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.
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.
Insurer
We set and collect premiums specific to each Australian Government agency to meet our claims liability and claims administration costs.
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
Comcare was established under the Safety, Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 1988 (SRC Act). This legislation sets out the functions and powers of Comcare.
Comcare also has functions and responsibilities under the:
- Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (WHS Act)
- Asbestos-related Claims (Management of Commonwealth Liabilities) Act 2005, and
- Parliamentary Injury Compensation Scheme (PICS) established under the Parliamentary Resources Act 2017.
For more information, see About the Comcare scheme.
