Street Maryan: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Street Maryan: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:660;Page:9146] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I wish to take up some of the challenge of the previous speaker Allan Peachey not least because it was a repeated misrepresentation of some of the nonsense we have previously heard from the Minister in the chair the Minister for ACC which was ably refuted by my colleague Moana Mackey. I am not going to go over the answers; I just ask that member to have a look at the  
Hansard  
for Moana Mackey’s speech which shot down that stupid claim very easily. 
I want to deal with two things in particular and they go to the question of responsibility I say to Mr Peachey. The first thing I want to refer to is clause 10 again and I ask members opposite and the Minister to consider the word “compassion”. This legislation lacks any compassion. In the rush to perpetuate the Minister’s falsehoods around the financial status of the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) he has wrapped values and sentiments with which Labour does not associate—and the lack of compassion is one of them. If the Minister had ever bothered to talk to the architect of the accident compensation scheme Sir Owen Woodhouse—who is a member of the Order of New Zealand in his 90s and still well able to lecture the Minister on what was meant by the system and how it is working—he would have found that in fact suicide was intended to be in the original report. It was intended to be there. I ask the Minister to ask Sir Owen Woodhouse instead of sitting there shaking his head like a clown at a sideshow in a fair. All he needs to do is open his mouth and then he would have the complete picture. The Minister needs to understand that suicide was always intended to be there. It was simply as Sir Owen has said elsewhere the religious convictions of one of the commissioners that compensation should not be paid out to people who were committing in that commissioner’s view a mortal sin that prevented it from being there at that time 40 years ago. 
We have come a long way since then. I think of the young people I know who have attempted suicide and survived. They have survived for a range of reasons not the least being good medical intervention and then they have rehabilitated through the provisions of the accident compensation scheme. 
I ask members opposite not to throw away compassion in some drive—misguided though it be—to make the scheme seemingly more cost-effective. There is more at stake here than money. 
I want to go to the next point which is about responsibility. One of the things that has always been a difficulty—or at least it was in the 9 years when Labour was previously in Government—is to address injury prevention and to address rates of rehabilitation that beleaguer some of our efforts and some of the things we aspire to achieve through our accident compensation scheme. 
The injury prevention issue was taken so seriously by the previous Government—unlike this Minister who wants to wipe it out of the language and the name of this legislation—that a cross-disciplinary injury prevention strategy was devised. My predecessor in the portfolio Ruth Dyson launched it and I had the privilege of working along with the people who were trying to prevent injury. There were six work streams. I will not go through all the details but I just say that some of them were obvious: road transport accidents drownings violence falls and suicide prevention. Those were some of the work streams under the injury prevention strategy. They brought together officials from justice police corrections health and education—a raft of officials from across Government departments—to address injury prevention. 
Some interesting findings came out of that not the least of them being that across all six of the work streams alcohol was a factor. So 19 percent of drownings are affected by alcohol. People go out on a boat have a few drinks fall over the edge and that is it—19 percent or one in five more or less. Similarly falls are precipitated in large measure by alcohol. We know that alcohol accounts for a significant proportion of our road transport accidents. It also accounts for at least 30 percent of the violent acts that are done in public places not to mention domestic violence. 
What was the purpose of all of that? The purpose of those work streams and finding out that information was precisely to take responsibility for injury prevention at a Government level across a raft of Government departments. We started to see some improvements. We have seen fewer drownings in recent years than in years before. We have seen a drop in road transport accidents and deaths. We have seen some awareness begin about the kinds of things that need to be done in order to effect a comprehensive and complicated injury prevention strategy. 
This bill not only erases injury prevention from the very title and from the purpose of the legislation but completely negates any sense of compassion and any sense of the purpose of education. What did we hear frequently from National members when they were in Opposition? We heard a lot about the nanny State and we heard that they did not like Government ads on television. They did not like the Government interfering and telling people how to run their lives like how to be safe in the water how to avoid road transport accidents how to drink sensibly or how to avoid and to report domestic violence. 
So what did we have from the nanny State-ists opposite? We had the accusation that the Government should be playing no part in this. I tell Mr Peachey that that is irresponsible and it is what his party and that wretched wretched Minister is doing. He is not applying any sense of responsibility to injury prevention and to accidents in this legislation. Labour is the party that took responsibility for trying to address injury prevention and rehabilitation rates. From that Minister we get half-truths and stuff that is purely misleading and that is the least polite thing I can say about it in the Chamber. That Minister is misleading. Not only that he is incompetent. 
This is a serious issue that works across a range of Government departments and goes right to the heart of the responsibility of a Government for its citizens. If we have the information and we know that alcohol affects six of the main causes of injury it is a Government’s responsibility to do something about it. 
Hon Dr Jonathan Coleman 
: What did you do about it? 
Hon MARYAN STREET 
: It is not the Government’s responsibility—I say to Dr Coleman who is a medical practitioner—to sit behind papers and pretend that what the Minister for ACC says is even remotely useful. It is a disgrace. This is a disgrace. This legislation will take us back because no responsibility is being taken for injury prevention or for rehabilitation. Yes these are difficult issues but they will not be solved cured or addressed in our society by legislation that takes away any focus on injury prevention and that denies compassion. I do not want to be in that society.