Parker David: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled 
Parker David: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled 
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Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 I will talk to clause 53 of the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill which relates to transitional provisions concerning gradual process workplace disease. This clause relates to a change that is being made to the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Act. The change disentitles some people who can currently prove a workplace accident relating to gradual process disease. After this transitional provision comes into effect they will not be able to. I will explain to those who are interested the nature of the change that is being made and how it is unfair. 
Currently it is quite hard to prove a work-related gradual process disease or infection. If someone has an illness there are often a lot of possible causes. If someone has an illness that may be related to exposure to chemicals at work or on a farm for example then there is some onus on that person to show that exposure to those chemicals caused the disease and not some other cause. I would have thought that is quite a hard albeit appropriate test to meet. One of the ways in which the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) goes about assessing whether this link is sufficiently proven is through ministerial advisory groups of experts who look into these things. As the quality of science improves and their knowledge as to these links grows the decisions that are made by ACC no doubt become better. Incidentally another provision in this bill does away with those advisory boards which to me seem necessary and ought not to be disposed of. 
My point in respect of clause 53 is that in addition to the existing test this bill introduces another impediment to getting cover. That impediment is found in clause 7 which does not come into effect until the transitional provisions of clause 53 apply. The new test in clause 7 says that people will not be able to get compensation for work-related disease caused by exposure to chemicals if that same chemical is found to any material extent in their non-employment activities or environment. So if someone now has exposure at work to chemicals that cause disease and if that exposure causes a disease then that person can get accident compensation. But if he or she has material exposure outside of work—at home—the Government will deem that that person did not get the disease from work. It does not have to be greater exposure at home; it just has to be some material exposure. 
I could understand if employers were saying that they were paying for the cost of non - work-related exposure to these chemicals that it was too tough and that maybe there should be some sort of pro-rata assessment of whether that injury should fall inside or outside the employers’ compensation scheme. I can see myself being persuaded that if there were partly a work cause and partly a non-work cause then the compensation should be proportionately divided and put to the different accounts. Indeed if there is no compensation for work-related disease partly caused outside of work then a person might not get full compensation if part of it was caused outside work. But to completely take away cover from someone who has a work-related disease because some of the disease was not work-related is just wrong. It is unfair. It denies the reality that this person has suffered work-related disease as a consequence of exposure to chemicals at work. 
These things are real. I think that most people who run constituency clinics will have met people who worked in photographic processing shops; that problem is dying out as technology changes. They were being exposed to the chemicals— 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: Glutaraldehyde. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: I am told glutaraldehyde is the chemical; I do not know that from memory. Those chemicals cause skin problems and respiratory problems and in some cases people have terribly affected lives. These consequences are not minor; they are life-changing events. This clause would say that amateur photographers—presumably some of these employees are amateur photographers—would no longer be entitled to compensation relating to personal injury caused by gradual process disease or infection as a consequence of exposure to those chemicals at work despite the fact that the vast majority of their exposure to those chemicals was at work and therefore was the cause of their injury. That in my opinion goes too far. As I said I could understand an argument to rateably apportion the cost between the two different causes but to say that just because there is a material effect from the outside-of-work exposure those people should have no right to any compensation for their work-related injury goes too far. 
Again the question is: why are we doing this? We already know that work-related accident compensation levies for employers in New Zealand are lower than they are anywhere in the world that we are aware of. The only information the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee had in that respect was the comparison with Australia which clearly showed that the costs for our employers are already lower. So what is the justification for reducing them further by effectively excluding cover for these real injuries? 
John Boscawen said that costs are going up and therefore we should truncate the scheme. It is true that medical costs are going up. They are going up for a number of reasons. There has been high inflation in the health sector which I think will abate and ever more sophisticated procedures are available to ensure that people live healthier longer lives in the face of injury and disease. Those procedures cost and as a country we face the pressures of meeting that additional cost. 
We make choices as to how the extra wealth that is generated in a society is allocated. We are a country that grows wealthier over time. Every country as it grows wealthier chooses if they have a bit of disposable income or more disposable income to spend more of that disposal income every year on health care because health care is so intrinsically important to quality of life. If people have the choice of spending more on quality of life—if they can afford it—they do. As a country we can afford to pay more for quality of life every year and we do. We should not be stuck in some 1950s paradigm that says that that was all we could afford back then and therefore all we should try to aspire to afford these days is the level of cover that we used to have. That is not the way for New Zealand. We want improving quality of service in medical services in New Zealand as the economy improves and as technology improves. That is called progress. Some of the comments we heard from John Boscawen seemed to be that the reality is that medical procedures all become too expensive and we just have to put a ring-fence round it and say that we are sorry but people will not get anything more. I disagree with that view. I think that we can as a country pick up some of these additional costs because we become wealthier as our economy grows. 
That is not to say that we ought not to be prudent and to try to manage costs. I certainly agree that we ought to maximise rehabilitation so as to minimise those costs but I am certainly not one of those people who thinks that we should have as an objective keeping expenditure in these areas static because in reality we cannot unless we freeze ourselves in time and slowly become a backward country. 
I will also talk about the residual levy. I agree with some provisions in this part of the bill. There is a problem with the levy-setting process of the accident compensation scheme. Changes in rates of return can have an enormous effect on the capital pool that is needed to fund some of these old residual claims over time and therefore the change in the parameter of expectation as to what the rate of return on investments will be for the next 20 years might go from 5 percent to 4.5 percent per annum. That change has an effect worth many billions of dollars on the pool of assets that is required to be held by the scheme to meet the long-term life of those old claims. That number bounces around every year and causes real volatility in the levy that is set for those residual claims particularly as we approach the end of that funding. We are doing two things here: we are extending the date from 2014 to 2019 which is good; and we are putting that date in stone which I think is a wise policy decision by the Government and I congratulate it.