Safe-work basics are being ignored, causing most industrial deaths in Australia, parliamentary secretary Bill Shorten claims.
Shorten, a former Australian Workers' Union (AWU) boss, this week attacked the long-term failure to implement recommendations from inquiries into workplace disasters.
He said the failure to take basic steps such as putting guards on machinery was still killing people in Australia.
"After 60 years it's the same killers and causes," he said.
Shorten was speaking on a government bill to set up Safe Work Australia, a body to look at harmonising the current nine different sets of occupational health and safety and workers' compensation laws across the country's federal, state and territory sectors.
"We seem to have this Utopian assumption that each time people die and each time we have an inquiry that we will learn the lessons of the past and somehow safety will improve," Shorten said.
"Logically, if this is the case, all disasters should stop… clearly, this is not happening in Australia."
Shorten said AWU research into 12 disasters in Australia and overseas and subsequent inquiries showed both the disasters and the inquiries had much in common.
He said he could confidently predict that the next inquiry into a disaster would recommend better education and training; changes to equipment, standards and duties of specific personnel; and more government oversight, but would not recommend legal action against the company or its senior personnel.
Shorten said there needed to be penalties to ensure recommendations were put in place and maintained.
The opposition did not oppose the passage of the Safe Work Australia Bill and related bill through the lower house with the legislation now going to the Senate.
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