Street Maryan: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Street Maryan: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:660;Page:9118] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 There was so much that was wrong with that last speech from the Minister for ACC that it almost beggars belief. I will start at the beginning of this process. The accident compensation system is one that we all know is second to none in the world. It is something that other countries aspire to; they wish that they had been visionary enough to put it in place 40 years ago as New Zealand did. The Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill offends against each and every one of the five principles that the accident compensation system is predicated upon. Not one fundamental principle of our accident compensation system is not infringed broken or damaged by this bill. The first of the principles underlying the accident compensation scheme is community responsibility. They also include real compensation complete rehabilitation comprehensive entitlement and administrative efficiency. I will deal with each of these. 
The community responsibility principle was the one that Owen Woodhouse and his commissioners outlined beautifully in the Woodhouse report. It was about the fact that workers should be compensated for injuries because they cease to be productive economic units when they are out of the workplace. He extrapolated beyond that to include women. In fact if one reads the Woodhouse report one sees that the mores of the time are reflected in it in that the expectation was that women would be at home and that men would be in the paid workforce. In order to accommodate women who were supporting the productive worker—to use the old term—the accident compensation system was extended to non-work injuries. That was how it came to cover non-work injuries. The community responsibility principle meant that everybody shared. If we all paid a little we all would get a lot. The motorcyclist who comes off his or her bike is welcome to my share of the earners levy because there may be a time when the amount that he or she pays is of benefit to me when I have a motor accident or a non - work-related accident for example. What everybody pays in as an earner or as a motor vehicle owner benefits everybody. I am happy to work on that basis. This legislation offends that principle by the fact that it is predicated on a private insurance model. National cannot get past the idea that we are talking about State-funded insurance and it would like to hand it over to the private sector as soon as possible. 
The second principle is real compensation. Clause 55 offends against real compensation. I ask members and the Associate Minister for ACC who is sitting in the chair to think about that. Clause 55 addresses compensation for casual workers. If anything in this bill does not look like real compensation it is this clause. It reduces the kind of compensation that a casual or part-time worker can expect to get. I will elaborate on that a little bit later. 
Clause 4 offends against complete rehabilitation. There is reference to the move from 35 hours to 30 hours. The Minister was talking about workers who had worked 35 or more hours a week being considered to have worked full-time; that is because they were working 35 or more hours prior to their accident or their injury. What we will have now is not complete rehabilitation back to working 35 hours in the job they were working in before but partial rehabilitation back to working 30 hours in some other occupation. So that is another principle offended against and infringed by this legislation. 
The fourth principle is comprehensive entitlement. Let us look at clause 6 in Part 1 to see whether it refers to comprehensive entitlement. Clause 6 refers to hearing loss of 6 percent or more that has been caused by a personal injury. According to audiologists and also I believe submitters who came before the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee 6 percent represents considerable hearing loss. I ask why people who because of injury have a hearing loss of just under 6 percent should not be able to access hearing aids and devices to allow them to hear comprehensively which they were able to do before their injury. That infringes and offends against the principle of comprehensive entitlement. Now one cannot have a 1 percent 2 percent 3 percent 4 percent or 5 percent hearing loss; it has to be 6 percent or more to get compensation. That is not comprehensive entitlement. 
The fifth principle that is offended by this legislation is administrative efficiency. What was broken? The overseas comparison that was done by PricewaterhouseCoopers showed in fact that our accident compensation scheme worked at a higher level of efficiency and rate of return than any comparable system overseas. So it was not broken. What this bill will do is create disputes. It will create a crowd of people who want to sue. It will open the door to pressure to sue and will create an administrative nightmare. In that respect this bill offends against the principle of administrative efficiency. 
When an organisation is deemed to be as efficient as the Accident Compensation Corporation is in administering the scheme then there is no need for the comprehensive wholesale reduction represented by this legislation. This legislation is about people paying more and getting less. It is about increasing levies where they did not need to be increased—and I will come back to that point in a later speech—and at every turn depriving New Zealanders of entitlements that allow people time to recover time to rehabilitate time to get back into the workforce in their original occupation where that is humanly possible and time to get back into the earning stakes that they were in previously. That is also offended against by this legislation. There will not be any consideration of previous earnings under this bill. It will not matter what workers earned before their injury; it will matter only that they can do 30 hours’ worth of something which may not be remotely connected to or anywhere near as well paying as the job they had before their injury. And that is meant to be satisfactory for New Zealanders. 
This is appalling legislation. It is founded on a misunderstanding—that is the most complimentary way that I can think of saying it—of every single one of the principles in the Woodhouse report which gave us a first-class and a world-class worker compensation system. This legislation is destroying something that is profoundly precious to New Zealanders. My colleagues will take up some of the individual points in a moment but it is clear that not one single principle of the accident compensation system in the Woodhouse report is not broken damaged or offended against by this legislation. It is a travesty. I feel sorry for the officials who have had to front up and try to prepare something along the lines of the Minister of ACC’s wishes. They cannot have their hearts in it because most of those I know are committed to the accident compensation system.