Comcare CEO Colin Radford, speaking at the Comcare National Conference, told government agencies to expect to see more unannounced safety checks at their workplaces. Photo: Comcare.
Government agencies have been put on notice: the Commonwealth’s work health and safety regulator won’t ignore any failure to protect workers.
In fact, enforcing regulations is a top priority for Comcare’s new chief executive officer Colin Radford, who is 10 months into the job.
Opening his first Comcare National Conference at the National Convention Centre in Canberra on Tuesday (15 September), Mr Radford told agency bosses and HR professionals he’s coming after them if they don’t protect their staff.
Government workplaces can expect more announced compliance checks and a stricter approach to enforcement.
“The first thing I want to emphasise is that we are taking a stronger regulatory stance,” the Comcare boss told the conference.
“We’re going to do some things differently from what you may have experienced in the past.
“You may have noticed that Comcare’s public voice on regulatory outcomes has been louder lately.
“And with good reason. We’ve had some very strong enforcement results this past year. Among them, a record $1.1 million court penalty – the largest ever imposed in our jurisdiction.
“And the first conviction of a Commonwealth employer for failing to manage psychosocial risks.”
Mr Radford said in his short time at the helm of Comcare he had noticed a lot of confusion about the agency’s role.
Comcare is the national work health and safety regulator and workers’ compensation authority.
The Comcare scheme provides a system for work health and safety, rehabilitation and workers’ compensation for the Australian Government and self-insured licensees.
But Mr Radford chose to stress the agency’s regulatory role at the beginning of his address.
“Let me be clear: Comcare is the regulator. We’re not consultants or service providers. We are the regulator,” he said.
“Yes, we will educate, but we will also enforce. We will be collaborative, but we won’t compromise.
“We will regulate compliance with the law – nothing more, nothing less.
“Going forward, we’ll be focussing our regulatory efforts and resources on areas where the most harm is occurring, or likely to occur, and we’ll be taking a more proactive approach.
“There will be a significant increase in unannounced workplace inspections by Comcare; and where warranted, you can expect to see more improvement notices, and more prohibition notices for high-risk areas.”
The CEO acknowledged, however, that better regulation includes reducing unnecessary regulatory burden.
He said he can accept that, but he won’t accept the notion that some workplace harm is simply unavoidable, or that protecting the health and wellbeing of workers is too heavy a cross to bear.
“We will never resile from the fact that every workplace death and serious injury is entirely preventable. Every single one,” he said.
“No profit, no productivity improvement, no corner cut is worth the price of a human life.”
Following that pointed warning, the CEO turned the conference’s attention to workers’ compensation, saying mindsets had to change over the ‘return to work’ process.
“The sad reality is that people rarely get better by staying on compensable injury schemes for longer,” he said.
“I’ve spent the best part of three decades working in personal injury insurance – across road trauma, workers’ compensation and medical indemnity – and the one thing all these schemes have in common is that the longer people stay in them, the lesser their chance of recovery becomes.
“All of these schemes, the world over, require you to regularly demonstrate how unwell you are, in order to maintain your income or treatment support. And then we wonder why people don’t get better.
“That’s not a criticism of Comcare or any other scheme; and I’m not for a minute suggesting that long tail insurance does not have a critical and ongoing role to play.
“But we need to change the ecosystem. We need to shift from a compensation or pension model to a focus on recovery and return to safe work.
“For Comcare’s part, we need to think of ourselves not as a workers’ compensation scheme, but as a recovery and return to work scheme.”
The other shift needed to be made, he said, was in how Australian Public Service bosses think about return to work and the definition of an employer.
Under the relevant legislation, employers must take all reasonable steps to provide suitable employment for employees who are undertaking or have completed a rehabilitation program.
For ongoing employees of an Australian Government department or agency, however, suitable employment is any employment within the Commonwealth.
“In other words, it doesn’t mean that an injured worker can only return to the agency where they were injured, to the source of their trauma,” Mr Radford said.
“Sometimes this is simply not possible, especially in the case of psychological injury.
“But that shouldn’t mean we just give up on that person. It doesn’t remove their utility or the value that they can contribute to society, to their community and the economy.
“We spend an enormous amount of time as a nation talking about productivity. And we have this incredible resource available if only we think differently about where and how that resource can be deployed.
“For those Commonwealth agencies represented here, we need to think of the Commonwealth Government, as we do in so many other ways, as one employer – and to think about a return to work to the APS, not just an individual agency.”
