WORKCOVER CORPORATION

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (15:22): I seek leave to make an explanation prior to directing a question to the Leader of the Government on the subject of WorkCover.

Leave granted.

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS: In an article in Indaily this week, the former CEO of WorkCover, Keith Brown, highlighted what he described as his political knifing by the incoming Labor government in 2002 and then went on to describe the fact that virtually the whole WorkCover board and his entire management team had left in what he described as an attempt by Labor to impose its own political agenda on the corporation. Further on, the article stated:

'So all that corporate memory went,' he says, identifying where he thinks the rot set in. 'In the commercial world...you run a very real risk when you do that of causing great problems to the business. Because there's no continuity, there's no understanding of where the issues are coming from, of how they are tracking. That was shoved out the door. What went wrong was their zeal for political change.'

Further on, he is quoted as saying:

'Also in terms of the impact on people, it's very clearly my philosophy that you work with the stakeholders, the workers and the injured workers. Get that equation right and the money will follow. If you focus entirely on the financial relationship then that's all you get. You get the consequences that I think they've suffered.'

The article further states:

Brown uses the carrot and the stick analogy to describe the culture that he thinks WorkCover should embrace again. 'Though both are available, we focused very, very heavily on the carrot. Because if you've got enlightenment rather than compliance, then you are more likely to be successful. People see it is good for business, it's good for relationships with their staff and they have a safe workplace, it's actually more powerful than the threat of some penalty for not complying.

My questions are:

1. Does the minister agree that Labor's attempt to impose its own political agenda on the WorkCover Corporation and its removal of virtually all of the corporate memory in WorkCover have been factors in the major problems we now see with the WorkCover scheme?

2. Does the minister agree that the Labor government's change in the culture of WorkCover, from a culture of working cooperatively with stakeholders, employers, workers and injured workers to a culture of focusing entirely on financial relationships, has also been a major factor in the problems that we currently see with the WorkCover scheme?

The Hon. B.V. FINNIGAN (Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for State/Local Government Relations, Minister for Gambling) (15:24): I thank the Hon. Mr Lucas for his question. The former executives or former board members of WorkCover may well have a view about how the corporation was run, how it should be run. They are entitled to have a point of view; it is a free country.

The government's responsibility is to make appointments to the board of people who it thinks are going to be in the best position to manage the scheme effectively to ensure that it is able to meet the demands made of it by claimants as well as play a role in ensuring that workers compensation runs effectively and efficiently within the state, and that workers are, wherever possible, kept safe at work and return to work quickly in the unfortunate event of an injury.

That is what the government takes into account when it makes appointments. The charter of the board is quite clear in that the role of the board is to manage the corporation and its affairs on a day-to-day basis. The government, under the act, maintains the responsibility not only of appointing the board but, ultimately, the responsibility for the performance of the scheme.

The board, the chief executive and the management of the corporation will, of course, make decisions from time to time about the staffing of the corporation, as any board or management would. I am certainly not convinced that it is accurate to say that the government has in some way put in place a regime to remove all of the existing staff at WorkCover.

I would be pretty surprised if it was the case that there is nobody working at WorkCover today who was working there in 2002. I would imagine that there would be quite a number of people who are still there, but there would be a lot of others who have left for one reason or another.

The Hon. Mr Lucas seems to be suggesting that, in a workforce of any organisation, corporation or management system, the staff, board, management, culture and everything about that corporation, business, scheme or agency should be frozen in time. That is a pretty absurd proposition and the government does not agree with it.