About Comcare
Comcare is the national authority for work health and safety, and workers’ compensation.
Purpose
Our purpose is to promote and enable safe and healthy work. Our purpose brings together our business and engages our clients and stakeholders around physical and psychological injury prevention, early intervention, injury recovery, return to work and work health and safety regulation.
Roles and responsibilities
We have several important core roles as a regulator, scheme manager, insurer and claims manager.
Regulator
We are the national work health and safety regulator with functions and powers for compliance and enforcement under the WHS Act and SRC Act.
Our Compliance and Enforcement Policy sets out our approach to our regulatory functions and powers, and guides our decisions on when and how we undertake specific activities.
Our compliance and enforcement activities in relation to both work health and safety and workplace rehabilitation combine proactive and reactive components, and are grouped into 4 main streams:
- providing information and advice
- making authorisation and approval decisions
- monitoring the extent of compliance in the jurisdiction
- investigating alleged or potential contraventions.
Scheme manager
We manage the Comcare workers’ compensation scheme which covers premium paying employers and self-insured licensees by:
- monitoring and maintaining legislation and developing policy and guidance
- providing advice to the Minister on the operation and effectiveness of the SRC Act and the administration of the WHS Act
- collating, curating and analysing ‘whole-of-scheme’ data, identifying trends to ensure we achieve sustainable and better practice arrangements
- approving and monitoring workplace rehabilitation providers who operate in the scheme
- recovering costs for the functions we and the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Commission (SRCC) perform under the SRC Act
- providing support through expert advice and services to the SRCC and the Seafarers Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Authority (Seacare Authority), and supporting the SRCC to manage and monitor self-insured licensees.
Insurer
We set and collect premiums specific to each Australian Government agency to meet our claims liability and claims administration costs.
Claims manager
As a claims manager, we:
- manage workers’ compensation claims for Australian Government agency employees under the SRC Act including delegated claims services arrangements
- manage liabilities for common-law asbestos related conditions under the Asbestos-related Claims (Management of Liabilities) Act 2005 (ARC Act) for the Australian Government
- administer the Parliamentary Injury Compensation Scheme which provides injury compensation coverage for Australian Government parliamentarians and the Prime Minister’s spouse.
Organisational structure
See Comcare's Organisational structure.
Corporate Plan
Our Corporate Plan (PDF, 2.8 MB) is our primary external planning document that provides Parliament, the public and our clients and stakeholders with an understanding of our purpose, roles and responsibilities, strategic priorities and key activities, operating context and how we will measure performance.
Governing legislation
The Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1988 (SRC Act) establishes Comcare. Comcare has functions and responsibilities under both the SRC Act and the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (WHS Act), which includes regulatory functions and compliance and enforcement powers.
The SRC Act also establishes the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Commission (SRCC), which has powers in relation to the management of self-insured licensees operating under the SRC Act, other than those attributed to Comcare.
The Seafarers Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1992 (Seafarers Act) establishes the Seafarers Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Authority (Seacare Authority), which is responsible for overseeing the Seacare scheme.
Comcare provides secretariat and other assistance to the SRCC and the Seacare Authority to perform their functions.
Comcare manages the Commonwealth’s asbestos-related claims under the Asbestos-related Claims (Management of Commonwealth Liabilities) Act 2005 (ARC Act). We also administer compensation claims for members of parliament and the Prime Minister’s spouse under the Parliamentary Injury Compensation Scheme (PICS), which was established by the Parliamentary Business Resources Act 2017.
The Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 (PGPA Act) establishes a system of governance and accountability for public resources. Under the PGPA Act, Comcare is a corporate Commonwealth entity and is:
- a body corporate
- governed by an accountable authority
- a separate legal personality from the Commonwealth
- subject to the Commonwealth Procurement Rules under section 30 of the PGPA Rule.
Figure 1: Responsibilities under the Commonwealth legislation
More information
For more information go to About the Comcare scheme.
