Dyson Ruth: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Dyson Ruth: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:660;Page:9235] 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 I begin by asking the Minister in the chair the Associate Minister for ACC a question but I doubt very much whether she will answer it because she seems to have been unable to find a contribution to make at all in this debate despite being the Associate Minister. Her arm is moving; that indicates some form of life. But she does not seem to think that it is part of her responsibility—despite collecting quarter of a million dollars with a car and free travel credit card and all the other trappings that go with being a Minister—to stand up in the debate and say why this is happening why we are having this debate. But the question I have immediately for the Minister is where Gerry Brownlee is when you need him. Where is the Leader of the House who felt obliged to come to the Chamber and have my Supplementary Order Paper ruled out of order on the grounds that it would nearly bring the Government to its knees— 
The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) 
: Let us keep this reasonably good-natured but the member is straying into two areas. The first is implying that a member is not here and secondly speaking about a ruling that has been made. The member cannot do that. 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: So where is Gerry Brownlee’s contribution when it is needed? Clearly it is not being provided at the moment because if Gerry Brownlee was able to make a contribution in this debate I am sure he would look at the amendment to the title and think about the huge impact on fiscal aggregate that this amendment from the Minister the Hon Dr Nick Smith will have. How much will it cost for every single letterhead every single logo every single front window every single car every single business card and every single bit of paper—including ones with perforated sides—that currently have the existing logo and brand “Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation”—to be altered? Gerry Brownlee is likely to be considering a contribution to this debate and having this amendment from the Minister ruled out. If it is good enough for the previous amendments to be ruled out it is certainly good enough for this one. But if we were able to put aside the huge impact on fiscal aggregate that this amendment will have even though it will be debated and then voted on by the sounds of the current lack of contribution from the Leader of the House then the Committee would be asking why we are doing this. 
At the very time when the focus of the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) has moved from looking at accidents as things that just happen and we pay out compensation for them why are we not moving that culture to say that a prime responsibility of the corporation as outlined in the original Woodhouse commission report was that injury prevention should come first? That is what the commission said. That is why the name was changed to reflect what should be the primary responsibility and focus of the corporation as it should be for the leadership position of the Minister and the Associate Minister to drive injury prevention. I do not think that anybody in the Chamber would want to see anyone injured; even in the most heated moments of debate we would not wish any harm on any of our political opponents. But without that focus in the name the corporation lost its way. It did not refer back to the original intent of the commission. Now it has looked to the title of its mandating legislation and said injury prevention comes first. 
What should be the second responsibility of the corporation? It should be rehabilitation. It should make sure that when people have the misfortune of an injury despite the best efforts of any injury prevention programme there is a fundamental responsibility to try to restore injured people to the greatest extent possible to their pre-injury earning capacity. We must make them as well as we can make them and restore them from their injury to as much as possible their pre-injury situation. So injury prevention should be the corporation’s No. 1 focus. Rehabilitation should be its second and compensation for loss of earnings or earning capacity should be its third role. 
Under this amendment and under the now new title—yet another leap backwards into the 1990s—we see that the title of the Act will be the Accident Compensation Act. What does that say from this Parliament to the corporation? What does it say to the general public? What does it say to the leading injury prevention and rehabilitation specialists? The message from the Hon Dr Nick Smith and the Hon Pansy Wong is: “We don’t care any more about injury prevention and rehabilitation. We don’t care about it to the extent that we’re even prepared to change the name of the mandating legislation so that the message is ‘accident compensation’—end of story.” That is not a good enough message. We have people day in day out who are injured often permanently often severely. People lose their lives in incidents that we could prevent such as children who are killed on quad bikes and children who drown. People lose their limbs in incidents that could be prevented. 
My colleague the Hon David Parker spoke of a fantastic programme that was funded in part by ACC and in part by local authorities and other Government departments and agencies. The programme focused on a group of people who were often neglected in the past in terms of injury prevention. The reason they were often neglected was that they do not cost the corporation much money because they do not receive earnings-related compensation—that is people over 80. People over 80 often fall and break their hips. They do not cost much so they were never in the past a priority. The previous Labour Government changed that. We said that those people were important in society. They have contributed all of their lives to our country and to their communities. They have raised families many of them have fought overseas on our behalf and we should not write them off just because they are over 80. So we put a focus on a critical area of injury prevention for those people through the National Falls Prevention Strategy. I say all credit to Otago University for the amazing work—led in particular by Professor A John Campbell—that was done with that injury prevention programme. 
The programme stopped large numbers of senior citizens falling over and often breaking their hip. If older people fall and break their hip they have a lot of pain they have to have a lot of surgical intervention and the most telling thing is that they never fully regain their confidence again. They rapidly decline in terms of their ability to get up get out of bed and get out and about because that fall has shaken more than their bones; that fall shakes their confidence. Why would we want to let that happen when we know that it can be prevented by a very simple internationally well-regarded falls prevention programme? I do not know the answer to that question because the National Government scrapped the programme not the Labour Government. This Government said to over 80-year-olds that it does not care any more about their falls prevention programme and that it does not care about injury prevention at all actually. It scrapped the small amount of funding that was keeping so many of those people out of danger and out of hospital and giving them an opportunity to lead a much fuller life. 
Those issues are at the heart of my concern about the change in the title. Many people might ask who cares about the name change. Well if we cared as little as that then we would not be debating it in Parliament. It is more than the name of a statute on the books of this House. It is about the message we give about what is important as the legislative mandate for the corporation and its staff throughout the country. It is about what this Parliament thinks is a priority. I do not think we should say that if it is an accident it just happens. I think we should say that these are injuries and in many many instances they can be prevented. It should be a moral responsibility of this Parliament to make it a legislative responsibility of the corporation to have injury prevention as its highest priority. None of us wants to see anyone being injured so we should take the next logical step to make sure the law reflects that.