Parker David: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Parker David: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:660;Page:9210] 
Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) 
: 
 Thank you Mr Chairperson. 
Chris Tremain 
: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. This is an amendment. It is not a debatable motion I understand. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Rick Barker) 
: Before I hear any more I will take some advice from the Clerk. I will refresh the situation. The Hon David Parker has an amendment to insert a new part. The Clerk advises me that because the amendment inserts a new part it is a separate question and therefore is debatable. 
Hon DAVID PARKER 
: New Part 3 which I and the Labour Party are urging Parliament to vote for puts a requirement on the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) to conduct an annual review of the effect of the amendment bill on injured people. We know that this amendment bill significantly cuts the entitlements of people who are injured. 
Most people in New Zealand never suffer a serious injury that has them off work long term thankfully. So thankfully most of us never experience the consequences of having a long-term injury and all the bad things that flow from that including loss of work pain lost opportunities and constrained abilities to do other things that one used to do before one’s accident. 
When we change the rules in fundamental ways—which is what the changes in this bill do—the impact of that on real people must be considered. During the debate on other parts we heard about the change whereby someone is deemed to be vocationally able and therefore is pushed off the scheme. But it is important that we recall that just because someone is deemed to be vocationally independent because in theory the person could work at some job for 30 hours per week it does not mean to say that he or she will get a job. It is absolutely clear that the “return to work following injury” rules under this scheme are already tough. 
In the minority report of the Labour members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee we referred to a published study that was undertaken by Hazel Armstrong and published in the  
New Zealand Law Review 
. It showed that even under current rules which are made tougher by this legislation people who were deemed ready for work and therefore were pushed off the scheme did not always get work. Indeed after quite a significant period the majority of them were still not in full-time work. 
In fact the study found that of those who were found to be vocationally independent and therefore pushed off the scheme only 32 percent of those who were deemed “work ready” had obtained full-time employment; 21 percent were in part-time employment; 22 percent were on a Work and Income benefit; and 10 percent were not working at all and were on no benefit probably because the person’s partner was of an income that meant the person was not eligible for any other benefit; and 9 percent remained on weekly compensation. 
So the vast majority of long-term injury sufferers did not go back into full-time work after being exited from the scheme. We want to see how this legislation plays out in terms of making the situation even harder on those long-term injured people. We want those additional costs to be assessed by ACC because the reality is that these changes do not cause costs following injury to go away; they just move them on to the injured person. 
It is not as though all of a sudden pushing those people off the scheme means they are miraculously cured. All it means is that they are no longer getting accident compensation. They are no longer entitled to further rehabilitation treatment. The person could have been in quite a well-paid occupation maybe a technical occupation and could be rehabilitated to the stage where he or she could stack shelves in a supermarket and then be pushed off the scheme and get no further assistance towards being rehabilitated to the point of being able to carry out his or her former job. 
The person may for example have been a labourer or a builder who was being paid more. After such a person is pushed off the scheme he or she does not get any further physiotherapy or other services or orthopaedic interventions to help him or her to get well enough to do their prior occupation. So effectively the cost of that rehabilitation either cannot be afforded or is paid for by the injured person. Those effects in the opinion of the Labour Party ought to be assessed and reported upon. That is why I put forward new Part 3 in the hope that the Committee will support it. Thank you.