YOU’VE HEARD the mantra again and again and again. And again, and again and again …
His eyes flash defiance as he passionately fights for the rights of Tasmania’s only truly protected species — Big End of Town Forestry — dressed up in the appealing blue singlet of The Worker
No forestry worker will lose his job, says Premier Lennon.
We’re here to protect the rights of forestry workers, thunders the Premier.
Well, that is, until they land on the scraphead and cling to the wreckage of their lives through the generous underpinning of Premier Lennon’s Workers’ Compensation Scheme.
The Saturday Mercury columnist Wayne Crawford found one such discarded worker last Saturday.
Wrote Crawford:
UNTIL almost four years ago, Steve Lowe and his partner of nearly a decade Kathy Ots were living comfortably and happily in a neat three-bedroom brick house at Sorell.
Lowe, a tree-feller for a small logging contractor operating out of Triabunna, was an active handyman and the couple had spent a lot of money and effort improving the first house they had bought together. They were an active pair and regularly went bushwalking, fishing and tenpin bowling; he liked a game of golf. They were, in short, living “fairly comfortably”.
However, after an accident at work which left Lowe with a spinal injury and damage to his heart, they have been reduced to what they both describe as “near poverty”.
They have lost their house, because they could not meet the mortgage payments, and now live in what Kathy Ots calls `”a tin humpy” in an isolated area behind New Norfolk.
At 49, Lowe is in constant pain and relies on drugs for relief — there’s no more bushwalking, fishing or golf; they’ve run up thousands of dollars in legal and medical bills, which they have no hope of paying; workers’ compensation has cut his income by about half and just to live they have to depend on the modest income Ots gets from a mail delivery contract.
Crawford wrote that a “after three years and nine months — with little retraining provided under his workers’ compensation cover — there’s not much prospect of a job, even though Lowe is keen to work if he can find something suitable. In fact, he’s taken four “work placements” — unpaid positions to gain experience in office work — in an effort to find something.
He has pestered politicians across the spectrum. Labor, Liberal and Green MPs have offered promises to investigate his concerns — but no useful support. Expressions of sympathy have come from such senior figures as the leaders of all three parties, including the late premier Jim Bacon, his successor Paul Lennon and Infrastructure Minister (responsible for workers’ compensation) Bryan Green — all three former union officials.
Yet sympathy and promises of “I’ll get back to you” have been as far as it’s gone.
Crawford says it rankled with the pair when one of those who’d offered sympathy but little else — former tourism minister Ken Bacon (also a former union official) — retired from Parliament citing illness as the reason, with the promise of $350,000 in superannuation after just six and a half years as an MP.
After 17 years working in the bush, Steve Lowe initially was offered as compensation for his life-changing accident a mere $40,000. He rejected that and negotiations are continuing — but it did seem a bit much like politicians teeing up one system for themselves and another for workers.
Crawford wrote that the the State Government’s much-vaunted workers’ compensation “no fault” scheme was supposed to do away with expensive, drawn-out legal arguments and ensure workers were promptly compensated for injury or illness caused by their employment, have adequate medical expenses and be trained for and found new work.
WorkCover Tasmania, the authority responsible for administering the scheme introduced by the Bacon government in 2001 and amended last year by the Lennon Government with the unanimous support of the opposition parties, boasts on its website the scheme’s main purposes are:
* To return injured or sick workers to the workforce as soon as possible through rehabilitation; and
* To ensure injured or sick workers are compensated for lost wages and medical and other expenses while unable to work and that their dependants are compensated for the loss of the primary wage earner.
That’s not the way it has worked out for Steve Lowe and Kathy Ots.
A tree-felling accident at Fortescue Bay on September 3, 2001 — which, according to Lowe’s statements to WorkCover, was not even his fault — left him with a crushed spinal cord, broken ribs and painful nerve damage under one arm. Worse, subsequent medical advice was that the accident had also caused scarring of heart tissue which has resulted in an irregular heartbeat. Lowe says he’s been told by his cardiologist he could “just drop dead at any time”.
