Bennett David: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
Bennett David: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee 
[Volume:648;Page:16940] 
DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) 
: 
 In terms of Part 1 of the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 2) and what my colleague Dr Paul Hutchison has been talking about which is the work-related and non - work-related criteria a good example was given by one of the submitters to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and I think people will gain a lot of benefit from hearing about it. This submission was made by the New Zealand Institute of Safety Management. It gave the example of a motor vehicle accident to show who would be covered and who we might have expected would be covered but was not. 
A motor vehicle accident may create two classes of injury. The employee who was driving will have his or her physical injuries covered plus any mental harm that may arise—the mental injury is covered by this legislation. The pedestrian who was hit by the vehicle and who was not at work will have his or her physical injuries covered plus any mental harm caused by the injuries—that is also part of this legislation. But a witness who was mentally injured and who was not at work will get nothing; somebody who received a mental injury as a result of witnessing a traumatic event will not be covered under this legislation. An ambulance employee who received mental trauma is entitled to claim—the pedestrian was the ambulance employee’s cousin in this case. As members can see from this example the proposed legislation creates two types of injury class: those who are not covered and those who are covered merely because of their employment status. 
A number of submitters said that that was not in keeping with the original principles of the accident compensation legislation as put forward in the Woodhouse report. The witness in this case will not get any cover even though the witness encountered the same traumatic event as say the employee did. That is part of the problem with the bill before the Committee. Two types of cover are being promoted by the Government in this case— 
Pansy Wong 
: Inequitable. 
DAVID BENNETT 
: —and it is not equitable because in some cases people will get cover and in other cases people will not get cover even though they may have a legitimate claim in the sense that their injury is as great as or in some cases greater than the injuries of people injured in the course of their employment. That is the fundamental problem that the legislation encounters. 
Many submitters brought this scenario before the Government of the day but the Government was not willing to concede this point because the Government is pushing through this legislation as part of the raft of legislation that it is promoting in its scorched earth policy in the last couple of months leading up to an election. The Government is more interested in what it can get through the House than in the content or success of the legislation in the long term. The Government is interested in going out there and promoting ideas that have no financial backing in the sense that nobody in the Government understands the financial implications because that does not matter to the Government; its members want just to be able to go on the election platform and say that they have done something about an issue. 
Well they have not done something about an issue when the people whom the Minister for ACC Maryan Street spoke about—such as the person who had encountered two of these kinds of traumas in his working life—are not covered by this legislation because it is not retrospective. That person who came before the select committee had been dealt two bad hands of cards. People would not expect to experience one such situation in their working life; that person had experienced two such situations and he is still not getting cover from the Labour Government. 
Labour is going out there with this legislation as some promise for the future with no financial backing and Labour is using it to say that it has covered off this situation after 9 years in Government. Well Labour has had 9 years to get a solution. It could have done it at a much earlier stage and in a form that would have provided retrospective cover and cover for non - work-related injuries. But it has forgone those opportunities and has done this bill in a very quick and hurried manner looking forward to an election. This legislation creates a number of holes.