NSW Premier Chris Minns and Treasurer Daniel Mookhey spent the morning in Manly today, 8 August, as part of a small business breakfast organised by the Manly Chamber.
While the Premier touched on his commitment to shifting Northern Beaches Hospital into public hands and confirmed the government’s $250 million investment in Mona Vale Road, the lion’s share of discussion during a Q&A with former Chamber President Charlotte Rimmer focused on controversial workers’ compensation insurance reforms. These reforms aim to reduce escalating premiums and the perceived overuse of psychosocial claims such as bullying, particularly by younger workers. Premiums have increased by more than 20%, and the sector had essentially become insolvent, he claimed.
The Premier made no apology for significant development enroute that would see the Northern Beaches landscape change significantly. Rather, he hinted at there being more to come across the state.
“We’ve got a long way to go when it comes to housing approvals, particularly for social housing, or even just the private housing market. We are so far behind, I’ll leave you with this statistic before we move on, but New South Wales produced over the last 10 years, six houses per 1000 people every 12 months. In Victoria, they do eight houses per 1,000 people every 12 months and in Queensland, it’s nine houses.”
“We’ve got a long way to go when it comes to housing approvals, particularly for social housing, or even just the private housing market. We are so far behind.”
“So notwithstanding is the fact that we’ve got the highest house prices, the highest rent, the highest increase in the house prices, the highest increase to rent, the biggest social pressure when it comes to young people leaving the state. Last year we lost 40,000 young people interstate other jurisdictions while also producing the lowest number of houses.”
You can read more about some of those new development policies here.
The Premier praised the former Government’s implementation of Metro transport and said his government planned on bringing in many more, stopping short of promising anything for the Northern Beaches.
“I think our challenge is to continue with those metros and also build housing so that people can live close to public transport and use the city as they want to see it grow,” he said.
“This is an incredible, incredible boom for the city. We want to capture some of that momentum, continue to drive it, see business growth and development, as well as economic opportunity and prosperity and the drivers of those two things will be housing for the next generation of young Australians and supporting small businesses.”
He briefly touched on local sore points.
“There’s a few things I’d like to speak about locally. We’re putting in 250 million for Mona Vale Road. We know that that’s a pinch point. We know that’s absolutely crucial for families and businesses on the Northern Beaches. We can speak a bit about Northern Beaches Hospital, We’ve made a decisive decision there. Something needed to change and we can’t sacrifice patient care and safety, but mainly, we want to hear from you and have an opportunity to speak to firms and understand business conditions to grab opportunities and make our state even better.”
While the Premier did invite questions from the audience, the format was instead a series of questions based on matters chamber members had emailed ahead of time.
Most questions centered on workers compensation reforms and local concern that the changes, while seeking major top line benefit, was adding more touch points and time from employers.
The Treasurer began, “In the last four years, the average psychosocial claim, so that is usually workplace conflict, a claim of bullying and harassment in the workplace, the average claim has gone from $125,000 to nearly $300,000. Thee has been exponential growth, we’ve seen a 90% increase in the number of people under 25 that are claiming it and I have heard cases over and over and over again of it employee being put on a performance management program and then the day after claiming a psychosocial injury in the workplace. This is just going to continue to happen unless we have reform, over and over and over again.”
The Premier added that Workers Compensation reform was a difficult decision for a Labor government to make it. “We’ve been criticised by unions for pursuing this reform. Because we have put a cap on the amount of money that those claiming a psychosocial claim or workplace conflict. Firstly, premiums will go up 8% for businesses in New South Wales on their workers. It doesn’t end there, though, without reform, next year that number will be 12%, and the year after that, it will be 12%, and the year after that, at least it will be 12%. So we are looking at a 36% increase in workers’ comp premiums that you cannot avoid over a three period unless the workers’ comp system in New South Wales is reformed.”
Charlotte Rimmer replied, “Thank you. I think we understand reform is needed. I think to get back to what we’re anxious about is how do we run our businesses with the decisions that you’ve made on the reform so far? So, for example, the extra cost to HR administration internally, the debate on how you actually assess what help is going to be given for each business… It feels like the reform has been made up here, but not necessarily considering those individual small businesses, because the overarching cost will be addressed, but the small businesses, some of them may not survive this.”
Current Chamber President Steve Carrodus addressed his concerns over the government’s decision to axe Business Connect, which offered free expert advice for small businesses and startups. The Business Connect program was launched by the NSW government in 2017 to help small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs start, run, and grow their ventures. Delivered by a network of independent providers, the program offered up to eight hours of free, tailored advice each financial year.
The Treasurer countered that if the opposition and others were willing to support the workers’ compensation reforms, they could put the $10 million dollar Business Connect program back on the table.
He added, “over the last six years, the government has had to tip between five and six billion dollars into the workers’ comp scheme, a scheme that should be funding itself. That’s money that we want to be putting into new metros and hospitals. We want to be putting it into schools and recruitment of frontline services. We want to be putting it into great initiatives like Business Connect. So it’s a Liberal Party came to us and said, You know what? We want to keep Business Connect. But in return, we want to common sense solution to workers comp, and that’ll be a good deal for us to work out, I think.”
The Premier later took a tour of Manly Pavilion after the event, where the meeting took place, as well as the new Espy bar now sitting across half of the former aquarium site.
He recalled a fond memory at the nearby Water Works, which has just completed its final season.
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