Little AndrewDAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): Thank you to the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety for that explanation. Look even if you take out the White Island tragedy the numbers that we've been supplied by your ministry have indicated that it is—I mean you've said plateaued" but it's actually still an increase year on year. But that aside what I want to know is—in your Estimates—in the next year how things will look different. So let me just take a step back. We've had the Gavin Jones report last year that was published as an independent report from WorkSafe. That report found a number of failings with the way WorkSafe conducts its investigations. Then fast-forwarding a year you've had I would say at least six or seven public cases in the media that have been reported where members of the public have had a lack of confidence in your agency's ability to conduct its investigations. So I think it is a reasonable question to be here in the Chamber tonight and to simply ask: what is it specifically that your ministry is going to be doing differently in the next year in order to supply the public with greater confidence that the way WorkSafe conducts its investigations will in fact lead to better health and safety outcomes? So I know absolutely you have provided a good kind of framework around the carrot and stick. That's great that's fantastic. But what is going to be different from year to year—well this year versus last year—to help see a measurable improvement in health and safety? And I'd just like to end in saying that nobody wants to have their workers or their loved ones go to work and not come home safe at night. So this is a genuine question I have for the Minister and I would really appreciate a more robust answer. Thank you.Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): Thank you again to the member Dan Bidois. I don't think that anybody would suggest anything other than his questions are motivated by a genuine wish and concern to see improvement in the area that we all know I think and understand needs to improve. So I accept that. Let's bear in mind that at the moment WorkSafe receives roughly 15000 notifications of harm incidents in the workplace. Some of those are more serious than others obviously and there will be fatalities within that as well. All of those have to be triaged and considered and considered for levels of investigation of varying degrees of depth.WorkSafe mounts nearly 600 prosecutions a year; they have roughly as I understand it about a 94 percent success rate. So they are certainly striving to achieve calling those to account who cause harm. A 94 percent success rate suggests to me that they are taking cases that have a reasonably high probability of success. Achieving at a lower proportion suggests to me that they are picking some of the harder cases as well but I'll leave that at that point. In the short time I've been Minister and having had briefings about their systems I know that they are on a continuous improvement process in terms of their triaging of their processes in terms of trying to make the optimal decisions on resource allocation to get investigations going.The case that the member's referred to now in his last two questions that has hit the headlines in the last couple of days was a road traffic accident. So there was a police investigation. It was a dreadful dreadful tragedy for that family where they lost two young boys and I've met the family as indeed his colleague David Bennett has as well. Following the police investigation and a prosecution and subsequent conviction and sentencing WorkSafe conducted their investigation. They applied four investigators to that investigation. Having investigated it they drew their conclusions against the Solicitor-General's guidelines of prosecution that they are bound by; they made the determination not to proceed with a prosecution. When they had the opportunity to review that after the coroner's inquest concluded that there was arguably a breach of the Health and Safety at Work Act WorkSafe then reviewed it but still drew the conclusion that a prosecution wasn't warranted.Now I think in those circumstances if that situation arose my expectation would be that WorkSafe would have sent the matter off for external review not just done an internal reconsideration as they appear to have done. That's the way you've got rigour in WorkSafe's system. So while I'm the Minister I'll be certainly looking to see that their systems are not just about getting good systems on paper and people complying with them but looking at opportunities to improve their level of performance and delivery. External sort of benchmarking external review is a very important way of achieving best possible performance and I will certainly be continuing to encourage them to do that."