear to see how closely related they are and I guess it causes us to question whether in fact there ought to be an even closer assimilation between the work of ACC and the work of WorkSafe. If you think about it when levies are collected by ACC from employers and employees and through our motor vehicle levies for the purpose of ACC dealing with the outcomes of accidents and injuries ACC is also charged with using some proportion of that levy to deal with workplace prevention strategies because of course many of the accidents and injuries that it is funding treatment and compensation for happen in the workplace—not all of them but many of them do. So it is right and it is proper that ACC should be funding workplace prevention strategies that not only include things like road safety but also include the subject of this bill: health and safety in the workplace.However there are some concerning parts of it. As we have just debated in Part 5 there is a little bit of smoke and mirrors going on with this Government. It is reducing ACC levies on one hand but now introducing a funding levy to fund the operations of WorkSafe. We have just agreed to that and passed that in Part 5. There is a bit of a sleight of hand going on there. I wondered whether in fact the very many amendments that are made in Part 6 indicate that the Government considered—and I would be interested in hearing the Minister’s views on this—actually keeping ACC levies where they were albeit that they have been getting overcharged for a number of years now under this Government and actually ensuring that ACC used its levies to fund the activities of WorkSafe as a workplace injury prevention measure. That is one way the Government could have gone about doing that I believe without spending pages and pages here in Part 6 describing how ACC and WorkSafe are kind of going to work together but are kind of going to work separately.I think that is always going to be our dilemma about ACC and its function and WorkSafe and its function. How do we make sure of the function of both of those entities which actually are charged with pretty similar functions? Are they are going to duplicate and replicate and fall over the top of each other or are they going to make sure that everything is covered and there are no gaps between their functions? That is why there are so many amendments to the Accident Compensation Act.I want to focus on one amendment in particular for the purposes of this call. I am hoping that I will get the opportunity to peruse other parts in another call on Part 6 later on but for the purposes of what I am discussing now I draw the Committee’s attention to clause 244 in Part 6. This actually amends section 174 of the Accident Compensation Act and it attempts to make sure that when WorkSafe and the Accident Compensation Corporation are establishing workplace incentive programmes they are working for the same aims. So it amends the Accident Compensation Act to say that when the corporation is establishing workplace incentive programmes among other things it has to have regard to the following matters set out in new section 174B(1)(a)(i) inserted by clause 244 which I am going to draw the Committee’s attention to. [Interruption] Well yes I know it is confusing. Just to be clear I am now referring to the section in the Accident Compensation Act that needs amending.New section 174B(1)(a)(i) says that the corporation has to have regard to the following matters: “the extent to which the programme is likely to lead to reductions in the incidence severity and impact of work-related personal injuries and to improvements in rehabilitation and durable return to work;”. So why would I be concerned about that? It sounds like a really laudable aim and it is. But sometimes we get perverse incentives from that type of focus on just reducing the incidence and severity of the work-related personal injuries. What we want to do is make sure that workplace incentive programmes do not incentivise employers or persons conducting a business or undertaking as I think they are now called in this legislation to not report accidents and injuries.I have certainly come across in my time workplaces where people are encouraged if they hurt themselves at work to maybe not report it as being a workplace accident or injury because it would then affect the ACC levy that the employer will pay in the future. They are encouraged to report it as something that happened off duty maybe on the sports field or what have you. Not only is that fraudulent—and I am going to put it right out there that that is a fraudulent practice so that no one thinks this is something that I am talking about in Parliament and that therefore makes it acceptable—but it also means that we have lost an opportunity to find out about what went wrong in the workplace because a report is not put forward that actually tells us about what happened with that accident or that injury. Therefore the opportunity to learn from that has been lost. This part of the bill this change to the Accident Compensation Act that puts this focus on the workplace incentive programme being designed to reduce the number of injuries and accidents and therefore reduce the levy that is payable does provide an incentive to do that.As a former health and safety practitioner I would say that those sorts of practices actually mean that we have got a more dangerous workplace because they can lead to a perverse incentive for people to not report their injuries. Therefore the opportunity to learn is lost and we know that the most serious work injuries that happen happen when a number of things go wrong. It is not just one thing that goes wrong; it is the perfect storm from a number of things that line up together and cause a big bad ugly thing. The opportunity to learn from an injury that happened to someone else and fix that problem stops that from lining up with a range of other things to cause the really big ugly serious issue. So I think that new section 174B and the way that we are changing the Accident Compensation Act may in fact be causing us an even greater problem in this regard.I want to go on briefly to look at clause 249 of Part 6 of this bill which inserts new section 264B into the Accident Compensation Act. Again I just relay my concerns and ask because we have got the responsible Minister now in the chair for his confirmation that WorkSafe will not be subjected to the same thing that we are doing here with ACC because new section 246B(2)(a)(i) states that before an injury prevention measure is agreed to ACC and WorkSafe have to say how the measures “are likely to result in a cost-effective reduction in actual or projected levy rates in the Work Account;”. That Minister could actually have the effect of a very good injury prevention measure.