Worksafe chairman tells industrial relations convention
Leaving the question of workplace health and safety to market forces an obscenity
Leaving the important question of workplace health and safety to the vagaries of the marketplace would be an unqualified obscenity, the chairman of the National Occupational Health and Safety Commission (Worksafe Australia) said today.
Mr Joe Riordan, a former senior deputy president of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, was key-note speaker at a convention orgnaised by the Industrial Relations Society of Western Australia. His address was on the need for law to achieve or maitain order in the workplace.
Mr Riordan claimed two factors might undermined future safety in the workplace. The first was the emergence of a new, very powerful class of investors.
The investors were major investment institutions and retirement fund managers, people and bodies with no direct involvement in the professional management of firms, companies and businesses.
"Their interest seems to be confined to the level of profitability, the so-called bottom line," said Mr Riordan.
"As I understand it, this new form of pressure on professional management is causing a reduction in some companies of the resources previously allocated to the provision of a safe working environment.
"Such a reduction forms part of cost-cutting procedures."
The second factor was the theory that if a government provided a particular benefit, a population would develop to exploit it.
He described the theory, credited to Professor Milton Freidman, as a cynical approach.
"Nobody will suffer death, serious injury or the slow lingering death caused by some workplaces diseases to gain a financial benefit," Mr Riordan stressed.
"If this theory were correct, perhaps the abolition of compensation for injury would eliminate injury and disease from the workplace; the abolition of social security benefits would bring unemployment to an end ( and perhaps stop the ageing process.
"Those who treat such absurd proposals as worthy of serious consideration deserve our sympathy, but not our respect. Yet we hear the cliches mouthed by those who should know better.
"The workplace will be safer when all concerned are dedicated to achieving that desirable state of affairs.
"Strong legislation and its rigorous enforcement coupled with economic penalty on the one hand, and financial benefit for those who achieve workplace safety on the other, are proven benefits.
"We should stay with them.
"To leave such important questions to the vagaries of the marketplace would be an unqualified obscenity."
Theme of the WA Society's two-day convention at Busselton, near Bunbury, was: Is the West Wild? Among other speakers were academics, State government ministers, and representatives of unions and employer groups.
13 October 1995
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