Woods Megan: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 19 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5997. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): Thank you for this the first call I take on the Health and Safety Reform Bill. Like many of my colleagues have spoken about it is actually with regret that Labour cannot support this bill. We are supporting this part—Part 2 of the bill—and I would like to genuinely thank the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety for taking a call and answering some of the questions that were put to him in the Committee here tonight. Actually in your answers Minister there were many other questions that came from those. I would welcome your taking a call to answer some further questions that arose from the information you gave us here in the Committee tonight.You talked about the farm and when it was deemed to be a workplace and about the recreational use exemption so that a farm was a workplace only when it was being a workplace—when people were performing work there—and not when it was being used for recreational use. You particularly talked about mountain biking and quad biking on these spaces. But Minister this opened some very serious questions that we need some clarification on. For example if someone is riding a quad bike back to a farmhouse to take a smoko break are they deemed to be at work? Are they covered by the bill? If they are riding a quad bike for the purposes of some after-work drinks on a Friday—the workers knock off and decide to have some drinks and people are riding around on quad bikes—is that deemed to be a workplace and will they then be covered by the bill? One of the issues that we have is around the number of exemptions that are being put into place and the dancing on a head of a pin around when a workplace is a workplace and whether health and safety legislation should apply. That is opening up questions. They were genuine questions and I would genuinely like an answer to them.I also have some questions for the Minister around when it is that accommodation is deemed to be a workplace. The test the Minister outlined is when there is a choice that the employee can make about whether or not they live in that accommodation—whether there is alternative accommodation that they can take up. So if accommodation is included as part of a remuneration package I would like the Minister to clarify whether or not accepting it is deemed to be a choice an employee can make. I would also like the Minister to clarify whether if there are no reasonable or affordable alternatives—there may well be alternatives but they might not be deemed to be reasonably affordable—there is deemed to be choice for the worker in that instance and whether this legislation would apply to them.This comes back to some of the fundamental problems that we have with this bill. Although we are supporting Part 2 our problem as many of my colleagues have outlined is the way in which this interacts with other parts of the legislation. We have these persons conducting a business or undertaking (PCBUs) or as my colleague Kelvin Davis renamed the acronym the b-o-s-s-e-s who are deemed to make these decisions but we have all these exemptions. The problem that we have here is that there is no onus for there to be health and safety reps. How is this part—this part we are supporting Part 2—going to be policed?I would like to turn my attention to subpart 4 in Part 2 “Duties to preserve sites and notify notifiable events” and specifically clause 51 through to 53 which are contained in this subpart of the bill because these are very important provisions within this bill. It is absolutely critical when accidents no matter how small or incidents—not even accidents but incidents—happen in a workplace that there is notification that these are recorded and that there is a record of these. I note that this part of the bill has all the great intentions around doing that. I support that and I welcome that but my concern is that in businesses where there is not deemed to be the need to have workplace health safety reps we are not going to have any ability to police that. I have heard members of the Government interject—not take a call but interject—that WorkSafe will do this. Well I would like the Minister to also tell us whether that is his realistic expectation—that WorkSafe will be everywhere in these businesses that are exempt from the legislation ensuring that they are being policed and that it will be omnipresent and know whether that is occurring.