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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-10-31 Daily Xml
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WORKCOVER

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (14:41): My question is to the Deputy Premier in his capacity as the Minister for Industrial Relations. Can the minister explain to the house why the local government sector seems to be able to manage workplace injuries, costs and return-to-work rates across its range of worksites at levels similar to those in other jurisdictions under the same legislation that WorkCover operates?

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (14:41): I thank the honourable member for that very good question, because it is a good question. Since I have been in the role of IR minister and I have had the opportunity to look in more depth at WorkCover, I have spent time meeting with people from SISA, the self-insured group, and I have met with other people involved in the sector.

It is undoubtedly true that the self-insured element which, as I think the honourable member was saying in his explanation, are operating under exactly the same scheme in terms of the statutory benefits arrangements, are performing better than those that are not. There is no question about that. It does raise the question, obviously: why? I think that is what was being put.

I have thought about that for some time and I have a number of possible suggestions that have come to me. The first one is that the cohort of people who are self-insured within the scheme tend to be different from the cohort of people who are not in that category by reason of the fact that they are, generally speaking, the larger employers who can afford to be, in effect, self-funding.

That means not necessarily that they are automatically better at things but they are big enough usually to have their own internal systems for dealing with work injuries—and that includes things like having their own on-staff people. As soon as someone is injured they go and personally manage that person. They personally go to that individual worker and ask, 'How can we help you? How can we get you back to work?' They do that because they know that an early intervention is critical to getting a really good outcome.

However, it's important to remember that those employers are often the very large or significant employers who have sufficient expertise, sufficient capital and sufficient breadth of skill base within their organisations to be able to do that. When you are comparing them with very small outfits—like a fish and chip shop or a small retail outlet or something of that nature—those people do not, as a matter of course, have their own internally-based occupational health and safety officer or some other thing.

That is one reason we get to the ultimate answer, in my opinion: it is the difference between an early intervention, targeting the individual and wrapping support around the individual very early on in the piece and not achieving that early intervention. That, in my opinion, is the fundamental difference and that is one of the fundamental flaws in the way things are operating presently.

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