WHERE THE ACT PINCHES

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 154, 30 June 1926, Page 9

WHERE THE ACT PINCHES

OUTCRY IN NEW SOUTH WALES,

(From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, 24th June.

The outcry in the Press and on the part of the business commmiHy and t'e underwriters against the Workers' Compensation Act suggests rather the old story of locking the stable door after tho horse is out. "While the Opporition was fighting the measure in P rliament little or nothing was heard about it outside. The Opposition, in its ; tack, had to play a lone hand. Now, however, that the Act is right on the point of coming into law there is a wild outcry. It is too late. Tho Government is adamant. The phase of the Act which is being most bitterly attacked is that relating to compensation for sickness which is contracted during employment, and to which employment is a contriouting factor. The gravamen of +he charge against the Act in this respect is that workers' compensation for injury should be confined '.■> injury which they are liable as workers, not to injury to which they are liable in common with the rest of the, community. As the Act stands, t co a man's health becomes belo - par, employment may be said to be a contributing factor to almost any disease wJiieh he may contract. Opponents of the Act regard it simply as national insurance under the guise of workers' compensation, with this distinction, that industry, instead of the State, will be burdened with it. The underwriters are sorely perplexed. They feel that, until the Commission gets to work and puts its own construction upon some of the present obscuro provisions of the Act, they arc very much in the position of a man who is trying to sell a commodity when he does'not kno-., exactly what it is going to cost him.v In short, they do not know what their rir'-.s are likely to be.