Bradford Sue: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and  Compensation Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Bradford Sue: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and  Compensation Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:637;Page:7523] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party supports this short and for bills concerning accident compensation unusually simple bill. The primary purpose of the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill is to merge the Accident Compensation Corporation’s (ACC) self-employed work account with its employers’ account. This is just sensible. There is no good reason why a self-employed person carrying out a business should be levied differently than a person who registers a company that employs him or her as its sole employee. Yet that was the consequence of the anachronistic legacy of the two separate accounts that flowed from the National Government’s failed privatisation of accident compensation in the 1990s. 
This bill presents an opportunity for the National Party to distance itself from the hard-right policies and the hollow men of the Brash years. It is a chance for National to show that it is acting in the interests of New Zealanders who have the misfortune to be injured rather than in the interests of its mates in the insurance industry. Yet what we see in this House is the National Party opposing this bill perhaps on the basis that the merger of the accounts would make it more difficult for some future National-led Government to privatise accident compensation again. 
It is time for the members on the National benches to come clean about their accident compensation privatisation policy. Who wrote it or at whose behest was it written? Was it written by Stephen Cosgrove of QBE Insurance who reportedly met with Dr Brash in August 2004 to discuss the re-privatisation of accident compensation insurance? Or was it written by Ross Chapman of the same company who reportedly met with Dr Brash in July 2005? Or perhaps it was written by the chief executive officer of the Insurance Council itself Chris Ryan who reportedly had numerous meetings and communications with Dr Brash and Dr Hutchison on the privatisation of accident compensation. 
It is also time for the members on the National benches to come clean about some other matters in relation to its accident compensation privatisation policy. Did National receive a $1 million-plus anonymous donation through one of its dodgy trusts from the Insurance Council in recognition of its privatisation policy as Nicky Hager claims it did in  
The Hollow Men 
 as advised by a confidential National Party source? It is time for the National Party which had the temerity to make allegations of corruption in this House for most of the past year to come clean about its own links with the insurance industry and the funding it may have received from it. It is also time for the electoral law to be changed to ensure transparency in the funding of political parties. Whatever the links were between the National Party’s accident compensation privatisation policy and the allegations of it receiving substantial donations from the insurance industry the public in the interests of democracy has the right to know. 
What the National Party forgets or chooses to forget is that its short-lived privatisation of workplace accident insurance was a disaster for people injured at work. A few weeks ago I received an email from one such person who is still suffering under the sorry legacy of that scheme through the transitional provisions of the 2001 Act. His email has the subject line: “WorkAon unfair and ruthless.” It is an email that I imagine most other members of this House also received. 
He says: “The thought of having to pay out money to injured people is an insult to their agenda so it goes without saying that they will put whatever obstacles in the way of injured people to avoid paying any money. They are not operating under the ACC laws. WorkAon’s efforts in the field of accident compensation are probably the worst that you could possibly come across. I have been told by some doctors that it was commonplace to have to wait for more than a year for their bills to be paid. What way is this to run a business? It would appear as though their first duty was to the organisations that are paying levies to them and also their shareholders not for the injured people that are unfortunate enough to have to rely on them for compensation as a result of the Government allowing big business to arrange their own cover.” The letter writer went on to detail a sorry sequence of events including WorkAon refusing to accept medical reports from specialists who had examined him and referring him to its own tame specialists whose opinions it then preferred. 
This highlights the problem with privatised workplace accident insurance that the National Party just does not seem to get—or chooses to ignore—in the interests of its friends in the insurance industry. The National Party says it wants to introduce competition into the scheme but the competition the National Party proposes advantages only the employer. There is no competition for the injured worker. Accident compensation insurance is not a normal insurance arrangement. Cover compensation and other entitlements are prescribed by statute not by contract. The easiest way for private insurance companies to be profitable and gain market share in the area of accident compensation is to deny the cover and entitlements that an injured person is entitled by statute to receive. They can do so in the knowledge that the accident compensation law is extremely complex and the injured person will often not know how to challenge an unfavourable decision. They can do so in the knowledge that many claimants will not be able to afford the legal representation they need in order to challenge anything that goes against them. They know that the health professionals doing the assessments will often be contracted to the employer and the perception if not the reality is that their assessments are far from independent and unbiased. 
They know too that the purportedly independent review process involves a reviewer appointed by the employer which further undermines any perception of independence. The consequence of course was that the private insurance companies in 1999-2000 deliberately or negligently refused to extend cover and entitlements that they were bound by statute to extend. They knew that most injured people would not challenge those erroneous decisions and that this was a far easier way to reduce their levies and increase their market share than their spending money on advising their employer clients on how to reduce risk. 
The other thing the National Party refuses to understand about accident compensation is that it is a no-fault scheme. This distinguishes it from most insurance arrangements where the insurance company can recover funds expended on a claim from the party responsible for the action that gave rise to the claim. That is not a possibility when it is deemed no one is at fault and this too leads to competing private insurance companies attempting to minimise claims expenditure by wrongly declining claims. These are the reasons that accident compensation should be retained in the public sector. The National Party’s blinkered view that everything that is private is good and everything that is public is bad is one reason that it is not yet fit to be Government again. The Green Party believes that there are some things the public sector does do best and accident compensation is one of them. Despite the shortcomings of the public accident compensation scheme—and I am the first to accept there are still some significant shortcomings particularly regarding the definition of personal injury—that scheme operates infinitely better for injured workers than did National’s privatisation experiment which they propose to revert to. 
I am pleased that New Zealand First which supported the disastrous accident compensation privatisation experiment back in the late 1990s is now supporting the aspects of this bill that merge the employers’ account and the self-employed work account. At least it appears that that party has moved on and can now see sense. The National Party however still seems to be stuck in a time warp promoting yesterday’s failed policies. Its record on accident compensation is one of failure and duplicity. This is the party that went into the 1996 election campaign promising that it would not privatise accident compensation yet by the end of the following parliamentary term it had partially privatised accident compensation. 
If National is serious about again sitting on the Government benches it should front up to this House and to the public of New Zealand and tell us the full story for better or for worse of its links with the insurance industry. It should acknowledge that the privatisation of accident compensation in the late 1990s was a disaster for injured people and repudiate that policy. It should also withdraw its misguided opposition to this simple little bill which does no more than rectify an anomaly that causes wildly fluctuating ACC levies for self-employed people and redress the situation that different people carrying out essentially the same business with the same injury risk can still pay vastly different ACC levies—just because of the way they have chosen to structure their businesses.