Fenton Darien: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Fenton Darien: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 I would like to bring the debate on Part 1 back to the select committee process and to the number of submissions we heard. I think we heard about 46 or 49 submissions. I was on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and it was a privilege to hear from submitters. I appreciate the effort they made to come to the committee to make their submissions during a very hot January summer because this Government was rushing the bill through and had a very short time frame in which to report back. So here we are in urgency: hello what a change! I acknowledge those submitters. 
The majority of submitters were opposed to this bill and I think it is very disappointing that the Government has not listened to the submissions. We see that in Part 1 where there have been almost no changes just some minor technical changes. 
Part 1 contains some very serious amendments to the current provisions which New Zealanders have become used to having as part of their accident compensation scheme. For example we see the removal of ministerial advisory panels. I find it incredibly arrogant that the Minister thinks he knows everything and does not need any independent advice about these issues about gradual process and other diseases about injury prevention and so on. He says we should get rid of ministerial advisory panels because they might be inconvenient. As other members have mentioned we are also seeing changes to vocational independence which is really quite scary stuff. I heard the Minister responding to this issue and trying to argue that being deemed ready for work at 30 hours a week rather than 35 hours a week was somehow the same as other things. 
We are talking here about workers who have been injured on the job most often through no fault of their own. After all let us remember we are talking about a no-fault scheme. Part 1 contains a provision that when people are physically able to work 30 hours a week—God knows what sort of job is being proposed for them—rather than 35 hours a week as it used to be they will lose their earnings-related compensation. That will cause hardship to more injured people. 
The next provision is a change to allow the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) to disregard pre-accident earnings. At the moment when ACC is assessing whether to deem someone as work-ready it must have regard for the person’s pre-accident earnings. The bill changes “must” to “may” which means of course “may not”. We have heard descriptions from my colleagues about what that could mean for people when it comes to deeming them to be work-ready and having to go back into some job that bears no relation to what they were doing before. How undignified is that! It is absolutely undignified. 
Then I will talk a little bit about the risk rating provisions and what they mean. There is a real sense of fear around this because we have seen it before under the past National Government where there were risk ratings and risk assessments. We saw that many many workers were too afraid to put forward their injury claims and some employers actively discouraged them from doing so because it would affect their risk rating. I do not accept that there are some people whose only motivation is money. That is what this provision means—that the only motivation for preventing accidents and preventing injuries is money. 
Then of course we come to the 6 percent threshold for hearing loss that some of my colleagues have talked about. I think that for the members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee this was one of the most poignant discussions in the committee. We heard from people who have hearing loss and we heard from audiologists. The audiologists handed out earplugs to give select committee members a sense of what it is like to have a less than 6 percent hearing loss and it is quite significant. I could not hear what they were saying without straining. As my colleague Carol Beaumont has said someone described it as losing the ability to hear the birds sing hear the grandchildren chatter or being in a discussion with a group of people and being able to hear only the person next to one and not the conversation going on around one. It is quite significant. 
What is most disturbing about the hearing loss threshold is its arbitrary nature. Where did it come from? Why were the professionals not consulted? They were aggrieved about that and there was a sense of dismay among the select committee members about that too. Apart from the fact that the Government did not consult anybody and the regulatory impact statement states that very clearly the Government did not talk to the professionals about what this meant and did not listen to what the professionals said when they came to the select committee. 
When we talk about the 6 percent hearing loss threshold we need to think about the thousands of workers in the workforce of the past who built New Zealand who built the factories who worked in the factories and who did the jobs to build the New Zealand that we are all proud of today. 
Lynne Pillay 
: They looked after us. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: Yes that is right. They were exposed to earlier industrial practices because they were acceptable then. Thank goodness we have moved on a little bit although I feel very fearful about the lack of injury prevention provisions in this bill and the lack of an injury prevention focus from this Government. 
The other issue the Minister has not addressed and it has not been raised in this debate tonight concerns the submitters who said the loss of cover for an up to 6 percent hearing loss opens up the right to sue. We have a 24-hour no-fault compensation scheme and the right to sue has not been part of it. I would be very very interested in hearing the Minister’s response to that. Will we see litigation opened up—for the people who can afford it because lots of people cannot afford to sue—to the people who can afford to take their employer or whomever to court and argue that they should be compensated because they are not compensated under this scheme as they previously were? 
Part 1 is very very important. There are other clauses in Part 2 that we will debate when the time comes. The select committee heard about some very significant changes in this part and submitters came in their droves and in their numbers to oppose them. I find it very very offensive to hear sniggering from members on the other side as the debate has progressed. That is offensive. When people come to this Parliament to put their point of view Labour members expect them to be heard. Unfortunately those people have not been heard at all although the Government insists that this bill is all about saving the accident compensation scheme because it is in trouble and about cost containment and so on. 
Accident compensation is about people. It is about people who are injured either in the workplace or outside of the workplace. It is about people who get hurt and who have grown up with the Woodhouse report and since the implementation in the 1970s of a cross-party scheme a no-fault 24-hour compensation scheme. They have grown up to expect to pay their levies and they expect better of this Parliament than we are seeing in this bill. There will be other things in Part 2 that we will want to comment on. 
I have one final question for the Minister and I hope the Minister in the chair the Associate Minister for ACC Pansy Wong can answer it. Earlier on we started talking about privatisation. One of the members opposite brought it up and said that members were looking forward to hearing some answers from the Minister. So I ask the Minister to tell Labour members whether it is the Government’s intention to carry out privatisation—in other words to open up the work account to competition. Thank you Mr Chair.