May 2010

DELEGATION TO CANBERRA
 
On Thursday and Friday 20th and 21st May, 2010 we organised a small delegation to Canberra to discuss some issues we had raised following the release of the new Harmonisation Laws. The delegation comprised of Cheryl Romer, Andreia Viegas and Wendy Lark from our group, and Deanne May from the Victorian Industrial Deaths Support and Advocacy group. It was great to be able to meet with Deanne and find many areas we have in common.
 
One of the excellent things about the new legislation (which will be adopted by every state) is that all incidents in a workplace where a worker is taken away by ambulance must be designated as a ‘notifiable incident’. This means the employer must immediately cordon off the area where the incident occurred, and must immediately notify WorkCover NSW. It has been our previous experience that this has not always happened, particularly when a worker has been critically injured – somehow some critically injured workers notifications have fallen through the cracks of the system, and there seems to be no penalty for late notification placed (despite existing legislation providing for this).
 
We discussed with Safe Work Australia our real concerns about the fact that work-related deaths information is not collected, recorded or reported in a uniform way across all jurisdictions, which results in the fact that there are no true statistics available to ascertain how large a problem we think this is, and also to be used by government and companies in planning workplace safety strategies. We have developed ongoing strategies to see if this problem can be addressed.
 
We also met with Safe Work Australia re our proposal that a designated family representative be included as a participant in the investigation and prosecution processes. There would be some restrictions to ensure that information pertaining to the prosecution is not released publicly (which would jeopardise the prosecution case). But we believe we should have a greater say in both parts of the process families must face following a workplace fatality, as families are the ones most affected by the incident and live with the loss and impact of the workplace death for the rest of their lives. This item needs to be further explored through the state attorneys general.
 
All in all it was well worth the effort of going to our nation’s capital.