Moroney Sue: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Moroney Sue: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:637;Page:7792] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 We are here to discuss the third reading of the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill. It is my privilege and my very great pleasure to rise to speak in support of the third reading of this bill. I have quite a bit of personal interest in this whole area and I want to talk about the world-class system we have in regard to accident compensation which is the envy of many other countries. When we look at some of the issues raised by Te Ururoa Flavell in the speech he has just made where he talked about people’s knowledge of their rights under this system I think we can reflect and see that it is just as well we do not have a system based on people having to know their legal entitlements and having to be able to afford to pay for lawyers in order to get any money back for injury treatment. 
Simon Power 
: It’s lawyer-free—that’s right! It works superbly well! 
SUE MORONEY 
: I know that National members would love to give this whole area over to lawyers and make it an absolute nightmare for working people. They really want to make sure that working people do not have good access to compensation when injured at work. However this Government will not sell our accident compensation system to the legal profession the Insurance Council of New Zealand or any other area like that. Our very fine accident compensation system is very accessible. By world standards it is much more accessible for working people than systems in other countries and we certainly do not want to go down the line of reducing that accessibility. 
This bill clarifies and simplifies the accident compensation system even more because it brings equity into the situation. I want to outline the background as to why we are even here talking about this bill which merges the two accounts of self-employed and employed people. It was an artificial split in the first place. If we go back in time we know that it was never meant to be the case with our wonderful accident compensation system. It was decided purely on the basis of industry and the occupations people were involved in which is how the levies were set traditionally. However in the 1990s the National Government saw fit to split the self-employed off from the employed in an effort to line the system up for privatisation by insurance companies. We are now coming full circle and rectifying the very artificial split that occurred during that time. So what we are now doing is consistent with the aims and objectives of the very collective system we have in place— 
Dr Jonathan Coleman 
: Of the Labour Party. 
SUE MORONEY 
: —yes that is right; the collective responsibility of the Labour Party—that ensures that people are treated equitably. This bill makes sure that despite what National members have tried to argue the scheme does give the right incentives. Of course it does. This bill actually links the injuries to— 
Simon Power 
: Yield to Darien Fenton. At least she’ll say it with passion. 
SUE MORONEY 
: Mr Power might learn something from this because— 
Simon Power 
: I doubt it. 
SUE MORONEY 
: I am sure the member will because when National members argue that this legislation does nothing to link injuries to levies they are completely and utterly wrong. [ 
Interruption 
] I will explain. Jonathan Coleman does not know what I mean by this so I will need to explain it to him. When the levies were split based on the business structure it was nothing to do with the type of industry people were involved it but it was to do with the way their businesses were structured. How did that make the levies appropriate to the injuries sustained in those industries? No one from the National Party has been able to explain that to us yet. 
National members do seem to have a view on the self-employed. I am not sure what they have against the self-employed but they have tried to portray the view that somehow the self-employed take a whole lot of risks with their own personal health and safety that other people would not take. I cannot understand where the National Party is coming from on this issue. Why are National members so against the self-employed? Having been self-employed myself my understanding is that self-employed people rely solely on their ability to perform their jobs. Why on earth would they take greater risks with their health and safety than employed people? There is silence from the Opposition. That is what Opposition members have been trying to portray throughout this debate but they still have not been able to explain why it is that without any evidence they believe self-employed people are sloppier in their work practices or put themselves in harm’s way more than people employed by companies. It is very interesting that Opposition members should be arguing this because they have not been able to come up with a decent argument on it yet. 
But even more interesting is being a member of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that considered this bill and observing the National members on that committee. I thank the officials for the wonderful work they did on this bill and the large amount of very precise information they gave the select committee. They were able to put tables before us—quite complicated tables that took a while to work through—that showed exactly what the merger of the two accounts would mean for every industrial group. There were 127 levy risk groups and the officials went through in very fine detail what the levies would mean for each of those groups under both the separated accounts and the merged accounts. 
As I was looking through all those figures I was most interested in observing the National members who went straight to the pages of the businesses they owned and who seemed to be interested in looking only at what it would mean for the dairy farm etc. that they happened to own personally. The questions for the officials that came from National members simply reflected their own personal interests in this field whereas the rest of us—Peter Brown and the others on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—were focusing on what the impact would be for the rest of New Zealand. We were not consumed with our own personal interests; we were looking to see what would happen overall. However that was certainly not what was happening from the National Party’s perspective. 
But there was a bit of a dilemma because when the National members did look at what it meant for them personally they discovered that the levies looked pretty damned good under this situation. Under the new bill the levies for those particular members were looking a lot better when the accounts were merged. That was very interesting—I think it was one of those flip-flop moments—because it caused them the ultimate dilemma: “Do we argue for this bill as National Party members because it is personally good for us?”. Out of self-interest I could see them wondering: “Should I actually support this bill because personally it does a lot for me or should I toe the party line and back the Insurance Council position?”. What a dilemma! “Do I go as a National Party member with personal self-interest or do I back the party line to ensure that the party can have good donations from the Insurance Council?”. Well I think at the end of the day— 
Simon Power 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. The member was fine until that last remark and you will know Madam Assistant Speaker that it is completely out of line to suggest that any political party or member of Parliament is under the influence or direction of any outside organisation. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ann Hartley) 
: The member is correct. The member will withdraw that remark. 
SUE MORONEY 
: I withdraw that remark. It was however very interesting to watch the dilemma and the flip-flop that was actually happening before us in the select committee about which line National members would take. 
They have ended up taking the party line but it sounded like opposition for opposition’s sake. I listened very carefully to what Peter Brown said in his speech and in discussions he was having with Pansy Wong looking for the very fine detail and the evidence for Pansy Wong to back up the facts she was asserting about this bill. When those facts and the detail was not forthcoming then that sounded to me as if the Opposition were opposing this for the Opposition’s sake. 
Finally I want to talk about what happens to people. We are talking about statistics and levies here but I want to talk about the impact on people’s lives when they are injured at work because after all behind all the facts and figures we have looked at that is the real point of what we are dealing with here. Certainly in my time of training health and safety representatives in the workplace I know that they were able to tell me very clearly about the impact on the lives of working people when injured at work particularly if workers had had to take time off work due to those injuries. So I want to remind the House that we are talking about significant impacts on people’s lives. That is where these levies go—to ensure that people can have dignity when they have been injured in their working lives. That helps to take the financial pressure off them and it can help the impact on family relationships as well.