Joke government in a state of weakness

THE Carr-Iemma Government can claim one achievement - it has managed to turn NSW into the punchline for jokes about the Australian states.

Given the competition offered by Tasmania and Queensland and the territories - particularly John Stanhopeless's People's Republic of Canberra - that is some feat. But the line by Chris Evans of Access Economics, that the state is so sick it risks being adopted by Angelina Jolie, is pretty good. Also, as the only evidence of the management skills members of the Carr-Iemma Government have boasted over a decade, it is pretty sad. Hospital waiting lists have increased by 8000 more people since former premier Bob Carr promised to resign if he couldn't halve them and the 2007 Report on Government Services showsNSW did worse on average, according to numerous indicators, in 2005 under former health minister (now Premier) Morris Iemma than any mainland state. The latest ANZ Economic Outlook (January 30) said the state is in technical recession because gross state product from the quarterly national accounts suggest NSW has had three quarters of negative growth. This is the recession we didn't have to have. It is the recession delivered to us by the ALP Government as it panders to its trade union mates and produces policies killing businesses, killing jobs and killing the economy. Few things reflect the Carr-Iemma Government's incapacity to run the state more critically than the Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1983, amended (to contain the worst of the earlier Act and the most lethal of the new) in 2000. With a third of Australia's workforce, NSW has more than 60per cent of the nation's OHS prosecutions with a 98per cent success rate - because it has loaded the dice. Put at its simplest, the NSW Government has ensured that employers must always be guilty if an accident occurs because, under the Act, employers must ensure safe work sites. This pie-in-the-sky, Rock Candy Mountain thinking beloved of the trade union movement has been embraced by the weak-willed Carr-Iemma administration despite the realities of life and all industrial conventions including those of the International Labor Organisation, which hold that employers can only be held responsible for those aspects of the workplace they can practically and reasonably control. A wonderful example of the damaging effect of this law enacted by this mindless Government is the December 5, 2006, decision by the Full Bench of the NSW Industrial Relations Commission in the so-called Gretley mine case which held mine operators responsible for the deaths of four miners who drowned after using inaccurate plans supplied by the Department of Mineral Resources - they drove a shaft near flooded diggings. As Justice Staunton said in an earlier hearing, the "workings depicted ... as workings of the Young Wallsend Colliery ... were not only wrong but proved to have disastrous consequences''. He continued, "the southeastern boundary of the old workings ... were always 100m or more closer to the proposed mining activity boundaries ... than the official mine plans for Gretley Colliery were depicting at all relevant times''. Given the miners were guided by official maps, an ordinary person would assume those responsible for the lethally inaccurate plans should be held accountable for the death of those who relied on them. Not so. Under the NSW Government's kangaroo court system of casting blame, the employers hold total responsibility for those they employ. One of those held responsible, mining giant Xstrata, didn't even have a share in the mine at the time of the November 1996 disaster. Two of the IRC's commissioners, Justices Walton and Boland, accepted the Government's view of the legality of its legislation. Fortunately, Justice Marks did not. In his dissenting opinion he savaged the Act and the prosecutor Stephen Finlay McMartin, whom he said acted "inappropriately'' and whose conduct he said he regarded as "in all the circumstances, unacceptable and as having compromised the processes of this court''. The judge said, since the Act came into effect, it had created offences "of absolute liability in that it is not necessary for the prosecution to prove any guilty knowledge or intention to breach those provisions.'' In other words, the employer is guilty if anything occurs. Further, Justice Marks raised serious questions about the Act, noting there is no notion that the employer should be found to be complicit in any conduct before a breach, or complicit in the breach itself, to be found guilty. He said it conveyed a "very wide power indeed on persons entitled to prosecute for breaches of the Act, and it would be left entirely to the good common sense of such persons as to what circumstances might expose an individual to prosecution''. He said his concerns "about the good common sense of the prosecutor in these proceedings'' might make it appropriate for the Act to be refined to make its intent clear. He said public monies had, in his opinion, been unduly wasted, there had been an impact on the state economy and the resources of the state and court had been wasted. "It is fundamental that the criminal law must be administered in an appropriate fashion,'' he said. "The legislature has chosen to emphasise the importance of occupational health and safety matters by creating absolute offences. If the prosecution of offences is undertaken in an arbitrary, capricious and irresponsible fashion, the laws themselves are brought into disrepute for reasons that are obvious.'' The NSW Government blocked any way to appeal IRC decisions in NSW but there is always hope the High Court will be agree to hear a case. If sanity is not restored, no employers will risk the Carr-Iemma state.