Today in Parliament, Abigail expressed vehement opposition to Labor's utterly cruel Workers Compensation Legislation Amendment Bill 2025, holding the line throughout a 16-hour Upper House debate and warning that it was a dangerous, deceitful and shamefully concealed attack on injured workers that would cause serious harm and even deaths. She successfully secured amendments that removed some of the Bill’s cruellest elements, resulting in a significantly stripped-back version.

Abigail said:

I express The Greens' utmost opposition to the Workers Compensation Legislation Amendment Bill 2025. If this piece of legislation is allowed to pass in its current form, it will result in people's deaths. It is as simple as that. It is a bill that should never have been proposed and should have been withdrawn in shame once its true nature was revealed. It is a bill that is based on lie upon lie, and misinformation and misapprehension. This Government should be ashamed to have produced it and to continue to support it. The Government knows that it is shameful. That is why it did its best to keep it secret and ram it through before the public and the Parliament had the opportunity to understand it. It is an appalling way for the Labor Government to conduct itself, but it is particularly shocking when it comes to legislation that will directly impact so many people's lives and the lives of their friends and families.

I will explain how we got to this point with this piece of legislation shortly and go through the proposed cuts and all of the lies, ignorance and callousness that has gone into it. First, I speak to the injured workers, many of whom I know are watching this debate. I am so sorry for what you have had to endure, and for how you have been failed by the system and by this Government. I am grateful for the opportunity to talk with and learn from so many of you. I am privileged for the chance to walk shoulder to shoulder with you on this long march for justice. Many of you have shared your stories of how a hostile system has prolonged your pain. You have spoken of the contradictions of a system that is supposed to bring you back to health but so often does the opposite, and of how its arbitrary rules, thresholds and cut-offs are strict and devastatingly abrupt for you, but how the rules for insurers and their conduct are more a suggestion at best.

This whole saga has been one of contradictions. How else can we explain the contradiction of a Labor government embarking on one of the most harsh, cruel and dangerous assaults against the rights of workers in recent memory—or perhaps ever. The contradiction of the strength, resilience and determination seen in so many injured workers who have told us how they have been broken by their injuries and the scheme that was supposed to support them, but yet they kept going. So many of them have told me how they have kept fighting and campaigning for a better, fairer system, not for themselves but so that nobody has to endure what they have experienced. Contradictions are what make people real: bloody, but unbowed; injured, but still strong—stronger even for the vulnerability and compassion to others they have maintained in solidarity with one another.

How else do we explain the hundreds of submissions received by the inquiry, many of them from people who have experienced an injury that isn't necessarily the type that is being targeted by this legislation, but who still see their struggle and their experience as one and the same as those being faced by others. The solidarity in the campaign for a better, fairer workers compensation regime in this State is so powerful, and it inspires and motivates me to maintain the fight in this place in solidarity with those workers. These workers have been injured but they are also brave and resilient.

Those experiences are what allow one another to exist. I put on the record my unending admiration and thanks to those injured workers who have contributed to my understanding, and the understanding of the Parliament, of how this scheme continues to fail workers. I have seen your work transform the views of politicians in this place. I have seen how your words have turned the numbers and letters on pages of a bill into the faces of workers and families—how a cut to an entitlement on paper is embodied into reckless and unjustified damage to real people. I also acknowledge and pay recognition to those injured workers for whom making a submission was just too much to bear, or who were not made aware of the changes, or who otherwise did not communicate their experiences. Your experiences are no less valid. Your needs are no less deserving. Thank you to all of you. I am so very sorry that this Government is attempting to do this to all of you.

