Work Health and Safety (Industrial Manslaughter) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 31 August 2023.)

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY (16:46): It should not even need to be said that the one certainty of going to work is the expectation that you will return home safely after the shift, yet here I am making this speech. Workplace safety continues to be a matter of grave importance. It is something we have just not been able to get right.

It is a tragic fact that too many people are not coming home from work due to workplace accidents. This is completely unacceptable. We are not a Third World country with outdated safety measures, nor are we a ruthless, oppressive regime where workers' safety and wellbeing are not deemed worth protecting, yet somehow we still cannot create standards that ensure the basic safety of any business's most important asset: the employee.

If you look at a Safe Work Australia chart in the 20 years to 2019, you will see a steady decrease in workplace fatalities, but it gives us nothing to celebrate. The 310 deaths in 2007 steadily declined to 146 in 2018, but then rose dramatically to 183 the following year. But even the lower number of 146 deaths gives us nothing to celebrate. What comfort can be gained in knowing that 146 people died doing their job in what statistics would suggest was a good year? Excuse me for using cold statistics, but they do present a picture of what is happening out there in factories, in warehouses, on building sites, on the roads and even in offices.

By August this year, with just seven months completed, there were already 95 deaths. That indicates that fatalities are on the rise again and things are not getting better. A good year, of course, is when nobody dies. We know that that is unlikely because, unforeseeably, accidents will occasionally happen in life and in the workplace, but we can make sure that all possible measures are taken to make the workplace safer and minimise the chances of accidents and particularly fatalities eventuating.

In South Australia, the number of deaths is masked by our population. While we had 21 deaths in 2016, and this has dropped to 11 by 2020, the rate of fatalities was recorded as 1.6 deaths for every 100,000 workers. I do not like that statistic, as there is no such thing as 1.6 people.

In real terms, it means that, for every million people who went to work in a year, 16 people died on the job. In South Australia, we have a million workers, so, in what is a more sobering and real way of recording deaths, 16 people did not return home after work last year. That is worse than the national average. In fact, it is equally the highest with Queensland of all the states. We are behind only the Northern Territory, which has other contributing factors, most significantly more dangerous working conditions in a harsher landscape. We have nothing to be proud of.

In 2022, SafeWork SA found that four deaths and multiple life-changing injuries, including amputations and serious burns, came as a result of workplace negligence. The companies were punished with more than $2 million in fines. Fines hardly seem a suitable punishment or deterrent for companies doing the wrong thing either through lack of care or putting profits ahead of their workers.

Without that law, we will continue to lose people like Jeffrey Wright, Lee Ravlich, Jack Hallett and Robbie Westover. The courts found that these men lost their lives through a series of causes, including a lack of training before being put into potentially life and death positions. In these four instances, it belies belief that their workplace was not identified as unsafe before these tragedies occurred.

Mr Hallett was crushed by a hydraulic door on a 30-year-old machine that had somehow not been identified as hazardous in previous risk assessments. Mr Ravlich was also crushed, this time between a sliding tray and the cabin of a truck. He had been working for the company for eight days. The mechanism producer and employer were found guilty of breaching work health and safety laws.

Mr Westover was killed when his head was pierced by a dislodged weight as he tried to unblock a drain. The cause of his death was a simple lack of training. Mr Wright died when he fell 6.5 metres through a worksite roof while replacing roof sheets. He had had neither formal training in working at heights nor was he given a safety harness.

The deaths of these four men, the courts found, were all preventable. Prevent them, and these four men would still be alive. Bear in mind I am referring to only four cases that hit the courts recently. To get a real understanding of the importance of workplace safety, you need to multiply the number by four just to get the number of people who die at work every year. When you multiply those numbers, remember that each statistic was a real person who had their own family, people who loved them and plans for their future.

Without these laws, we will continue to have cases where a worker loses both their lower limbs in a workplace accident, and the company deemed negligent is out of pocket by a paltry $31,000. In this particular case, the courts found a 'systemic failure to engage in safety responsibilities' had left the worker's feet charred with full thickness burns to the lower torso and legs. The 2018 incident occurred on a metal elevated platform found to be in a poor state of repair. It came into contact with live powerlines. While that worker escaped death, I am sure none of us would consider him fortunate.

The new law being introduced under the Work Health and Safety (Industrial Manslaughter) Amendment Bill does not impose new duties on the employers; they are already in place. The bill is being introduced so that unscrupulous employers cannot get away with life-threatening breaches of their duty, whether it is a lack of training or preparation, cutting corners on costs or demanding a worker carry out a job they should not be doing.

Instead of handing out frivolous fines that will not hold companies accountable, this bill is designed to make sure the penalty reflects the severity of the crime. Instead of fines that may amount to a few weeks' pay for bosses, those bosses can face a maximum penalty of 20 years' imprisonment. The company can be fined $18 million.

These are the penalties that individuals and companies may face if they are reckless or grossly negligent in conduct to the point that it results in the death of another person. The gravest health and safety breaches carry a penalty that sends a message loud and clear to employers who place workers' lives at risk in the carrying out of their regular work. You will be held to account. You will face the most severe penalties and you may lose your freedom—in extreme cases, for many years.

I mentioned the names of four workers who lost their lives recently in workplace accidents that could have and should have been avoided. These workplace penalties are not just for the people who have lost their lives. They are for the families and loved ones they leave behind, and they are for every future worker who can go to work confident that their employer will be forced to do the right thing, or they will face their own life-changing penalties.

The state Labor government made an election commitment to bring South Australia into line with other states and jurisdictions that have made industrial manslaughter a crime. Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory have already done so.

We are not introducing this industrial manslaughter law lightly and it is not a case of playing politics. We have undertaken extensive consultation with people in all areas of the workforce, including business groups, unions, and work health and safety professionals. After doing our due diligence, the overriding view was that companies and employers whose breach of standards and cutting corners to save a few dollars caused the death of a worker have committed a crime.

The vast overwhelming majority of employers care about their workers and they put in place safety measures and ensure that their workplace is safe, but there are a significant number of unscrupulous employers who continue to have unsafe workplaces. Very often these are reflected in statistics where they consistently have a high number of injuries and it is only a matter of time before somebody is killed.

These are the people who we are after. These are the people who need to be held accountable. We need to make sure that workers in this state can feel confident that everything is being done to ensure that their workplaces are safe. I ask the council to endorse the bill.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. I.K. Hunter.