Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, the Greens certainly understand that assaults on workers in workplaces are unacceptable, and concerningly, there definitely appears to be an increase in some areas of work where workers are at risk. There is more aggression, there is more intimidation, there is more harassment and more assaults. We particularly hear stories from people in the retail and hospitality industries, and people who are working in schools, child protection services, the police and the health profession.
There is much more pressure on people in our community, especially with the cost of living. The incredible struggle that so many people have on a daily basis to survive is real and it has consequences. People living with extreme stress are more likely to respond badly in situations, more likely to be impatient, more likely to be self-focused and more likely to be desperate. People who do not get mental health support when they need it are at a much higher risk of going into psychosis and are at much higher risk of having uncontrollable attacks of anxiety. People also misuse substances when they are desperate and struggling to cope with the circumstances in their life.
All these things are happening more often. People who are working with the Council of Social Services understand that these things are happening more often and that circumstances are dire for so many Tasmanians who are living through winter without housing. That is the incredibly harsh reality for so many Tasmanians. There are women fleeing family violence with children, and women suffering from the trauma of sexual abuse and assault.
None of this is an apology for acts against workers who are going to work to do their job in the workplace. It is merely a recognition of the whole situation that those people are working within. It is a complete failure for the government to bring a bill like this to this place instead of doing the job that they should be, which is putting the money into services, and having the conversations with workers to understand what would make a real difference in their workplace to make it safer.
I am quite confident that this bill will make no real difference to workers’ safety when they go to work on a daily basis. It does not have the money it needs attached to it. There is no commitment to resourcing massively understaffed areas of the education, housing, health and child protection services areas where staff are working in intolerable circumstances under extreme pressure, not able to provide the services that desperate people desperately need. It is in those circumstances that people become intolerant and combustive. It is in situations where young people are going in and causing havoc and distress for retail workers where we see so clearly the failure of the Liberals to resource the social workers, the youth workers, the therapeutic and early intervention programs that we know would make a huge difference for those retail businesses to give those young people the direct intervention and attention they need so they are not roaming around in groups, unsupported and undirected, without people there taking account of the reasons they are acting that way and actually working with them to change their circumstances. This bill will do none of that.
This bill also will provide nothing effective to look at the individual workplace-by-workplace situations and produce responses. It is a bill that the Greens have never supported and we will not be supporting it this time. It creates two classes of public sector workers, those in the so‑called frontline positions and other people who are not defined in the bill as being frontline workers, so people who are ambulance officers, child safety officers, correctional service officers, health workers, transport workers, retail and hospitality workers, and also security officers are frontline services officers, but what about everybody else who is working in Tasmania and is exposed to violence and assault, intimidation and harassment in their workplace?
I know that the member for Clark, Mr Bayley, has had many conversations with people working in schools, for example school support staff and teachers, who face the real risk of physical harm and abuse from young children in mental distress or who are acting out in the classroom, and those harms can be inflicted on teachers as well as other students. Where is the government in listening to those teachers? Where is the government in working with the Education Union to produce the resourcing that those staff are telling us so clearly, they need to make the difference so that their workplaces, their classrooms, are safe for them to go to work in?
What about the people working in housing? What about the people who have to go and tell a person that as a result of this government’s policy decisions and financial constraints, people will not be receiving the housing they desperately need. There are over 4500 people on the waiting list, all of whom are desperate, some of whom are in extreme circumstances already sleeping in a car with their children, escaping family violence. What about those people? What about the way they respond to the housing staff when they cannot believe that yet again, years after they have been on the waiting list and the more desperate their circumstances have become, still no-one listens, still no-one cares.
After 10 years the government still is not putting money into housing or doing anything about short‑stay accommodation in Tasmania. There is no restraint on the planning rules and we know for a fact that as a result of that calculated decision by the Liberals now for a decade, we have a horrendous situation because of the loss of houses, especially in Hobart but also Launceston, which could be going to desperate and needy families. About 4500, about the same number as are on the public housing waiting list, could be freed up over time to go back into the housing pool and yet the government does not do that. People who are desperate understand that these are choices being made by ministers like Mr Barnett in the Health portfolio, so that they do not get their house they desperately need. That makes people really angry when they are desperate. I can understand that anger and I can absolutely feel a great level of concern for workers who are exposed to that on a daily basis, but they are getting no support, no tools to help them and no-one to back them up.
We have a government that decides to send single paramedics out to jobs, having to deal with people in psychosis, or drunk, or off their face on drugs. This is what happens. I heard it and the ambulance ramping inquiry heard it from the voices of paramedics. This is the reality of their life, and although it is not meant to happen, they are continually being sent out to jobs on their own, unsupported.