Let us talk about how we got here. How far should we go back? Maybe we should start in 2012. In 2012, under the O'Farrell Government, a dramatic and sweeping set of cuts to workers compensation entitlements were enacted. That legislation inserted sections 39 and 59A into the Act, which for the first time imposed an arbitrary cut‑off for entitlements for medical and weekly payments based on an assessment of permanent impairment. Prior to that, workers were entitled to compensation based on their capacity to work. Those changes were condemned by the then Labor Opposition as dangerous and cruel. The now Treasurer, who is the one inexplicably driving the proposed brutal and devastating cuts, was not yet elected to Parliament at that time, but many of those who are enabling this bill's passage were. On 20 June 2012, the now Minister for Industrial Relations and Work, Health and Safety, the Hon. Sophie Cotsis—who ostensibly has responsibility for the workers compensation scheme, but who the whole Parliament knows has been shoved aside by the Treasurer in terms of this bill—had this to say about those 2012 cuts:

I vehemently oppose this deplorable legislation and I urge members who are compassionate—and those few members on the Government side with a heart—to vote down this despicable bill. Every member of this Government will wear this disgraceful piece of legislation around their neck. In time, it will become lead in their saddlebags. In the dead of night, in the wee hours of this morning, the O'Farrell Government is crushing workers and their families, and this will last for years and years.

What did the now Attorney General, Mr Michael Daley, have to say in 2012? He said:

We must remember the philosophy that underpins the workers compensation scheme as we discuss these legislative amendments. That is that, if one is injured at work and cannot work, one should be compensated for as long as one cannot work; and that compensation should include payment of one's medical treatments and medical bills for as long as one cannot work. The philosophy includes that sometimes negligent employers should be required to contribute their fair share to that payment of compensation so that the burden does not fall on taxpayers. Ironically, these amendments will put a greater impost on the taxpayers of New South Wales. This Government—unfortunately, successfully at times—lives by the mantra that if one repeats a lie often enough it becomes the truth.

He went on to say:

During the committee hearing I asked Michael Gliksman, Vice President of the Australian Medical Association, and Peter John Burke, a medical‑surgical specialist representing the Australian Medical Association and the Australian Association of Surgeons delegate to the Medico Legal Committee, the Law Society of New South Wales, what their opinion was of increasing the threshold to 30 per cent. I asked them how many would make it through the 30 per cent threshold …

Dr Gliksman replied:

Very few. In my experience of those I see who I feel have a genuine work‑related injury less than one in 100 people would get to the 30 per cent threshold. In my opinion it would shut the system down as a means of support.

Dr Burke replied:

I agree with that. It is one in 100. It would severely damage the average person who is genuinely injured at work.

The now Attorney General went on to say:

I asked Roshana May and Timothy Concannon, members of the Injury Compensation Committee of the Law Society of New South Wales, and Justin Dowd, President of the Law Society of New South Wales, the same question: What would happen if the 30 per cent impairment level suggested in the issues paper were imposed? Mr Concannon replied:

In my experiences of working under the scheme, I have had two or maybe three workers, amongst thousands of workers I have acted for over that period, who would satisfy that requirement.

That was back in 2012. What about the now Leader of the Government in the Legislative Council, Minister Penny Sharpe? In 2012 she said this:

All governments have choices and every government must take responsibility for the choices it makes. The bills before the House tonight demonstrate that the O'Farrell Government has made a deliberate choice to undermine support for and the workplace rights of workers who find themselves in the terrible position of being injured as a result of simply doing their job. The choices made by this Government have nothing to do with supporting workers back to work and everything to do with reducing premiums for employers. It has taken a lazy approach. It has taken an ideological approach that makes injured workers bear the brunt of its decision to reduce costs in the scheme without making any other reforms.

Behind every statistic is a real person who has been injured on the job and who is struggling to get back to work. More than that, every statistic is a person with a family who faces losing medical and financial support, their home and even their family if this bill is passed.

What was the effect of those terrible cuts? I could tell you, but instead let us hear from the Treasurer himself. He had this to say in 2018:

If the Government wants to correct its own system, it needs to look at section 39 of the Workplace Injury Management and Workers Compensation Act 1998, which is an arbitrary cut‑off from benefits of workers who have been assessed to be injured—substantially and permanently impaired—to the point where they are entitled to benefit.

