NSW Labor is demanding the Premier sack the Treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, who today admitted the many failures of his workers compensation agency iCare.
\nIn an extraordinary 25 minute interview on ABC Radio Sydney, Mr Perrottet was repeatedly asked if he would resign after the agency\u2019s \u2018complete, systemic failure\u2019.
\nThe Treasurer said he would not stand down, but said \u201cthe buck stops with me.\u201d
\nNSW Labor Leader Jodi McKay said the Premier must make her Treasurer accountable and remove him immediately: \u201cAfter five weeks of denials and obfuscation, this morning the Treasurer finally admitted to his catastrophic failures of iCare.\u00a0 It\u2019s the first time he\u2019s admitted that he got it wrong and is to blame for the failures of his agency \u2013 the largest in NSW.
\n\u201cMr Perrottet said that \u2018in public life you make mistakes. You\u2019ve got to accept them, apologise and move on.\u2019 That\u2019s not good enough.\u00a0 Dominic Perrottet has let down hundreds of thousands of businesses and more than 3 million workers.
\n\u201cOur system of Government requires ministerial accountability.\u00a0 The Treasurer said the buck stops with him.\u00a0 He\u2019s right. He should be sacked.\u00a0 If this was a private business he wouldn\u2019t remain in the role.
\n\u201cDominic Perrottet\u2019s colleagues don\u2019t trust him and neither does the community.\u00a0 If the Treasurer can\u2019t be trusted to restore integrity at iCare, how can he be trusted to manage the economic recovery?\u201d
\nThe Shadow Minister for Finance and Small Business Daniel Mookhey said Dominic Perrottet should be sacked for his incompetent management of iCare.
\n\u201cNothing is going to change at iCare if the Treasurer is left in charge.\u00a0 If the Premier is serious about restoring confidence, it starts by removing the Treasurer and removing the Board of this organisation that has tanked the NSW workers compensation scheme.
\nUnder Dominic Perrottet’s stewardship:
\n\u2022 iCare underpaid 52,000 workers up to $80 million
\n\u2022 iCare overpaid dodgy doctors hundreds of millions of dollars in duplicate and fraudulent payments
\n\u2022 iCare paid for two secret political advisors in Dominic Perotett\u2019s personal office
\n\u2022 iCare in February tried to eject 17,500 workers from the workers compensation system to offset the scheme\u2019s mounting losses
\n\u2022 iCare sought to hike employer premiums by 4% and introduce a ‘gap fee’ for injured workers needing to see a doctor
\n\u2022 iCare is under investigation for paying $22 million to insurance brokers in breach of the law
\n\u2022 iCare\u2019s CEO resigned after it emerged that iCare awarded his wife a lucrative contract
\n\u2022 iCare\u2019s CEO and another top executive took an undisclosed sponsored trip to Las Vegas paid for by a multi-million contractor to the agency
\n\u2022 iCare\u2019s top executives took a 36 foreign trips in four years – 10 times more than SIRA, their regulator
\n\u2022 iCare faced an ICAC referral for handing an $11 million marketing contract to a company secretly owned by a top executive at the agency
\n\u2022 Treasury in September 2019 secretly cancelled an external investigation into probity and governance at iCare after the former CEO complained
\n\u2022 The State Insurance Regulatory Authority (SIRA) made referrals about iCare to the Independent Commission Against Corruption for further investigation
\n\u2022 A damning independent review found that in 46 percent of claims handled, iCare failed to follow the relevant law
\n\u2022 iCare organised with the Treasury a secret $4 billion bailout of the workers compensation fund for police, nurses, prison guards and teachers to stop it from collapsing
\n\u2022 The Treasurer was warned in May that iCare was set to lose another $850 million before COVID-19 hit the scheme even harder
\n\u2022 iCare racked up underwriting losses totalling $4.54 billion in the past three years
\n\u2022 iCare’s $3.9 billion surplus effectively disappeared, before COVID-19 affected investment returns
\nDespite this record Mr Perrotett told Parliament that iCare did a ‘superb’ job.
\nMs McKay and Mr Mookhey said the Premier can no longer ignore the Treasurer\u2019s massive failings and must remove him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NSW Labor is demanding the Premier sack the Treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, who today admitted the many failures of his workers compensation agency iCare. In an extraordinary 25 minute interview on ABC Radio Sydney, Mr Perrottet was repeatedly asked if he would resign after the agency\u2019s \u2018complete, systemic failure\u2019. The Treasurer said he would not stand … Continue reading “Buck stops with the Treasurer: Premier must sack Perrottet over icare catastrophe”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nswnews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.16news.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}