Wrote Crawford:
Under the Workers Rehabilitation and Compensation Act, although he’s entitled to be paid 80 per cent of his previous wages while unable to work, this has been reduced by the number of hours which a doctor judges he should theoretically be able to continue to work. Lowe says that has left him being paid about 50 per cent of what he earned when he was working — and there is no obligation under the Act for WorkCover or the insurer to adequately retrain him and find him a new job to make up the difference in pay.So, unable to keep up the mortgage payments on their Sorell house on an income that had been halved, the couple were forced in October to sell. With what they had left after paying the bank, they had only enough to buy a block of land at Magra, with a storage shed divided into three rooms. “We’ve gone from a three-bedroom house to a three-room tin humpy,” says Kathy Ots. They plan to build a small house next to the tin shed but their future hangs entirely on the outcome of a lengthy battle with the insurers over long-term compensation for the accident — and particularly over Lowe’s need for retraining.
Because his injuries have severely limited physical activity, it would be impossible for him to return to the sort of work he’s done all his life — logging, shearing, cray fishing and truck driving. Even though it’s clear he needs retraining if he’s to go on working — probably in an office job — he says that in nearly four years he has been allowed only about $900 worth of TAFE and private tuition in computer work; he has also paid out of his own pocket for extra tuition.
Added to this is their anxiety over mounting bills for legal representation in dealing with WorkCover and the insurers and the cost of medical reports demanded for Workers Rehabilitation and Compensation Tribunal hearings.
Concludes Crawford:
Lowe says he owes more than $10,000 just in legal fees — and if that much had been spent on retraining him instead of on lawyers “I’d be over-educated by now”.
Contact Wayne Crawford at: [email protected]
A little history … From The Archive:
Mr Lennon has some explaining to do
Other stories of the forest:
A contractor’s lament
And, From the Archive:
A Cry From the Heart
Brett
June 9, 2005 at 14:19
My thoughts go out to Mr and Ls lowe, as I to have suffered Lennon’s workers’ comp scheme.
Two years ago I fell 6 metres through a missing section piece of walkway, breaking both my arms.
My employers, who were self insured, took on the case with very little knowledge of the workers comp legislation.
My employer and I found ourselves on a learning curve, that dramatically headed in the downward position, especially when a cost was involved.
I soughts legal help … in other words, it all went bad.
My attitude towards my employer after the fall was to say the least, very angry. I needed constant help.
Lennon’s scheme required me to sign the return to work program only two weeks after the fall.
I would like to see our hypocrite leader all busted up with his wife wiping his ass while some bustard tries to get him to sign an agreement in relation to his broken arms.
As you may imagine (only two weeks after my injury), my mood was to say the least very sour.
This was not a good start to the rehabilitation programme.
Anyway this went on and on and on, and put huge pressure on my family until my partner of 7 years at the time decided she had had enough and moved out with my two children; don’t blame her really for she did say that if I returned to that dangerous workplace she would leave.
So I eventually resigned before I was boiled in oil by my fellow workers and forfeited most of the so-called workers’ comp.
I will be moving to Victoria this Sunday to start a new job.
I have made a pledge to myself that I will never work as an employee in this state again.
And unfortunately I still have a deep set-in bitterness towards the employer and the so-called people’s party.
I still have residual damage and poor movement in both wrists but the mount of imparement calculated does not justify paying the lawyer to make a claim.
I am hoping it will go away …
No closure
X Tasmanian
Brett
Paul de Burgh-Day
June 13, 2005 at 04:47
You would not need to look to far to find that the harrowing accounts here are but the tip of a very large iceberg.
They show up the brutal cynicism of politicians of left and right. You might expect the Libs to be heartless bastards – fact is governments run by ex union bosses are just as bad.
After the mendacity of Howard in his nauseating deal with Lennon from the lead up to last year’s federal election, it was obvious to me that the forest workers who cheered the PM in Launceston had been played for suckers.
At all levels, the workers are the cannon fodder for the corporations. Governments of both right and left (what’s the bloody difference these days?) dance to the corporate tune.
Who do you vote for next time eh?