Wednesday, 1 November 2023

WorkCover premiums

Ann-Marie HERMANS (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:52): (557) My adjournment is to the Minister for WorkSafe and the TAC in the other place. The action I seek is for the minister to provide me with an explanation in writing outlining what he is going to do to sort out the financial mess in WorkSafe. It has contributed to huge increases in WorkCover premiums being imposed on virtually every business in the South-Eastern Metropolitan Region, which I represent. As part of the annual document dump yesterday, the annual report for WorkSafe was tabled in this place. I note that this annual dumping of numerous annual reports on the last possible reporting day has become a habit of the current government, who in a vain attempt to hide from scrutiny think that tabling hundreds of reports on the same day will somehow prevent the content of these reports from being seen – a quite delusional proposition.

I have been contacted by countless businesses in my region, all of whom have been subjected to enormous increases in their annual WorkCover premiums. In one case, there was a longstanding family business who had no change in the number of employees, no significant change in total remuneration and no WorkCover claims and yet had an increase in its WorkCover premium this year of a staggering 91 per cent. Many other business owners have contacted me with premium increases, in many cases being 50 and 80 per cent.

All Victorians need to be very clear as to the cause of these outrageous premium increases. It is the complete financial incompetence of the Victorian Labor government. For example, because of its inability to run any major project on time or on budget, it has wasted more than $20 billion on cost blowouts on major projects. These extraordinary premium increases are of course on top of more than 50 new or increased taxes – actually I think we are up to 53 – introduced by this government since it came to power nine long, long, long years ago. It is this unreasonable level of taxation that is seeing businesses leaving Victoria at a dramatic rate.

We know that Labor cannot manage money, and that is why we have seen in the WorkSafe annual report that WorkSafe, despite receiving a cash injection of $300 million from the government, lost more than $176 million last year – a staggering figure. I note this is despite an increase in premiums charged in the last financial year of 11.6 per cent to more than $3.2 billion. Minister, I look forward to receiving in writing an explanation from you outlining what you and your government will do to sort out the mess you have created, rather than taking actions that will in fact make it worse, so that I can advise my constituents and local businesses.