Ms BURNET – Minister, this is around WorkSafe. Are you confident that all government departments currently have processes in place to ensure compliance with work health and safety obligations of the PCBU, the person conducting a business or undertaking? Specifically, can you confirm how many work health and safety breaches there have been across Tasmania Police and the State Emergency Service in the last financial year, and the nature of those breaches?
Mr FERGUSON – I’ll ask Ms Pearce, the executive director of WorkSafe Tasmania, to respond to your question. I will say there’s never a guarantee, regardless of sector, that everybody is meeting all of their obligations. That’s the whole message of WorkSafe policy, law and practices: that it’s a joint responsibility of all players in an enterprise. The reason I’m saying it like that is because it’s a reminder that you can never set it and forget it, and say, ‘Job done, we’re now compliant’. It’s a daily question: ‘Am I compliant?’ Maybe some would say hourly questions. With that context, we have a shared responsibility to have safe workplaces, government and non‑government. Ms Pearce, can you speak to the question of any performance improvement notices to state agencies, especially DPFEM?
Ms PEARCE – I don’t have information with me in relation to those particular agencies. Certainly, there are incidents we respond to that involve those agencies. There are, at times, complaints across State Service agencies that we look into. Whether or not contraventions have been identified and notices issued. I would need to look into that data.
Ms BURNET – But you could take that on notice?
Mr FERGUSON – Yes, we’ll take that on notice and provide the committee with whatever data we can that’s useful, noting that we wouldn’t want to conflate a complaint with a contravention.
Ms BURNET – Understood.
Ms PEARCE – In terms of the detail, that would be at a very high level in terms of the nature of the contravention. It wouldn’t have specific details due to some confidentiality issues.
Ms BURNET – Thank you. WorkSafe Tas conducted a number of spot checks relating to COVID‑19 during the pandemic. It’s been put to us that during the time, WorkSafe Tas became aware that most government departments and many private sector employers do not have the capability to complete a risk assessment.
Did WorkSafe undertake action to remedy this lack of compliance, particularly in the State Service? Will you ensure there is an audit to ensure the government is complying with work health and safety obligations relating to job safety analyses?
Ms PEARCE – Risk assessments are a fundamental requirement under the legislation, as the first obligation for a PCBU is to identify the risks in their business and then to mitigate those risks. We tend to see that the lack of understanding around risk assessments is more prevalent in small business than in mid‑ to larger sized business. I would include government agencies in that.
In terms of doing proactive visits, when we attend an agency in response to a complaint or an incident and we start to look at their assessments, the very first questions that we ask are: ‘Have you identified the risks?’, ‘What are the hazards?’ and ‘What have you put into place?’. I haven’t seen anything from those that is suggesting that there is a systemic gap across the State Service in the identification of risk. Our ability to be able to run a proactive program in that space would be dependent upon what the other matters are that we’re dealing with at a particular time. Our inspectors will deal with investigations, complaints, and incident notifications. They tend to have the highest priority as we deal with them in accordance with national compliance and enforcement policy. Our observation in the state government is that there is certainly a much greater focus on managing work health and safety risks.
Ms BURNET – My question was around private sector employers as well. Are you seeing that?
Ms PEARCE – We certainly see in the small business sector that that is a challenge. We have identified that. At the Safe Work Australia level, as a result of the Boland Review, there has been some work done to develop some simple tools to assist business in undertaking their risk assessments. Through our advisory service we provide free services to small to medium businesses to assist them with establishing safety management systems. That goes to also helping them to undertake risk assessments as part of that. In previous years through Work Safe Month, we’ve run specific workshops and events focused on helping to educate people more on risk assessment as well. It is that very fundamental underpinning of the legislation.