… In the first year of operation of section 39, the first cohort of workers who lost benefits numbered 5,000 in the first year, with an additional 4,000 forecast. From memory, the forecast from then on is approximately 2,000 every year. Already that means that by the end of this year we are looking at close to 10,000 workers who previously had benefits cut off. The Labor Opposition has been pursuing through the Standing Committee on Law and Justice and the budget estimates processes information from SIRA about precisely what has been happening to those workers. Less than a month ago the Opposition heard that in the first year of operation SIRA received 13 reports of workers among that cohort being at risk of self‑harm. Six of the workers in that cohort are now deceased, with the Coroner now inquiring into those deaths.

He continued:

What other policy have we ever implemented that we know leads to the risk of self‑harm and we in this Parliament have refused to do anything about it? The other odious aspect of section 39 is that the Government knows that the overwhelming majority of the people who lose benefits under section 39 are destined for Centrelink benefits. That is what is happening, and the Government knows that because the SIRA website provides advice to workers about how to go about getting Centrelink benefits.

The now Treasurer then asked:

What other policy has any government ever applied to deliberately transfer people onto welfare payments? That is what the effect of this policy has been. Right now the Government is saying that the taxpayers ought to pick up the slack for the terminated benefits through the welfare system as opposed to employers, where the injury was sustained, through the premiums that were collected. That is what is happening with section 39 and that is not by accident. That is the deliberate policy of the Government to facilitate that transfer.

He continued:

… as a basic matter of justice, people who are injured and are unable to return to work ought not be condemned to a life lived in poverty as a result of a deliberate decision of the Parliament to maintain a provision such as this. The second reason is that, in the absence of this amendment passing, we see the forced transfer of injured workers from the workers compensation system to the Disability Support Pension or the Newstart Allowance. The forced transfer of workers away from a compensation system to a welfare system, which we are told no party supports, will continue.

Well, the Treasurer was absolutely right. Someone else who was right was my remarkably prescient colleague, and a person who has been a champion of injured workers and their rights for years, the now Senator David Shoebridge. What David said then, when the Hon. Daniel Mookhey was moving his amendment to delete section 39, was this:

Since 2012 The Greens have gone on record about the grossly unfair amendments that savaged workers' benefits. We have noted on record that we will continue to support every measure to reinstate those benefits. To that extent, I note the Opposition's amendments that will be considered in Committee. I say this: If there is a change of government after the March election, The Greens will move those exact amendments to the workers compensation bill in the first session of Parliament. We hope the goodwill that we see from the Labor Party in opposition is reflected in legislative responses when it is in government. In times past that has not been the case.

He saw what none of us wanted to believe: That Labor would come to power in this State on the backs of working‑class people, claiming to represent their interests, and after taking power it would turn its backs on them. It is even worse than he predicted. He was predicting that a Labor government might not keep its word and repeal sections 39 and 59A. But what is happening here is the Labor Party doubling down on the cruelty it knows to be devastating working people in this State as we speak, and making it so much worse.

In 2021, the Hon. Robert McDougall, QC, presented his report on his independent review of icare and the State Insurance and Care Governance Act 2015 [McDougall review]. That investigation came about through the joint work of a number of members of this place, including my colleague David Shoebridge. But we all know that the man who centred himself as the main protagonist of that campaign was the Hon. Daniel Mookhey—the man who would be Treasurer. Looking back on that period of history, we can already see the warning signs. The Treasurer claims he was fighting for injured workers by exposing the failures of icare, its waste and conflicts of interest. But what did he actually investigate? What did he really do other than accuse icare of spending too much money? It was just a training ground where the Treasurer was sharpening his red pen, preparing himself to draw it across the lives and livelihoods of thousands or tens of thousands of seriously injured workers and their families.

