NSW Parliament's Law and Justice Committee has just handed down its report into the NSW Labor Government's proposed changes to workers compensation entitlements. This follows a mammoth hearing just last Friday where the Committee heard from almost 40 witnesses across nine and a half hours of evidence.
The evidence contained in the report details near universal opposition to the major elements of the government's proposed reforms from witnesses and stakeholders.
The inquiry into the government's legislation follows only two years after the Committee conducted a fulsome and comprehensive inquiry into the drivers and impacts of workplace psychological injuries resulting in compensation claims. The majority of recommendations, including key prevention and management recommendations, from that report remain unfulfilled. Despite the NSW Labor government agreeing or agreeing in principle to all of those recommendations, many of the elements of the government's proposed reforms are in direct contradiction to those recommendations.
As stated by Abigail Boyd, Greens Spokesperson for Treasury, Work Health and Safety, and Industrial Relations:
"The evidence received by the committee in our one-day hearing painted a damning picture of what the government proposes to do to injured workers in this state.
"Everything we heard pointed to just how ill-conceived and incomprehensibly cruel the Minns Labor Government's proposed curtailment of support for psychologically injured workers is - these reforms will be actively harmful to thousands of injured and deserving people.
"The government's inability to present coherent modelling and financial analysis of either the scheme liabilities or the impact of these proposed changes is cause for great concern. Projected future rates of growth of psychological injury are based on heroic assumptions that only an actuary could love, and a highly motivated one at that. It's on these shaky projections that the supposed crisis the government claims to be responding to is based.
"But even if you are to believe that there is to be some catastrophic blowout in costs from psychological injuries, the answer is not to pretend those injuries don't exist - we have to focus on stopping people getting injured at work in the first place and, if they are injured, doing everything we can to get them quickly back on their feet. Anything less is not only dangerous to workers' lives and morally wrong, it's also an incredibly naive way to manage the State's longer-term finances, dependent as they are on a productive and resilient workforce.
"The proposal to increase the threshold for accessing long-term support to a level that would require a worker to be rendered essentially catatonic or in need of permanent around-the-clock professional care was identified by experts as being particularly cruel and without basis or justification. If allowed to go through, these changes will cost lives."
