With apologies (yet again) to Oscar Wilde, to lose power to one public utility
may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two … well, you get the idea!
Things were ticking along reasonably well for the Government until late on
Tuesday, when the period from last Sunday morning to tomorrow evening
was suddenly designated as Not A Good Week.
Around 3pm, Flinders Medical Centre lost power and the back-up generator
failed, leaving medical teams to fend off disaster for close to an hour.
Around two hours later, a Noarlunga-bound train lost power too.
For around four hours. The less temperate on board were allegedly reduced
to thinking up inventive new ways to use the bathroom.
As Pat Conlon intimated, a train losing power at the best of times is an
unfortunate set of circumstances. As he then pointed out, 5pm on a weeknight
is not the best of times.
The Government therefore spent much of Wednesday in what is known in
the biz as “Damage Control”, by which we mean it spent the day blaming
“operational matters” for its public embarrassments.
This is not altogether unfair; although in the Westminster system, ministers
are duty-bound to cop the blame for problems that occur under their watch
(a convention, incidentally, frequently ignored by the current administration),
you would be a bloody-minded individual indeed to hold Conlon or John Hill
personally responsible when the power fails in an outpost of their ministerial
empire. It would be like blaming your landlord every time you have a lightbulb
on the blink.
So it would be fair to say that the Government has spent much of the week
defending matters for which it can hardly be blamed.
What has flown largely under the radar this week, though, is a matter for which
it can be largely blamed, but for which the Government consistently refuses
to accept responsibility. The fact that no-one was surprised by WorkCover’s
record unfunded liability of $1.3 billion doesn’t mean that no-one was appalled
by it.
As of this week a swathe of reforms designed to make life harder for people
on workers’ compensation (sorry, designed to get injured workers back to
work!) came into force. It was, therefore, spectacularly bad timing that this
week marked the six-monthly WorkCover board meeting that confirmed the
liability deficit had spiralled out well beyond the psychologically significant
billion-dollar mark.
Add to that the decision to retain the levy rate steady at 3 per cent, despite
assurances the new business-friendly/worker-unfriendly model would see
it reduced.
This decision was apparently fought out in the board meeting so vociferously
that the announcement was delayed until around 5.30pm on Monday afternoon,
a fact that left television news bulletins hanging for information until the last
possible moment.
So, in an egregious sort of way, Monday’s board meeting was something of a
triumph, in that it managed to piss off every significant stakeholder in the
WorkCover corporation, and several more besides.
Workers would be rightly annoyed that the scheme has been run down to the
degree that their pain is yet to deliver any tangible improvement in the
corporation’s financial outlook. Businesses are aggrieved that the scheme
remains an impediment to creating jobs and generating economic growth.
And, as an added bonus, the media had its collective nose put out of joint by
being mucked around for an afternoon, despite the size of the unfunded
liability being well known to the entire board.
The Motor Trade Association, speaking (one would assume) on behalf of
small and medium-sized businesses across the state, said the buck stopped
with the Government and the board, whose members should “consider their positions” (universal code for “resign”).
Now, the WorkCover board is comprised of some of the state’s best and
brightest business minds. The fact that a major lobby group is calling for
them to move on demonstrates the degree of anger the scheme’s
(mis)management has prompted among stakeholders.
The obvious question is: Why was it left to the Motor Trade Association to
publicly rebuke the board on behalf of employers? Where was the State’s
Chamber of Commerce, Business SA?
Well, the answer is that Business SA was silent because its chief executive,
Peter Vaughan, has a well-known conflict of interest – he is a member of
the WorkCover board. He may well have argued long and hard in the
meeting that the levy should be reduced, as promised, but ultimately
the corporation has failed business, just as it has failed injured workers.
A year ago, when WorkCover opted to slash employee’s entitlements,
union boss Janet Giles quit the board in protest. That was an appropriate
course of action, enabling her to criticise the Government from the
sidelines.
Now that the Government – and the scheme – has broken its promise to
small business, and the state’s peak business lobby group is forced to
remain silent, perhaps it is time for Peter Vaughan, too, to “consider
his position”?
Meanwhile, both board and Minister Paul Caica doggedly hold to the excuse
that WorkCover is going down the gurgler because of the “Global Financial
Crisis”, a term that has become a convenient catch-all for almost any
financial ineptitude.
True, the corporation’s investments have taken a big hit over the past year;
but much of the rot had already set in by the first half of last year, long
before universal prognostications of global doom had become the norm.
So, GFC or no GFC, the fact remains that WorkCover’s unfunded liability
has gone from $56 million in December 2001 to $1.3 billion and climbing.
This is a scheme that is broke, in every possible sense of the word.
The irony is that, in attempting to fix it, the Government seems
to have forgotten that this is, by definition, supposed to be a
scheme for compensating injured workers.
Ref: Tom Richardson, 6/04/2009, The Independent Weekly
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