The McDougall review of icare identified that the use of a whole person impairment threshold for determining access to ongoing weekly and medical payments, as inserted by the 2012 changes, was an inappropriate tool. McDougall wrote:

The use of the concept of WPI as the test for entitlement to weekly and medical benefits does not reflect the policy objective of ensuring that the most injured workers should receive appropriate support. That policy would be better served by a test that assessed the severity of an injury by reference to the treatment and support necessary to manage its consequences, as well as its impact on the worker's capacity for work.

WPI assessments may well be suitable for their original purpose – assessing lump sum compensation for the non-economic loss caused by the injury. I received no submission to the contrary. But those assessments measure neither the capacity to work nor the necessity of medical treatment. The use of a WPI assessment for those purposes creates a significant risk that workers may be left uncompensated for a real and severe loss of capacity to work, or substantial medical expense, arising from a workplace injury.

In 2022 when the Standing Committee on Law and Justice commenced its statutory inquiry into the workers compensation scheme in New South Wales, the focus of that inquiry was on psychological injuries. But, due to the timing of the election, it was unable to report. Really, we already knew what the major problems were. The Labor Party certainly claimed to know. The now Treasurer claimed to know.

In 2022, Monash University published a report commissioned by the State Insurance Regulatory Authority entitled Receipt of Centrelink Payments After Long‑Duration Workers' Compensation Claims. The report looked directly at the impact on people who had their income support payments terminated under section 39. It compared that against workers who had received workers compensation income support payments for at least two years but their claims stopped independently of the section 39 amendments. It found that there was a significant transition to Centrelink payments after workers compensation and this effect was largest for that section 39 group. Transition to Centrelink payments was 25 times more likely for those whose payments were terminated under section 39 because they had no capacity to work. It further found:

There is some evidence that injured workers who go on to receive Centrelink payments report higher levels of financial distress than both those who have returned to work and those continuing to receive workers' compensation benefits. Financial stress has been associated with negative health, particularly mental health consequences, as well as lower likelihood of returning to paid employment.

Cutting off workers with no capacity to work as a result of a workplace injury condemns them to a life of poverty, poor health outcomes and further degrades their ability to rejoin the workforce. It is an appalling piece of public policy, as the Treasurer well knows. Members may remember that he said as much in 2018. He said:

What other policy have we ever implemented that we know leads to the risk of self-harm and we in this Parliament have refused to do anything about it? The other odious aspect of section 39 is that the Government knows that the overwhelming majority of the people who lose benefits under section 39 are destined for Centrelink benefits. … Right now the Government is saying that the taxpayers ought to pick up the slack for the terminated benefits through the welfare system as opposed to employers, where the injury was sustained, through the premiums that were collected. That is what is happening with section 39 and that is not by accident. That is the deliberate policy of the Government to facilitate that transfer.

What we know, and what everyone said would happen, has come to pass, borne out in the evidence. Following the passage of section 39, we saw in the first year of effect 375 injured workers being identified as vulnerable to self‑harm, 13 instances of confirmed self‑harm and six deaths of workers on workers compensation being referred to the Coroner. By 2020, when the majority of workers impacted by the changes were starting to feel the effect, there were 115 incidents of self‑harm. In the 2024 calendar year, 1,025 injured workers had their weekly payments terminated and 2,013 injured workers had their medical entitlements terminated, due to these arbitrarily imposed legislative timelines.

From 2020 to May 2024, the State Insurance Regulatory Authority [SIRA] recorded 59 instances of suicides by injured workers receiving workers compensation support. Icare recorded a further 33 attempted suicides during this period and 170 incidents of self-harm for New South Wales Government workers on workers compensation. SIRA has confirmed that the incidence of suicide remains under‑reported. In response to questioning over the Government's planned legislation to cut entitlements further, for psychologically injured workers in particular, icare confirmed it had done no modelling or calculations as to the number of suicides or self‑harm incidents that might result from the proposed legislation.

