Street Maryan: Accident Compensation Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Street Maryan: Accident Compensation Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
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Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I would like to begin by saying that this legislation from beginning to end is a complete travesty. It is a complete abrogation of the responsibility that comes with a social contract which is what accident compensation used to be and will be until in about an hour’s time this third reading is concluded. It has been a travesty from the very beginning with its title with the amendment that the Minister wishes to pass to call it the Accident Compensation Amendment Bill. Funnily enough he did not want to call it that at the introduction of the legislation. He did not want to call it that at the second reading of the legislation. It has been only in the Committee stage that he decided suddenly to call it the Accident Compensation Amendment Bill and I wonder why that is. Taking out the words “injury prevention rehabilitation and compensation” from the title of this bill does not augur well. 
First of all it is an abrogation of those difficult bits—injury prevention that is successful and injury prevention that is long-term and sustainable—across those six areas of critical injury prevention activity that Labour put in place in those 9 years that it was in Government I say to Minister Wong. Injury prevention was beginning to take effect and the abrogation of this Government’s responsibility in that respect will see us going backwards. 
I want to recap on some of the principles of the scheme and talk about what Sir Owen Woodhouse and his fellow commissioners originally intended and the kinds of principles upon which they built the scheme to begin with some 40-odd years ago. The number of principles was about five and the first one of these was community responsibility. Community responsibility meant that everybody paid a little and everybody got a lot. Everybody put in something and everybody got a lot back as and when they needed it. That goes to the heart of the kind of scheme that the accident compensation scheme is. For me and for Labour it goes to the heart of the kind of society we want. That is what the scheme was about. This Government is shifting the basis of it away from community responsibility towards privatisation faster than one can think of. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: Where is that in the bill? 
Hon MARYAN STREET 
: Just because the word is not there does not mean that privatisation is not on the agenda. The Government is preparing for that on the basis of a private insurance model. Nothing could be more different from a social contract. The scheme will not represent a social contract underpinned by community responsibility any more and that is a tragedy. 
Real compensation was another principle that the Woodhouse report emphasised. Real compensation is offended against by clause 55 of the bill which takes the earnings of casual workers and divides them not by the weeks they have worked in order to achieve fair compensation but by 52 weeks in the year. That Minister comes from Nelson. I wish he would start to represent the people of Nelson because he seems to be ignorant of the fact that some 76 percent of the earners in Nelson earn less than $40000 a year and therefore made nothing from the tax cuts that the National Government trumpeted so loudly last year—nothing not a bean not a brass razoo. He wants to calculate compensation like this. If somebody works 40 weeks—as is often the case if the person is picking apples or trimming vines or harvesting kiwifruit in Nelson—instead of dividing his or her earnings by the number of weeks worked let us say 40 weeks he now under this legislation is dividing those earnings by 52 weeks in the year. Everybody knows that that is a smaller amount and when 80 percent of that becomes compensation I tell the Minister that that inflicts hardship on people in his patch. That Minister needs to front up to those people and explain what he has done instead of telling one story in Nelson and another story in Wellington. 
Complete rehabilitation is another principle and that has been offended against by this legislation as well. Clause 4 of the bill now has rehabilitation back into work happening at 30 hours a week. Never mind what people used to earn or the kind of job they used to be in now people will be assessed as being fit for work again if they can work 30 hours a week regardless of the occupation they used to be in or the salary they used to earn. 
Comprehensive entitlement is another principle that is being infringed and offended against by this legislation. That is apparent in clause 6 where it says that a person has to have a 6 percent hearing loss now in order to qualify for some accident compensation entitlements. A 6 percent hearing loss is significant; that was demonstrated at the select committee. It is not now just a matter of having a 1 2 3 4 or 5 percent hearing loss. If a person has that level of hearing loss I am sorry but that person does not qualify any more. Here we have levies going up and entitlements cut. 
Administrative efficiency was the fifth of the principles underpinning the scheme. There was nothing wrong with the administrative efficiency of the scheme. In fact PricewaterhouseCoopers of Australia determined that the scheme was run more efficiently than any other compensation scheme in the world. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: They did not. 
Hon MARYAN STREET 
: They did so. The amount that the Accident Compensation Corporation expended on administration was minimal compared with other schemes. I say that it is absolutely minimal compared with the profit that would need to be given to private insurance companies which are poised and ready to swoop in at this Government’s behest. 
I would like to say something about some of the half-truths that the Minister has been continually perpetuating in the course of the passage of this legislation. One of the half-truths is about $2.4 billion lost in about 2008. The point is that the investments of the scheme have been performing above the international benchmark for the last decade. In 2008 a recession began in financial institutions overseas. I am not sure whether the Minister is aware of that but it did. It began to trickle through into the scheme’s investments. Instead of addressing that issue with the kind of hysteria that that Minister has been demonstrating from the beginning to the end of this process he just needed to take a long view and watch those investments begin to recover. Sure enough what did we see? Now the earnings on the scheme’s investments and on New Zealand superannuation investments are fuelling the Government’s coffers and improving the Government’s accounts. What do we hear from that Minister? Half-truths. 
I will talk about one other aspect about which the Minister has been less than fulsome and that is injury rates. I will draw to the Minister’s attention in particular some things to do with motorcycles and motorcyclists because some of those figures the Minister will never let the House know but these are official figures. In 1973 there were something like 77000 motorcycles on the road in New Zealand. By 2009 that figure had almost doubled. There were 114000 motorcycles on the road in New Zealand. But per 10000 motorcycles on the road what we see over that period of time from 1973 to 2009 is a complete falling away in the number of crashes the number of injuries and the number of fatalities. In 1973 per 10000 motorcycles on the road there were 511 crashes. In 2009 there were 122. The other figures bear that out. We have been fed a diet of half-truths by that Minister and it is not sufficient. Something is being broken here and it is a scheme that we— 
Dr Cam Calder 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. When I last heard about it a half-truth was akin to a lie and I do not think it is appropriate that anybody can suggest that a member is lying in the House. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Eric Roy) 
: I have been listening very carefully and the test that the presiding officer applies in this case is whether such a statement is personalised. It is about the argument rather than the individual. It is kind of just inside the boundary of where a member may go—only just. 
Hon MARYAN STREET 
: This has been a world-class system which other countries envy. It is affordable it is sustainable and if the Minister had moved faster and put in the residual levies extension of date clause a year ago he could have saved every motor vehicle owner in this country $80. There is something rotten in the state of this Government.