Hutchison Paul: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Hutchison Paul: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20289] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
: 
 Thank you Mr Chair for the opportunity to speak on the title and commencement of the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3). I want to reiterate the reasons why the National Party has indeed supported this bill which resulted from the review of medical error and medical mishap that has occurred over the last 2 years. The review identified the core problems that medical mishap criteria are arbitrary and often bear little relationship to the circumstances of the patient which results in claimants unfairly missing out on cover; and secondly that medical error criteria require establishing that an individual practitioner or organisation is at fault which is at odds with a no-fault system and hinders the medical misadventure claim process. There is no doubt that those are very unfortunate aspects and that they have gone on for a long time. They need addressing and have been addressed by this bill. 
I guess it is the other aspects of this bill however that worry us. Firstly I want to comment again on the excellent attempt by my colleague Pansy Wong to bring in a fairer solution to the problem concerning acupuncturists which the Labour Government and the Minister for ACC have failed to address. Surely after 5 years they should have managed to sort out a solution for acupuncturists. Instead they have caused the exclusion of a group whose members come from China and are of Chinese origin and who perhaps have not been as powerful advocates as the two traditional acupuncture groups that the Minister has included. I think it was a great pity that United Future was the only other party—there was the Progressives too but we do not count them—that did not support Pansy Wong’s excellent amendment which would have at least given the Minister a chance to address the anomaly concerning acupuncturists. 
I come back to the title: “Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3)”. I think Katherine Rich was quite right; the title does not reflect what this bill is about. This Government after 5 years of saying it wants to focus on prevention has a dismal record on it despite having spent $40 million a year—it is coming up to that—and increasing. We know that the statistics show there are more moderate and severe accidents every year in New Zealand than there were in prior years. So the Government gets a “fail” for that. As to rehabilitation there is a clause in this bill where the Government says it is going to stop rehabilitation. If we think back over the 5 years we realise we have seen some very curious and odd aspects of its rehabilitation methods. I think back to nasal lavage which was carried out in the Waikato under this Minister’s watch. Even worse down in the South Island near Oamaru the Government had Accident Compensation Corporation rehabilitation people writing their own epitaphs. That was a most extraordinary phenomenon and it occurred under Minister Dyson’s watch. 
Finally we have compensation. Indeed constituency MPs have all sorts of difficulties with the interpretation by this Government of what is fair compensation. Anomalies do arise from time to time and unfortunately we have a Minister who is particularly slow to address those anomalies. One of the other outstanding things about this bill is the Government’s reckless attitude towards how much it is going to cost. The Minister has not at any stage addressed that aspect.