Two months after that evidence was given to Parliament, SIRA commissioned new research into suicide in the workers compensation scheme, which is due to be reported back mid‑next year—just before the predictable wave of self‑harm incidents would likely occur if the Government's proposed cuts to support for psychologically injured workers in this bill are allowed to pass. Despite calls from SIRA itself to reform the workers compensation scheme to become person centred, the research statement of work expressly prohibits researchers speaking to anyone "who has lived experience of an attempted or actual suicide". The Treasurer's own chief of staff, Michael Buckland, is the former CEO of the McKell Institute and was the lead author of a McKell Institute report into workers compensation. That report found that 87 per cent of workers found it difficult to meet the cost of living, 72 per cent lost employment during their claim, 70 per cent of workers rated their experience with icare at one out of 10, and 78 per cent of workers experienced suicidal ideation.

During the campaign for the 2023 New South Wales election, the Injured Workers Campaign Network circulated and campaigned around a pledge that spelt out some of the major issues being faced by injured workers and a framework for reform. Its mission statement is to reform the workers compensation and rehabilitation system in New South Wales in the interests of injured workers with a view to ensuring dignity, respect and fairness. The pledge, grounded in that clear vision for a better system, made five asks. It asked candidates and members of Parliament to pledge to create a workers compensation and rehabilitation system that returns injured workers to work when it is safe to do so; has doctor‑led care with timely and appropriate medical treatment; protects injured workers from unfair terminations; ensures polite, timely and accurate responses to all enquiries and requests; and provides ongoing medical and financial support for workers who are unable to return to work by removing section 39 and section 59A of the Workers Compensation Act 1987.

Sections 39 and 59A are very relevant to the debate we will have today because not only are we not removing sections 39 and 59A, as promised, we are actually doubling down on the problem, raising the thresholds that have been identified as being so cruel and so dangerous and so unfair. This clear and compelling vision for a workers compensation system that works for injured workers and employers alike made for a powerful campaigning tool. It was so powerful that they got around 80 signatures across Labor, The Greens and crossbench members.

The signatories for that pledge were across the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council. From the Legislative Assembly, the signatories were my three colleagues—Jenny Leong, the member for Newtown; Kobi Shetty, the member for Balmain; and Tamara Smith, the member for Ballina—and Independent members Alex Greenwich, the member for Sydney; Roy Butler, the member for Barwon; Phil Donato, the member for Orange; Joe McGirr, the member for Wagga Wagga; Greg Piper, the member for Lake Macquarie; Jacqui Scruby, the member for Pittwater; Judy Hannan, the member for Wollondilly; Michael Regan, the member for Wakehurst; and 42 other Labor members of the lower House.

What about those of us in this Chamber? My Greens colleagues and I signed the pledge, understanding it and committing to it with all of our hearts, as did the Hon. Emma Hurst from the Animal Justice Party; the Hon. Jeremy Buckingham from the Legalise Cannabis Party; and the Hon. Mark Banasiak and the Hon. Robert Borsak from the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party. From the Labor Party, the Hon. Mark Buttigieg, the Hon. Anthony D'Adam, the Hon. Greg Donnelly, the Hon. John Graham, the Hon. Courtney Houssos, the Hon. Rose Jackson, the Hon. Dr Sarah Kaine, the Hon. Stephen Lawrence, the Hon. Daniel Mookhey, the Hon. Tara Moriarty, the Hon. Peter Primrose and the Hon. Penny Sharpe all signed that pledge and made that promise to injured workers before they campaigned for them in the 2023 election.

Of that number are 19 of 22 current Labor Ministers, including the Treasurer; the Minister for Industrial Relations, and Minister for Work Health and Safety, and the Minister responsible for the State Insurance Regulatory Authority. How many of those people have broken that promise? All of the Labor members in the lower House; the member for Sydney and a bunch of other Independents who also signed it—too many. How can anyone ever trust this Labor Government, or any Labor government, ever again, if it can be so willing to so callously shred their promises at the first available moment?

