WORKERS REHABILITATION AND COMPENSATION (INCOME MAINTENANCE) AMENDMENT BILL

Introduction and First Reading

The Hon. M. PARNELL (16:50): Obtained leave and introduced a bill for an act to amend the Workers Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1986. Read a first time.

Second Reading

The Hon. M. PARNELL (16:52): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Last year, this parliament passed one of the meanest pieces of legislation that I have experienced; that is, the suite of changes that cut entitlements to injured workers under the WorkCover scheme. No doubt, the government felt that, by introducing and passing this legislation so far out from the state election, by the time 20 March 2010 came around people would have forgotten the days of early 2008 when we saw the spectacle of thousands of trade unionists, workers, their families and supporters on the steps of Parliament House condemning the Rann Labor government for its vicious attack on injured workers. No doubt, the government hoped that people would have calmed down and would have forgotten by the time March 2010 came around.

I talk to unions regularly and I have a lot of contact with workers, including injured workers, and I can tell this council that they are still angry and they have not forgotten it. When we debated the bill last year, I moved many amendments—from memory, 150 or so—and every one of them was opposed by the old parties. Once the bill finally passed mid-last year, I promised injured workers and their representatives that I would bring the worst elements of this legislation back into the parliament to give members the chance to reconsider these mean-spirited and unfair provisions. So, the bill I present to the council now seeks to redress some of the worst excesses of the government's 2008 changes.

Members might recall that we had a lengthy debate on these measures in 2008. We sat late into the evening on a number of occasions. It is not my intention to repeat everything that I said back in 2008 but I want to highlight now what I think were some of the worst of those changes and to explain those I seek to redress through this bill.

The first area relates to the issue of the payment of WorkCover benefits to injured workers during disputes—that is, where the injured worker is in dispute with WorkCover. My amendment seeks to return to the situation that existed before August 2008 whereby payments for workers whose claims were the subject of a dispute were continued until such time as the dispute had been resolved.

When we debated this last time I described this as one of the very worst elements of the bill and the area on which I had possibly received the most correspondence, especially from people who were outraged at the unfairness of the provision. The government's approach, as I described it last year, was that it sought to starve injured workers into submission and it was prepared to follow that model, even when WorkCover had made the wrong decision to cut a worker's income. That is what the government sought to do last year.

My amendment seeks to reverse that situation. I think it is a terrible affront to injured workers to use the weapon of cutting payments during a dispute as a means of preventing disputes. I think it is an appalling way for the WorkCover system to operate, and that is why I have brought this important amendment back to the parliament. As I say, it is an amendment on which many unions and individuals have written to me and I am very pleased to be able to give this parliament another opportunity to consider reversing that mean-spirited provision.

The second area that I seek to reform through my bill is the inclusion of a safety net for the lowest paid workers to ensure that no worker receives income maintenance payments that are less than the state's minimum wage. As members would recall, the arrangement that was passed last year included a step down from the original figure of 100 per cent of payments to 90 per cent and then down to 80 per cent. When you consider a worker who was on the minimum wage, then we are talking about income that is 80 per cent of the minimum wage. In other words, it is not the minimum any more. My amendment seeks to provide that floor beneath which no injured worker can fall.

The government, in opposing that move last time, talked about unintended and perverse incentives that would work against an incentive to return to work. I thought that was rubbish back then and I still think it is rubbish now. We need a floor—a safety net—that is just that, not a negotiable safety net where only 80 per cent of the minimum wage can be paid.

The third amendment that I am seeking to introduce through this bill is to ensure that retraining and rehabilitation is provided to injured workers before they are made to undergo a work capacity review. I do not think an injured worker should be removed from the scheme, and remember that was another one of the introductions last year—the removal of people from the scheme following these work capacity reviews. I do not think they should be removed until all reasonable steps have been taken by rehabilitation providers, and that includes retraining as well as rehabilitation.

The fourth series of amendments that I introduce through this bill is to reverse the step down arrangements that were introduced in August last year that reduced an injured worker's entitlements to 90 per cent after 13 weeks and 80 per cent after 26 weeks. It is probably fair to say that some of the aspects of the new WorkCover legislation have not yet manifested themselves in the hardship that we expect and know will follow because, in some areas, it is early days. But certainly, the step downs are now in place; they are taking effect, and we see injured workers taking a cut to their pay.

The irony is that we are in a period when all the talk is around economic stimulus, around handing money to people to help them consume. I doubt very much whether any injured workers who received stimulus payments would have been buying plasma televisions; they would have been supplementing the income that was cut as a result of these mean and tricky amendments that the government put through last year. So, my amendments take us back to the situation that existed before, when we did not have these step-downs.

The fifth area that my amendments cover is to remove the five per cent impairment test that applies to injured workers in relation to their impairment before lump sum payments can be made. That is an area, again, about which I received a great deal of correspondence on the basis of its unfairness.

What my amendments seek to do is to remove the provision that says that a worker who ends up with a permanent loss of function of less than five per cent of their whole body receives not 1¢ of compensation for their non-economic loss. The amendment also removes the ban on non-economic loss compensation for psychiatric injuries. When I introduced these amendments last year I spoke at some length about why both those reforms are needed.

The final amendment introduced by my bill is in relation to the difficulty that is apparent in the selection of doctors in relation to medical practitioners who are able to assess injured workers. There are some areas of medicine (for example, cardiothoracic) where an injured worker has a choice of only one or two medical practitioners. The problem with that, of course, is that, if the first assessing medical practitioner refuses to treat the injury seriously, the worker possibly has no option of seeking a second opinion. I want to enshrine the ability of workers to make sure that their condition is properly assessed.

Those are the amendments that I seek to bring forward this time. As tempting as it was to re-engage all 150 amendments that we went through last year, I do not propose to do that. That might be an exercise for the next parliament. What I am proposing now is that all members, including those who supported the government's WorkCover changes last year, have a good look at the impact of those changes and their impact on workers whose only crime was to have been injured at work through no fault of their own—none of them asked to be injured.

I ask all members to look at whether we can make these changes to re-inject some fairness back into the system. By no means does my bill fix up all of the problems that we identified last year, but I think this would be a very good start for many members, particularly those in this place with a union background, to redeem themselves in the eyes of their members. With those brief words, I commend the bill to the council.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. J.M. Gazzola.