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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
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WORKCOVER

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (14:50): My question again is to the Deputy Premier in his capacity as the Minister for Industrial Relations, particularly given the answer to the previous question: can the minister explain what actually is buggered within WorkCover? His answer intimated that it seemed to be that self-insurers have the capacity to manage injured workers, and he gave the example of a fish and chip operator, and surely the fish and chip operator's injured workers are case-managed by WorkCover, which has enormous capacity. So, what is buggered?

The SPEAKER: Before calling the Deputy Premier, I am advised that the 'Society of Clerks' publishes a list of unparliamentary expressions of which 'bugger' and 'buggered' are two. But if ministers of the Crown will insist on using it, I suppose they can be questioned about it. Deputy Premier.

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (14:51): I thank the honourable member for his question and, as I heard it, it was just a series of asterisks. Anyway, the answer to that question is that—as I tried to explain—first of all there are a number of things about the scheme that require attention, and we could spend a very long time going through all of those, and they are all elements in the bigger problem. There is no simple magic bullet-type solution to all of these problems, but if I had to try and characterise where the problem was—

Mrs Redmond: The Labor government.

The SPEAKER: The member for Heysen is warned for the first time. Deputy Premier.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Mr Speaker, I thought I heard a voice from the wilderness. As I was saying, if you really had to get down to the bottom of it, the bottom is this: the longer it takes for an injured person to be actively assisted either by way of having training, or some medical treatment, or some notification of their work arrangements, or being offered alternative duties—the longer you take between the time of the injury and the time of that happening, the worse the probable outcome is for that individual. That is obvious, and all the statistics, every piece of information I have ever seen, points in that direction.

It has been historically the case, it seems to me, that claims managers or WorkCover or anybody else who is doing that as a third party intervention into another workplace historically has not had the same focus and the same energy committed to that task as the individual employer that is big enough to have their own internal systems designed to help their own workforce.

When we get around to people like the Local Government Association, they have the capacity to say, 'Look, you have been injured in my council, I haven't got a job for you but here you are; you go over to this bloke over here and he'll look after you for a while,' and so forth. So, they are very good at that, but then again, they can be.

Of course, what has happened—we need to remember this—is that a large number of larger employers have exited the scheme by coming within the definition or the capability of being a self-insured operator. They do that for a number of reasons, one of which is that they think they will do better out of it. That's the main one. And what they do is they then create a residual pool of those people who aren't big enough or aren't organised enough, or aren't well-enough managed within their own structures to remain in the scheme.

So the scheme becomes a residual scheme full of the less better-performing people. The challenge is—and it is one that I have indicated several times we are addressing—how to improve that outcome. But the critical thing is early intervention, early case management, and effective case management in the workplace of the individual worker.

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