The 2023 law and justice committee's report into the workers compensation scheme had a particular focus on psychological injuries, incorporating the evidence from the truncated 2022 inquiry. It considered how best psychological injury claims should be handled, how claims management was failing injured workers, and how the system should be reformed. It made a raft of recommendations, including increasing access to commutations, reconsidering the use of the psychological impairment rating scale and setting the whole person impairment thresholds at a consistent threshold, regardless of whether the injury is physical or psychological in nature, recognising that a difference between thresholds for different injury classes is a stigmatising and ideologically unjustifiable disparity. The report was handed down once the Labor Government had come to power in March 2024. It supported all of those recommendations, including those about the psychological impairment rating scale, and commented that it was currently being reviewed by SIRA. This bill once again does the opposite of that commitment and goes against all the recommendations the Government committed to in March 2024. That is yet another broken promise.

The New South Wales Labor Government's proposed cuts to workers compensation entitlements for workers with serious psychological injuries will have genuinely devastating effects on thousands of injured workers across this State. We saw the heartbreaking and life-shattering impacts last time similar cuts were introduced. The proposed cuts are even more targeted towards people already more vulnerable due to the nature of their injury, and so the impact can be expected to be even more acute and devastating. I cannot emphasise enough how dangerous this Government's proposed cuts are. They will rip away support from those who need it the most.

The Government and the business lobby are desperate to cut off workers who have been injured as a result of their work just to save a few dollars in the short term, rather than doing the hard work of reforming a system in which poor claims management, administrative inefficiencies and faulty premium calculation methodologies are driving bad outcomes for injured workers and employers alike. This Government is proposing the blunt and lazy option of eliminating nearly an entire class of injured workers from support when they need it the most. The Government's plan to cut costs will leave injured workers and their families paying the price.

There are further similarities between this legislation and that that passed in 2012. Now, as then, the justification for the cuts is that the schemes are in financial deficit. In 2012 the deficit was $4.1 billion. History has shown that, while delivering a short‑term improvement to the scheme's financial position, the assumed benefits of the 2012 cuts were overstated and the effects short-lived. The 2012 package of cuts saw return to work rates return to pre-reform levels within two years, with any financial benefits totally subsumed soon after, leaving horrific and tragic outcomes for injured workers in its wake. We must learn from the mistakes of the past. The evidence, the historical experience and the Government's own modelling have proven that the only way to deliver real and sustainable cost savings to the scheme is by improving the return to work rates for injured workers. Without that structural improvement, any savings through artificially increasing exits from the scheme by legislating away support will be transient at best.

The Government's justification for the legislation is without foundation, based on outrageous modelling assumptions with no grounding in reality, and focused solely on appeasing ratings agencies and artificially inflating the budget. It is true that premiums have risen but that is not because of the volume of claims. It is because those claims are being handled in an appalling way, lining the pockets of massive insurance companies while delivering bad outcomes for workers and employers alike. We received evidence that the biggest businesses have the worst rate of injuries, particularly psychological. Large employers employ 47 per cent of the workforce and make up 58 per cent of new claims, yet their claims cost only 49 per cent of the total cost of claims. Meanwhile, small and micro employers, employing 25 per cent of the workforce, were responsible for only 15 per cent of new claims. However, those claims represent 27 per cent of the total claims cost. That is evidence that it is not the volume of claims that causes financial difficulties to the scheme but, rather, how the claims are handled.

Meanwhile, claims service provider remuneration continues to grow, costing the Nominal Insurer hundreds of millions of dollars each year despite declining return to work rates. The truth is that icare's return to work rates are the lowest in the system. Specialised and self insurers operate under the same legislation as icare, which is responsible for the Nominal Insurer and the Treasury Managed Fund [TMF]. In fact, just about all the self and specialised insurers use the same insurance companies to manage their workers compensation claims as icare does. But icare schemes are performing the worst, because icare has done a shocking job holding those insurance companies to account for their shoddy outcomes and SIRA has done such a woeful job as an insurance regulator.