What about the other people who are sent to work on their own, like community nurses who are sent round to people’s houses on their own, or tenancy staff who are sent round to talk to people on their own? That is not best practice and does not help them feel safe when they are confronting people in very difficult circumstances and they do not have the support of another person. This is a decision the government is making. This bill will not do anything to fix that. Of course it will not. It will not do anything to make the resources flow into all the areas that Mr Barnett is right now as Health minister cutting and taking more money out of.
We are really concerned to think about the people who have to carry out these jobs in the face and real risk of verbal and sometimes physical abuse; that happens. We are deeply concerned that it talks about some workers being more important than others. Why don’t we have school staff included? Why don’t we have people in the Education and Housing portfolios included in this list? Who are the winners and losers here? All workers are workers and they all deserve to be safe when they go to their workplace.
I want to thank Unions Tasmania, the Health and Community Services Union and the Commonwealth Public Sector Union. I had a conversation with Jess Mundy and she reflected the wide view of the trade union movement and the thousands and thousands of workers they support, including these so-called frontline workers that the minister has handpicked, or sort of captains picked. Unions Tasmania was not consulted about this bill; they heard about it in the newspaper. There was no consultation with anyone in the union movement I have spoken to about this bill. As the representatives of workers, that the first time they hear about a bill like this which purports to talk about workers’ safety is in a newspaper, it just goes to show what a shallow political exercise this really is.
It was said to me that workers see this for what it is, a cynical, rushed attempt by the government to look like they are caring about workers, at the same time as they are steadfastly opposed, and have been for years now, to critical reforms that would make a significant difference to preventing serious harm, like industrial manslaughter laws. The government has opposed that for years and years. It is also distracting from the terrible stories workers are telling about the harshness of the conditions they are working under, not from people who are abusing and assaulting them, but from the government’s failure to resource them. They are getting burnt out and leaving their profession, such as paramedics, nurses, teachers and child safety workers are doing. They are doing that because they are living in desperately underfunded workplaces which create incredibly intolerable and stressful situations. That is a decision that the Liberals are choosing to make.
This bill will not fix the problems facing workers and they are serious and real. There is increasing violence against workers. It is a real and growing problem. There are ways that it can be responded to that would make a difference and the government is not doing them.
It is the government’s duty as an employer who sends people into dangerous workplaces to make sure that they have the protections they need. That means that the government as employer has a duty of care to co‑design workplaces with workers to make sure that they can become safer. When they are identified as a high‑risk environment, then it is the duty of all the employers in different portfolios to identify the risk‑specific hazards and to co‑design better safety controls for workers so that they can work. We have to make sure that they are not on their own, make sure that they have backup and that they have comms available. None of this is being done.
The government is putting in place a bill that is an end‑of‑the‑line sentencing solution. It pretends to be a solution to a workplace risk, and it makes it look as though actions are being taken and the government cares, but it is after the fact – after the harm is done. There is zero evidence that this form of legislation provides any real deterrence. It does not stop young people from taking actions. It will not have an effect in that respect. It does not stop older people or people of any age from taking actions of aggression, intimidation and harassment. These are bad actions and they need a response. This is not an effective one.
Health unions have also expressed a concern that this bill will introduce perverse outcomes by legislating to provide a presumption of a particular sentence, which is effectively a minimum mandatory sentence. That is effectively what it becomes, because it requires the magistrate or the judge to make a determination and give an opinion about why a particular minimum sentence should not be provided. Essentially, it is putting it within a frame of providing that sentence unless evidence can be provided in a determination to make the case for why it should not be that sentence.
People in the health workforce have reported being concerned that the outcome the bill may have is that caring people will not report events that should be reported. Everyone in the health profession is a caring person – they are there because they care about people. They understand the complexity of people’s circumstances and they are trying to help.
Health professionals, in many cases, would not want to see the people that have harmed them in some way – despite the fact that they have been harmed, shouted at, abused or intimidated – receive a mandatory sentence. That may make them reluctant to report the event in the first place, when what we want is openness about the risks in the workplace and all hands on deck to try and find solutions to support staff and to put more people in place so those people are not put at risk again. It is a concerning possibility that has been reported – that the bill will provide this potential for perverse outcomes.
Given the government has all these options on the table – options that unions have been calling for years – it is concerning but not surprising that it has chosen this cynical and not useful mechanism to pretend that they are responding to violence against workers, instead of taking up the things that will actually prevent harassment and assault.
