Hodgson Pete: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled 
Hodgson Pete: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled 
[Volume:660;Page:9196] 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Labour—Dunedin North) 
: 
 I want to take up some remarks made by my colleague Grant Robertson when he referred to the Woodhouse report and the social contract. We are seeing in the Chamber today changes to the legislation that directly and determinedly abrogate that contract. The contract was that the right to sue would be removed and in the stead of the removal of that right there was to be a thing called an accident compensation scheme. The idea of accident compensation back then was always manifold. It included for example back then 30 years ago significant attention on injury prevention. It included the idea that people would be substantially—and the figure chosen was 80 percent—kept free of the risk of their being injured as a result of an accident through no fault of their own and it was on the basis of no fault. Now we see through these changes creeping deterioration of that contract and my colleague Grant Robertson and other speakers have given example after example of that. 
Holiday pay would do as an example—one example. If one is sick and goes to Work and Income and says: “I have an illness I need some sick leave.” I wonder whether members could tell me whether Work and Income would say to that person to first of all use all his or her holiday pay. Is that the case? 
Hon Member 
: Yes. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: Oh it is the case. Let us come to bereavement leave. In the situation where someone has an illness and applies to have access to bereavement leave is that person told to use his or her holiday pay first? If a member of Parliament breaks his or her leg is that member of Parliament told by Parliamentary Service that before he or she goes to the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) he or she must use up his or her holiday pay? Actually he or she is not told that for this reason: members of Parliament if they break a leg receive no pay cut at all. They do not go near ACC; they do not need to—not if they are going to be away for a week or two. One can be a parliamentarian with a broken leg; I have seen a number of them. 
There is a difference between people in different strata of society. If I am a meatworker and I break a leg my pay stops that day. If I am a member of Parliament and I break a leg my pay does not stop and unless I am away for a long time my pay will not stop. So you see we already have a situation where some people in society need not worry too much about accident compensation and the finer points about whether holiday pay is up for grabs. Members of Parliament are some of those people and yet we as a group of 120-odd people are deciding by majority to remove the rights of a whole lot of others even though we do not even face the problem ourselves. 
National members should be actively defending this legislation for indeed I find it straightforwardly indefensible but there is not a word from them on these transition provisions in Part 2—or indeed much else in this legislation. We see National members doing the opposite: they are staying silent talking about a system being broken when it is making $1 billion profit a year and saying that we must move quickly to constrain the ability of people to get accident compensation for financial reasons. That is not the social contract. The social contract was never: “We’re going to take away the right to sue so long as we can afford it.” The social contract was that the right to sue goes and therefore we as a society will set out to get some social insurance running to ensure that if people are injured through accident they are held free from personal damage from that. No longer is that the case. 
These days under this legislation meatworkers should get injured late in the season because if they are injured early in the season it is too bad. The way the calculations are done means that those injuries will be thoroughly improperly and incompletely compensated. The meatworker’s fault was to get injured early in the season; if a meatworker is injured late in the season then there is less fault visited on that private individual. That is not a social contract; that is penny-pinching— 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: Cheating. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: —and it is cheating. What is more it is cheating on a group of people who are already limited in their ability to secure 12 months’ income because of the very nature of their seasonal work. 
Entrenched unfairness is being legislated here and that is not nice. It feels ugly and it is also in my view something that should be defended. I think that the people who are about to do this to the public of New Zealand have an obligation to get up and say why they are doing it. They have an obligation to give the other point of view an obligation to say there are reasons behind this legislation and here they are. This is supposed to be a debating chamber. It is not. It is an echo chamber because there is nothing coming back from the Minister in the chair the Hon Pansy Wong and there is nothing coming back from the so-called staunch supporters in National every one of whom will vote yes to pass this legislation. Not one of those members is getting up to defend it. Is there a word for that which begins with “c” that I am not allowed to use? There may be. 
Let me just ask another question. Why is the hearing loss threshold of 6 percent defensible? Why is that defensible? Does that mean that the Government has come to the view that all hearing loss of 1 2 3 4 and 5 percent must be age related and that hearing loss beyond that may be accident linked or injury linked? 
Hon David Parker 
: No because that is over and above the 6 percent. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: OK so I am advised by one of my colleagues the Hon David Parker who is our spokesperson on ACC and who knows about these things that the way it is done is that age-related hearing loss is estimated first and then 6 percent is added. That means that if one is an older New Zealander one needs to have a hearing loss of somewhat more than 6 percent before the scheme will operate. So if hearing loss that is age related is already taken into account why is the figure not 0 percent? Let us see if the Government can answer that. 
If it were to be 1 percent that means that the little wee accident was not compensatable. That itself is a break of the social contract. But we have got ourselves up to 6 percent. I suspect that many people in the public arena are not aware that 6 percent hearing loss is substantial. It does not mean that someone hears 94 percent of everything; it does not mean that. It does mean that in a busy society where there is a lot of incidental noise and where there may be more than one conversation running that hearing loss is very substantial under those circumstances. So we have a 6 percent threshold that was no doubt stolen from some other jurisdiction which no doubt did not have that social contract in the first place. 
This system is unique to New Zealand. It is unique in our history. It is the envy of the world. When one goes to Australia—I suspect the 6 percent threshold came from Australia did it not? 
Hon David Parker 
: Well it’s misrepresented! 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: Oh it has been misrepresented! It came from Australia but it became an aberration on the way over. It is a trans-Tasman aberration. If we go to Australia we will not find even the history of the social contract. How do we know? Because if we engage in conversation with any doctor in Australia he or she will say sooner or later: “Gosh we would like your accident compensation scheme because we would not have to self insure so much for our practice. We would not have to put up with ambulance-chasing lawyers. New Zealand does not have them but we have them in Australia.” Members must see that the system is different. Not only that but our scheme is known to be better. So why would one take a system that is known to be better proven to be better—in fact was there not a great big report in only 2008? 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: PricewaterhouseCoopers. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: A PricewaterhouseCoopers report. The scheme got a big tick was it? Am I right? 
Hon member 
: That’s right. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: There was a big tick for the scheme then a change of Government which said: “Oh let us change it.” That has to be defended in this House. National members of Parliament must get up and answer that. I ask my colleagues across the Chamber what PricewaterhouseCoopers got wrong. What did it get wrong? It was a massive report and what did the National Party in Opposition say at the time? Did the National Opposition members say it cost too much? 
Hon David Parker 
: Probably. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: They probably did say it cost too much. Did they read it? Who knows? The big review said things were pretty good with the accident compensation scheme and only months later it somehow has all turned to custard. That is not believable it is not credible it is not defensible and therefore it must be defended by the people who will vote for this legislation to come forward. I say to them that they have an obligation to get up and put their point of view—we will listen to it—so that the public can see what the other side of the debate looks like.