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Legislative Council - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2024-03-19 Daily Xml
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Industrial Relations

The Hon. M. EL DANNAWI (14:40): My question is to the Minister for Industrial Relations and Public Sector. Will the minister inform the council about the government's achievements in the industrial relations portfolio since the 2022 state election?

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Attorney-General, Minister for Industrial Relations and Public Sector) (14:41): I thank the honourable member for her question and her interest in the area of industrial relations. This week marks two years since the election of the Malinauskas Labor government back in 2022, and in those two short years the government has been very pleased to work with both business groups and trade unions.

As I mentioned in an answer to a question from the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, we have been very pleased to deliver real improvements in the lives of South Australian workers. It was no easy feat finding a balance, but we stabilised the finances of the Return to Work scheme after the former Liberal government had a policy of letting the return to work levy go up potentially by hundreds of billions of dollars by leaving a ticking time bomb in terms of the unfunded liabilities of the scheme.

We have introduced legislation to permanently restore representation to the board of ReturnToWorkSA to ensure the voices of the workers are always heard when important decisions are made in this area. We have repealed the second edition of the Impairment Assessment Guidelines, made without proper consultation by the former industrial relations minister in the Rob Lucas-Steven Marshall Liberal government, and ensured that future guidelines are subject to disallowance by this parliament.

We have commenced significant consultation on the development of new guidelines, which has included input from workers, insurers and medical professionals. We are consulting on legislation to reform section 18 of the Return to Work Act to improve the operation of the system in terms of return to work and to improve the operation of the system for people suffering from dust diseases in particular.

We have undertaken the most significant reform to shop trading hours that we have seen for many years, providing sensible compromises that provide a balance for businesses and workers. We brought South Australia into line with every other mainland state by making Easter Sunday a public holiday, and we have also ensured Christmas Day is a public holiday regardless of the day of the week on which it falls.

We have introduced new regulations to increase penalties on people who assault frontline retail workers. We have conducted a review into the practices and the processes of the South Australian Employment Tribunal, and last month we introduced legislation to improve the operations of this tribunal. We have legislated for 15 days of paid family and domestic violence leave for every public sector and local government worker in South Australia. We have added to the Fair Work Act a new provision to make gender equality an object.

We are currently in the final stages of legislation to deliver on our election commitment to expand portable long service leave to workers in the community services sector. We have introduced regulations to ban the uncontrolled dry cutting of engineered tabletop stone and last year committed to a national agreement to ban the use of engineered stone in Australia.

We have made new regulations on the management of psychosocial health and safety risks. We have committed to fix secrecy rules which keep injured workers and their families with less information than is desirable in investigations being undertaken by SafeWork SA, and after seven attempts over the last couple of decades we have passed legislation to make industrial manslaughter a crime in this state in an attempt to deliver justice to the victims of workplace deaths.

This is a small sample of the work the government has undertaken in industrial relations in just two short years, and we look forward to progressing and continuing on our reform agendas.

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