One of the things that could be done that is not being done is funding the workplace regulator, WorkSafe, as it is completely underfunded in this area. What it needs in order to be able to do its job effectively and able to report to the minister responsible, if the minister wants to pay attention, is a lot more staff, inspectors, safety advisors and outreach.
There needs to be more real opportunity for WorkSafe to go to workplaces where incidents occur and to co‑design with staff specific safety responses that are particular to the type of work and to the actual location and workplace itself. That is what is needed. That is a minimum requirement.
The other requirement, where it is appropriate – for example, it is not the case for retail and hospitality, but it is the case for the health sector – is for the government to put the money in to make sure that workers are not working alone and that they are properly supported in the workplace.
Another fundamental reason that we do not support this bill is because it imposes an effective mandatory minimum imprisonment for offences under section 16A. The Greens have never supported mandatory sentences of any type, and we include this in that list. The bill as it is – presumptive sentencing for assaults on frontline workers – will effectively have the same outcome for justices as a mandatory minimum sentencing requirement.
We have never supported the interference of parliament in the decision‑making of the justice system, particularly the decision‑making of justices and magistrates about the appropriate sentence that a person should receive. This is one of the fundamental tenets of the Westminster system, which is our democratic system in Tasmania. It is incredibly valuable, and the Greens will continue to uphold the separation of the powers of the executive.
Bills like this attempt to provide direction to the judiciary. The separation of these two powers is something that has always been upheld as one of the greatest things about our democracy. We look with real concern at other countries where this has been eroded. We see the influence that politics can play in the judicial system in the United States, where there has been such an overt stacking of the Supreme Court with extremely conservative judges, and now we are looking at a winding back of historically and popularly supported laws that allow a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body. This is the sort of politics getting into the judiciary, which is deeply concerning.
What we are seeing in this bill today is a smaller version of the same thing. It is basically the government of the day having a particular political imperative to try to make it look as though it seriously cares about workers and it would do something if it could., putting a direction to the judicial system on how they must behave in order to fit a Liberal ideology of tough on crime that is at play at the moment. We thought we had seen an end to this sort of stuff from the Liberals, but clearly, we have not.
We are concerned for the reasons I said before: that it creates two classes of people and it will have possible perverse outcomes where people in certain professions will end up not reporting events when they should. It will do nothing to make workplaces safer. The government has no intention of passing laws that would make a difference, like making industrial manslaughter a crime. The Greens, Labor and other members have all been pushing for that. This is a bill the Labor Party is bringing on tomorrow, which is fantastic. However, we do not support interference in the judiciary at all.
I will finish by thanking all the unions and workers who work in Tasmania in the public and private sectors every day. I particularly thank Unions Tasmania, HACSU, CPSU and other unions who have made comments previously on this bill. They were not able to comment publicly. There was no call for submissions on this bill, not one they heard about, at least. The community legal centres and TasCOSS have made submissions, but there was no deliberate stakeholder reach‑out to the unions I have spoken to for this bill. I am not sure why the Attorney‑General does not include unions on the stakeholder list. I think it is a mistake and should be corrected.
I will conclude by saying how disappointing it is that Labor has rolled over from a long‑held position of standing firm against mandatory minimum sentencing of all sorts. Labor has capitulated to support this bad law. It will not fix the problem and it introduces other potentially perverse, problematic, and harmful outcomes for workers. Waiting to get into government, as Ms White said, before you do something is just a cop‑out for being actively involved by voting to support bad laws. Bad laws have been operating for a long time and, while the Labor Party continues to support them, they will operate until, if and when, they ever become the government. The evidence from history in Australia is that the Labor Party does not undo bad laws made when they were in opposition. They just continue on. That is the new normal. They are as averse to making changes when they are in government as they are when they are not in government.
I will leave the question to Labor and the people who voted for Labor about what Labor is doing that is useful in this space, except to say that while the Liberals are shifting to the right, the Labor Party is shifting with them. When you allow something to happen, you are creating change and you are making that a new normal. Silence is collusion, but voting in support of a bill is active support of a bill. I do not care what else you say about it; that is what is happening when you say yes. All of the arguments Ms White put against it – an imperfect definition of frontline workers, creating two classes of workers – that is not the big issue here. The big issue here is this bill is bad, it should be voted against and those of us who care about the rights of workers should continue to advocate for real change that will affect the rights of workers. That is what I will be doing on behalf of the Greens and everybody else because they deserve something real and not this fig leaf of care and support the government has put up.
