For all its absurdity, the widespread compulsory wearing of high-vis vests by workers performing even the most mundanely safe tasks — delivering mail, selling copies of the Big Issue, holding stop signs outside construction sites and, for politicians, conducting choreographed press conferences on factory floors — must have an upside.
It’s not unreasonable for the rest of us to expect that this new and almost ubiquitous obsession with safety (which ironically doesn’t apply beyond the shoreline at our beaches, but that’s another story) has led to a corresponding decrease in accidents at work, and therefore a similar decrease in workers’ compensation payments.
After all, we pay for those payouts through the goods and services we buy. Every employer in the nation pays compulsory insurance premiums of between 1 and 2 per cent of wages to cover workers’ compensation. These premiums increase the price of everything we buy at every stage of production and delivery. So by making workplaces safer and reducing insurance premiums, all these high-vis vests and other safety measures must also be making life cheaper for all of us, right?
Before I answer that, let’s apply the same curiosity to road safety. As new cars become infinitely safer with airbags, ABS and other compulsory bits of protective technology, and road rules become more complex and punitive, the compensation payouts to accident survivors should be steadily declining alongside our Compulsory Third Party insurance premiums, right?
Right?
Spoiler alert: they’re not.
According to data from the federal agency WorkSafe, workplaces are increasingly dangerous, not safe. The number of approved injury claims increased by 43 per cent to 146,700 in the eight years to June 2024. And in case you were thinking that this simply correlated with a larger workforce, the number of claims per 100,000 hours worked also increased, by a whopping 23 per cent to 6.8.
Total workers’ compensation payouts rose 16 per cent, to $7.2 billion, in the two years to June 2023. For comparison, $7.2 billion is the equivalent of about 15 fully equipped regional hospitals, or 8000 times what the Sydney Swans are paying new recruit Charlie Curnow per year to help them win an AFL flag some time between now and 2029.
That $7.2 billion figure is from two years ago. There are no national figures for the two years since then. Perhaps the public servants tasked with calculating them stabbed themselves in the eye with a pen or something. But at least one state — Queensland — has produced figures for 2023-24, which shows a massive 17 per cent increase on the previous year. So it’s fair to say that the increasing rate of workplace injuries is becoming an irreversible trend.
The same applies to road “safety”. In the two years post Covid, when you would expect a sudden surge in traffic accidents as people were allowed back on the roads, compensation payouts increased by only about 2.2 per cent a year. In the two years since then, however, payouts have increased by more than twice that rate.
So what gives? What happened in Australia in the past two years that, despite our neurotic obsession with safety, led to an alarming rise in compensation payouts?
The most likely answer, I’m sorry to say, is an influx of unscrupulous scammers from Third World shitholes.
An informant inside the insurance industry tells me that the majority of the people with the most dubious compensation claims for road and workplace injuries are, despite barely being able to speak English, suspiciously well informed about the intricacies of compensation laws, and adept at gaming the system. They do this most often by feigning back pain — which is inherently difficult to disprove — or by claiming even more intangible “mental health” injuries from workplace harassment.
Ordinary Australians are not averse to taking advantage of this latter category, but recent arrivals are still over-represented, partly because the system makes it especially easy for them. Claim you feel unsafe at work because one of your (white) colleagues called you racist names and you’ll be watching Bollywood classics in your new home cinema on full pay from now until next Diwali, no questions asked. only the most outrageous claims are investigated, and even then at a snails’ pace, so the incentives are alluringly high.
Before you call me racist, allow me to add that I don’t blame them. Many of our newly arrived subcontinental brothers and sisters were raised in a culture that considers trustworthiness not only a sign of weakness but also an invitation for exploitation and corruption.
So if you were raised in those conditions, and were then positively welcomed as an immigrant to a country like Australia, where faking an injury is the only skill necessary to scam a pile of other people’s cash, what would you do? It’s obvious, right?
It goes without saying that not all subcontinental immigrants think this way. Many arrive, work hard, and assimilate. But a large proportion never discard the cultural habits that continue to make India and its neighbour nations so corrupt and dysfunctional, which is the direction Australia is now heading in.
Victoria has raised the threshold for state-based workers’ compensation claims, and New South Wales is planning to do likewise. But this is only tinkering at the edges to try to save money. If they were not burdened with billions in debt, I doubt the government of either state could care less.
We wouldn’t even be in this mess, though, if we didn’t invite hordes of immigrants who see our compensation system as a weakness, and a lucrative invitation to pull off an easy scam. Why our federal politicians blithely allow this to happen is just too depressing to contemplate.
