Kedgley Sue: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20268] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 I shall give a brief speech to introduce two amendments the Green Party has tabled. As we said in our second reading speech in general we support this bill and we are very pleased with its provisions. There are just two issues that we would like to see amended. 
We have an amendment to section 32(2)(c) in clause 13 which at present excludes “personal injury that is solely attributable to a resource allocation decision:” from the definition of “treatment injury” and therefore from cover and compensation under the Act. Our amendment will allow an injury caused by failure to treat a person for whatever reason—including the lack of a resource to treat the person—to be considered as a treatment injury and be covered by accident compensation. We believe that injury caused by the failure to treat a person for whatever reason should be considered as a treatment injury and be covered by the scheme. We think it is unfair and indeed inequitable that someone who develops an injury because he or she has not been treated properly by a medical professional is covered by the bill but someone who becomes ill because his or her treatment has been delayed because of resource shortages is not. That seems to us to be unfair. 
To give an example of what that could mean a person who developed cancer because of treatment delays caused by the failure to diagnose a primary cancer would be covered under the bill but a patient who developed cancer because appropriate treatment was unavailable due to a shortage for example of radiation therapists would not be covered. Similarly a person who became ill in an isolated rural area and developed serious complications may have accident compensation cover if the air ambulance was not able to locate that person. However if the complications developed solely because of delays in despatching an air ambulance because none were available then that person would be denied that cover. That seems to us to be unfair and inequitable. Because we are making progress in this legislation in making medical misadventure claims fair and able to be accessed by all we want to see that particular injustice also eliminated from the bill. 
We have another amendment a new clause 13A that addresses the discrepancies in the bill relating to lump-sum compensation. Under the current principal Act claimants who have cover for mental injury for work-related gradual process disease or infection injury or for medical misadventure injury are excluded from lump-sum compensation eligibility if the last causative event—as it is called—for their injury occurred before 1 April 2002 even if their date of injury is after 1 April 2002. That excludes applicants who have injuries with significant latency periods from eligibility for lump-sum compensation. Our amendment seeks to provide consistency and fairness to the lump-sum eligibility provisions so that all claimants whose date of injury is on or after 1 April 2002 are eligible to receive lump-sum compensation provided that they meet the impairment threshold set out in the principal Act. 
Frankly we think it is unfair that anyone is excluded simply because his or her injury happened before a particular and indeed arbitrary date. Anyone who was injured before 2002 is excluded under this bill. That seems to us to be utterly unfair. But that is a minor amendment which simply clarifies the situation for people who suffered injuries after 1 April 2002. 
As I have already said we will not be putting up an amendment as we had intended to do about the acupuncture provisions in the bill because we were assured by the Minister yesterday that there is agreement amongst acupuncturists now. Apparently they have reached agreement about a scope of practice.