Manslaughter laws not needed: Business SA
Efforts to introduce legislation outlawing ‘industrial manslaughter’ are unnecessary because the existing laws adequately cover deaths in the workplace, according to Business SA.
Greens’ Legislative Council member Tammy Franks last week announced plans to introduce a Bill that would impose long prison terms and big fines on employers who cause the death of a worker by breaching their duty of care and ‘knowing of, or being recklessly indifferent to, circumstances which created a substantial risk of serious harm’.
The maximum penalties in Franks’ draft legislation include 20 years imprisonment for an employer who is an individual and $1 million fine for corporations.
Business SA director of policy Rick Cairney said Franks’s proposal was unnecessary because the 2012 changes to the Work Health and Safety (WHS) legislation had addressed the issue of workplace deaths and substantially increased penalties.
Cairney said the 2012 amendments to the Work Health and Safety Act included maximum financial penalties that range from $300,000 to $3 million and five years imprisonment for reckless actions that expose a worker to serious injury or death.
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“Business SA believes workplace health and safety should be an important priority for any employer and in the introduction of the new WHS laws the penalties were significantly increased,” Cairney said.
“We do not believe the amendments proposed by Tammy Franks advance the issue further and, with only two years in operation, there is nothing to indicate that the penalties in the revised WHS laws are deficient.”
Franks said her Bill “seeks to capture a very small minority of employers who cruelly put their workers through unnecessary risk and would only apply in the event that an employee tragically dies and circumstances warrant this remedy”.
She said 185 workplace deaths occurred in 2014 of which 13 were in SA.
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“Not all would be captured by an industrial manslaughter charge – this proposed law is unashamedly a stick rather than a carrot – but a punitive approach is appropriate when a person has been killed due to negligence,” Franks said.
Franks attempted to insert her industrial manslaughter provisions into the 2012 amendments to the WHS legislation but her proposals were not accepted by either the Government or the Opposition at that time. It is likely Franks’s ambitions will meet the same response on this occasion.
On another legislative front, Business SA has opposed the State Government’s plans to introduce legislation that would retrospectively facilitate two potential prosecutions that were not instigated by WorkSafe SA within the two year statutory time limit.
Cairney said Business SA strongly opposed, in principle, any legislation that was retrospective because it undermined the fundamental rule of law that possible offences be dealt with by the law applying at the time.
“If you head down the retrospectivity path it means that no one can have any confidence that the law which applies today will still apply tomorrow, and that is not a basis for doing business or engaging in any other activity,” he said.
“If Parliament allows the Government to retrospectively change the WHS laws it will set an unacceptable precedent.
“Once such a precedent is set then the Government, or indeed any future government, may well seek to change any law retrospectively to ‘cover up’ a totally indefensible administrative failure by a regulator.
“And that is not justice”.
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