It is not entirely SIRA's fault, though. Bizarre provisions in the legislation, which we will seek to amend later, prevent icare or the scheme agents from being held to account. Insurance companies consistently breach their legislative obligations when it comes to timely decisions about liability and medical assistance, leaving businesses and workers in a state of limbo. Delays in liability decisions drive down return to work rates for psychological injuries by almost 60 per cent. According to SIRA, psychological injury claimants who receive their first payments within two months of making a claim have a 24 per cent higher return to work rate and end up costing the scheme almost 20 times less than those who do not. Under-reporting of wages, resulting in underpayment of premiums, is rife across the scheme, which increases premiums for employers who are doing the right thing. A recent SIRA report found:

Under insurance within the NI's portfolio poses a material risk to the workers compensation scheme. Employer compliance in providing the NI with a declaration of actual wages for the calculation of the premium has declined over the past 5 years, resulting in possible underpayments of $60 million in outstanding premium.

Further, the NI's wage audit program in the 2024 financial year identified $674 million in under declared wages across 1000 employers (0.29% of total policies), resulting in additional premium payable of $24.5 million. 75% of the employers audited were under insured with the main cause being failure to submit an actual wage declaration.

Those are the sorts of things the Government should be cracking down on. Instead, it has gone for the laziest, easiest and cruellest solution. It does not want to do the hard work; it just wants to legislate away the rights and entitlements of thousands of seriously injured workers. It is shameful, and the Government knows it is shameful. That is why it has spent so much time and effort keeping it secret and denying anything was happening. Then, when we forced it into the public, it lied about the truth of what it was proposing to do and lied about its impacts.

The process surrounding this legislation has been a farce. The Premier and the Treasurer have perpetuated appalling culture war tropes through leaks to the media and coordination with the gambling lobby to put out nonsense stories of injured workers supposedly rorting entitlements. The greatest farce is that it is the Treasurer pushing the cuts himself. He has no legislative basis for doing so. He actually has no legislative role here. The mere fact of his being the one in charge of driving these gross, cruel and dangerous cuts is proof positive that the entire purpose of this assault on the rights of workers is to make his budget balance sheet look a little better. Time and again the Treasurer has gotten the basic facts about what he is intending to do completely and catastrophically wrong.

It started with McDougall review, in which the Hon. Robert McDougall, KC, directly called out the Treasurer for calling TMF contributions bailouts—for everyone else, they are called premiums. McDougall savaged that characterisation as misleading and a gross misapprehension of how a scheme like the TMF works. Unperturbed, the Treasurer has persisted in using the word bailout, a description that exists only in his own mind. It is called paying your bills, Treasurer. It is called being responsible and accountable. The outrageous fearmongering that has gone on around premiums is also shameful. The Government has admitted that the scheme is already more than half a billion dollars better off than it thought, and said it was and would be, when it embarked on this appalling course of action. That is more than the equivalent of a 12 per cent increase to premiums and, after having already raised premiums by around 8 per cent last year, there is no need for an increase to premiums this year.

This legislation could have been done properly. It is shameful. The Government claimed it was about premiums, but it was always about its budget balance sheet. What has been so shameful is the Treasurer's response to emails he received, once his plans became clear, from injured workers asking him why he was doing what he was doing. His response to those emails was "I have forwarded this email to the Minister for Industrial Relations, and Minister for Work Health and Safety as the responsible Minister." If he was so proud of what he was doing and thought it was the right thing to do, why would he not take responsibility for his actions and respond to those injured workers directly?

There is so much to say about this legislation, and so much has been already said. It undermines "the Australian value of a fair go". It cuts "the entitlements and protections that New South Wales workers rely on if they are killed or injured because of their job". It undermines "the basic protections that three million New South Wales workers rely on every day". It has:

been introduced contrary to every expectation that the people of New South Wales have about how their democracy should work. These bills are motivated by the … Government's ideological agenda and by its craven subservience to special interests. This legislation has been introduced after a shameful process when the Government decided that it would introduce them without any election mandate or any consultation with the community.

