Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. It's a pleasure to speak to the Accident Compensation Amendment Bill. As I was looking at this bill there were three big parts that struck me and I will particularly spend some time on the last as my colleague the ACC spokesperson for the Opposition the Hon Tim Macindoe alluded to.I think the first part has been well canvassed by previous speakers that this bill takes into account compensation for New Zealanders who qualify as ordinary residents who are paying New Zealand tax who go offshore and suffer personal injury by accident. It covers their children spouses and dependants. That's clearly a good thing. I think there's also some tidy-up of the relationship between claimants and superannuation as they come to the age of superannuation and when they qualify. This bill tidies that up. But I particularly want to apply myself to the disestablishment of the Accident Compensation Appeal Authority look at what that's about and give a cautionary word from some work done three or four years ago by the Hon Nikki Kaye that might want to be discussed in select committee as well.So if we focus on that the disestablishment of the ACC appeal authority the reasons for that are several fold. First of all the extension is that it will then go to the District Court. The reasons behind that are that when they consulted stakeholders stakeholders said Look we don't want specialist tribunals; we'd like a consistent court process."—firstly. Secondly the appeal authority hears very few cases and the burden of two different appeals bodies is quite significant. Well just how few? If we go into public domain and look at what the appeal authority has actually looked at in 2015 there were 14 cases; in 2016 there were six; in 2017 just one; and there's been none to date. So that's 21 cases over nearly 3½ years.Furthermore if we look at the last case that was litigated with the appeal authority on 9 March 2017 the guts to this case is it's an application for leave to appeal an out-of-time decision. So we can see the sorts of cases that the appeal authority has been dealing with. They tended to deal with situations that applied to old legislation and as we can see the numbers got less and less—21 cases over the past four years. So I think it's a fair argument to say "Few cases—maybe we don't need the appeal authority." I think it was also complicating having two appeal bodies: the District Court and the appeal authority and there is certainly a strengthening of process with all appeals going through the District Court registry. It ensures that all interactions are with the same body and heard by District Court judges.Now before we get to the appeals process we just want to reflect for a moment on all the steps that are taken before you actually get to appeal—and there's a number of them. There's an internal independent review. Sometimes that then goes to alternate disputes resolution; other times it then goes to the true independent review often carried out by FairWay Resolution. From there from that stage if there's still not satisfaction it then was either going to the District Court or to the appeal authority. Now I think an interesting piece of work in this area was done by Nikki Kaye in 2015 where she looked at abolishing the District Court process and the appeal authority and replacing it with an appeals tribunal. The reason here I think this is important is because we don't want to recreate that same sort of situation.Eventually just to conclude that story there were significant issues with the appeal tribunal so it actually didn't progress. But if we look at the reason why this was being suggested the situation was—the emphasis in 2015—the ACC appeals before the District Court had an average age of 669 days. So here's something for the select committee to think about: if we funnel everything now through the District Court are we going to get back to where we were in 2015—669 days before it could get to District Court resolution? The discussion document that went out to look at the tribunal that raised this point raised several questions. It raised whether we could just increase the number of judges. Well it turns out to be an ACC appeal court judge you have to have seven years of judicial experience. That can be challenging sometimes to find those sorts of people with those sorts of skills.I think a lot of work was also done at that time around other parts of the appeals process particularly the Acclaim Otago work of 2015. That was a body of work that came out of an NGO saying "Look the resolution process for ACC the disputes resolution actually isn't fair and we don't think people are getting their medical evidence in a timely way. They don't have access to legal recourse. They don't have access to expertise. Where there is legal advice it's not fully accessible on the Ministry of Justice website." And a whole body of work was done by a QC Kearn as I recall around the Acclaim report commissioned by Nikki Kaye and that's informed this whole resolution process.So fundamentally I just wanted to lay out the case as to why the appeal authority is on good grounds to be established and to also pass some work to the select committee to just reassure that we don't go back to the situation in 2015 where the District Court was 669 days behind. With that I commend this to the select committee."