For an injury to be 'caused' by the client being under the influence of alcohol or a drug, there must be more than an incidental or minor causal contribution. The intoxication must be the sole or principal cause of the injury.
The issue of access to these medical documents and the employees statutory obligations to provide medical certification of injury with the claim form has already been dealt with in this Handbook at 6.5. However, for the sake of completeness of this present instruction, the following extracts from 6.5 are repeated here:
In those cases where smoking is identified as a causal factor by the claimant when submitting their claim, or if medical evidence suggests that a history of smoking contributed to the development of the claimed condition, Delegates should request that claimants complete the “Cigarette Smoking Questionnaire” found at CLIK 26.7.5 which has been approved for use specifically in the assessment of DR
It is unlikely that many claims for compensation now received for a 1971 Act injury will meet the requirements of S54(1) that the claim be made within six months commencing on the day of the injury. Accordingly it will usually be necessary to test whether the failure to make a claim in time did not prejudice the Commonwealth or 'resulted from the death, or absence from Australia, of a person, from ignorance, from a mistake or from any other reasonable cause'.
Note that the criteria for acceptance of accidental injuries suffered under the previous Acts, is essentially the same as that now current under the SRCA, i.e. 'arising out of or in the course of' employment. However, for acceptance of liability for diseases the criteria have some significant differences, i.e.:
Section 53(1) and (2) of the SRCA require an employee to give notice in writing of an injury or loss of property as soon as practicable after the employee becomes aware of the injury and provided that the Act does not apply in relation to the injury or loss if this requirement is not met.
Having established the date of the disease, the Delegate should look to apply the criteria used by the SRCA and its predecessors for determining liability to pay compensation for a disease.
All of the Acts take account of the nature of diseases, i.e. in that they may have multiple or complex causes. Thus the legislation requires only a contribution from employment for the whole matter to be compensable. However, the degree and nature of the contribution varies between the Acts.
Last amended: 12 April 2011
In practice this means that prior to the SRCA amendments wrought by the Military Compensation Act on 7 April 1994, neither the SRCA nor any of the previous Commonwealth worker's compensation Acts applied to injuries or diseases arising solely out of 'Operational Service'.
However, DRCA cases can seldom be accepted on the strength of an RMA SOP alone. To accept liability for a particular medical condition requires more than confirmation that the disease may be caused by the factors cited in the relevant SOP. A medical examination and opinion confirming or discounting employment factors as 'probably' causing the particular condition will generally be required. All of the available evidence must be considered. RMA SOPs can be an effective tool for quickly eliminating fanciful contentions or for elucidating other likely causes
Determination of liability to pay compensation under S14 of the SRCA means the primary decision as to whether the SRCA has relevance to the employee's injury, i.e. it is the formal concession or denial of the Commonwealth's responsibility to pay compensation of any kind. It is no mere formality. Nothing is payable before/unless liability has been accepted.