…

It is always the people who are least able to afford it who are made to pay for the … Government's so-called reforms.

The bill is "heavy-handed", it lacks "any imagination" and has "not been subjected to good policy analysis". Sorry, I was quoting the Minister for Industrial Relations, and Minister for Work Health and Safety again. It is funny how history repeats itself. It is just that sometimes it is wearing a different coloured shirt. I hate this bill. It is evil. It is loathsome. It is dangerous. I am genuinely scared of what it will mean for seriously injured workers in this State if it is passed. It is craven politics. The Government has been dishing out deals left, right and centre trying to shore up support for it. That is how desperate it is for it to pass—just about anything and everything is on the table. How can we trust people like that?

Processes like that are corrosive to politics and public trust. How could the public not feel that its trust has been broken and its faith in political actors has been anything other than ruptured when a government makes a pledge and then breaks it, and when a Labor government brutally turns its back on injured workers to side with their bosses? There may be a few minor improvements to the status quo within the legislation, but they are so far outweighed by the enormity of the awfulness of what it tries to achieve that they barely rate a mention. Beyond the threshold changes, the bill seeks to treat psychological injuries differently to physical injuries in numerous ways, not in terms of treatment but whether the Treasurer thinks they count as real or not, and whether people deserve any help to recover.

The main culprit is what will be called the relevant events. Under the proposed legislation, a psychological injury will only be compensable if it occurs as a result of a so-called relevant event. That may seem innocuous but it in fact turns the existing operation of the workers compensation scheme entirely on its head. Until now, the legislation had no definition of physical or psychological injury. It had never presented an issue before. All that was required was for workers to demonstrate that they had received an injury verified by a doctor or psychiatrist, that they could demonstrate that the injury was received in the course of or arising from their employment, and that the employment was a substantial contributing factor to the injury. That works and has worked for a very long time. The amendments now restrict compensable injuries to a limited range of events to bar claims by workers whose injuries, regardless of whether or not they were suffered in the course of employment, do not fall within that limited range.

There will be many people who suffer a genuine psychological injury in the course of their employment who will no longer have access to support as a result of that approach, and it does not even address the Government's ridiculous culture war arguments. The bill proposes to restrict access to legal funding for injured workers. It is appalling to not only rip away entitlements and make them harder to get in the first place, but also to pull up the ladder and force those workers to try to navigate this arcane and complex system on their own or pay for legal advice out of their own pocket, especially when they cannot work because they are injured. That is a special kind of sick and twisted. I could go on, and I will have more to say in the Committee of the Whole.

I express my intense gratitude and appreciation to everyone who I have been proud to work alongside, lean upon and learn from as we struggled to achieve a better outcome for injured workers in opposition to this legislation. There are genuinely so many I people that I cannot name them all, but I particularly thank all of the injured workers and their families I have spoken with this year, especially Matt and Sarah U'Brien. I thank Roshana May, Shane Butcher, Sherri Hayward and Craig Tanner. Their wisdom, insights and deep expertise have been instrumental in my own understanding of the legislation and the operation of the system. I also thank Chris McCann for his willingness to give such valuable evidence in the parliamentary committee inquiry. I thank Unions NSW secretary Mark Morey and the team for their campaigning and constant principled support of the rights of injured workers.

It is a shame that we are now stuck with a Labor Party in name only. Cuts that leave injured workers with serious mental health conditions without access to required supports carries a significant risk of self-harm and death by suicide. To implement those cuts would be unconscionable. There is a better way. We all agree that reform of our workers compensation system is necessary, but I do not believe that members can in good conscience pass legislation that would raise whole person impairment thresholds in such a way, particularly when there are so many savings available before that point. The Greens oppose the bill in no uncertain terms and call on all members with conscience and heart to oppose the bill.

The debate went on until 5:30am the following morning, with Abigail moving over 60 amendments to the bill which were predominantly shut down by Labor,  however she successfully secured 6.

Read the debate in Hansard here

13 November 2025