Several hundred unionists rallied outside the NSW Treasury in Martin Place on May 26 to demand NSW Labor drop its proposed cuts to workers’ compensation laws. The planned changes would severely limit workers’ right to access compensation for psychological injuries suffered at work.
Reportedly, the Martin Place protest was timed to coincide with Treasurer Daniel Mookhey’s meeting with the Labor cabinet to discuss pushing through the amendments.
The city protest was part of a series being held around NSW.
Unions NSW said the workers compensation system is “already broken”, but the Treasurer “wants to make it worse” by cutting off long-term support and mental health care for seriously injured workers.
“These changes won’t prevent injuries or support frontline workers; they’ll just make it harder for people to access the care they need to recover,” it said.
It said Labor MPs and MLCs pledged to stand with injured workers before the election, but “now they are backing cost-cutting reforms that break that promise”.
“Every worker in NSW should be able to access timely health cover so they can get back to work,” the rally chair said.
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Amber Flohm, vice president of the NSW Teachers Federation, told the rally that the situation is clear. “We either support the Treasurer throwing injured workers on the scrap heap, to their families to care for, on to social services that are already overburdened by demand, or we stand up against these cuts.
“The fact is that the financial burden is being shifted from the Treasury to the injured worker. The evidence is in. There was an inquiry report last Friday [which collected] 486 pieces of evidence — 480 of which support the position of unions.
“We know that when you increase the whole-of-person injury from 25% to 31%, you effectively shut down psychological injury claims for workers.”
Flohm explained that this change would overwhelmingly affect workers in the caring industries, include teachers and nurses, 80% of whom are women.
NSW Parliament’s Law and Justice Committee recently handed down its report into the proposed changes to workers’ compensation entitlements. This followed a mammoth hearing on May 23, during which the committee heard from almost 40 witnesses across nine-and-a-half hours.
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Abigail Boyd, Greens spokesperson for Treasury, Work Health and Safety, and Industrial Relations, said on May 26 the evidence received by the committee “painted a damning picture of what the government proposes to do to injured workers.
“Everything we heard pointed to just how ill-conceived and incomprehensibly cruel the Minns Labor government’s proposed curtailment of support for psychologically injured workers is; these reforms will be actively harmful to thousands of injured and deserving people.”
Boyd said Labor’s “inability to present coherent modelling and financial analysis” of either the scheme liabilities or the impact of these proposed changes is “cause for great concern”.
“Projected future rates of growth of psychological injury are based on heroic assumptions that only an actuary could love and a highly motivated one at that. It’s on these shaky projections that the supposed crisis the government claims to be responding to is based.”
Boyd said that even if you believe there will be a catastrophic blowout in costs from psychological injuries, “the answer is not to pretend those injuries don’t exist”.
She said the government has to “focus on stopping people getting injured at work in the first place and, if they are injured, doing everything we can to get them quickly back on their feet”.
“The proposal to increase the threshold for accessing long-term support to a level that would require a worker to be rendered essentially catatonic, or in need of permanent around-the-clock professional care, was identified by experts as being particularly cruel and without basis or justification. If allowed to go through, these changes will cost lives,” Boyd concluded.