Woodhouse Michael: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Woodhouse Michael: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:9071] 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) 
: 
 I assure the member who has just resumed her seat Carol Beaumont that we were listening albeit having a significant hearing loss of my own it was difficult for me to hear at times. It is a hearing loss that is congenital and probably not helped by the fact that I blew a rugby whistle for about the last 11 years and shot a rifle for the last 30. But if an audiologist had said to me that even one skerrick of that hearing loss was work related it would have been accepted for accident compensation cover and I do not think that is appropriate. So I support the changes in the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill. I will talk more about them in the committee stage of the debate. Carol Beaumont’s speech reinforced the polarised views that a committee that is otherwise in a pretty good cooperative state had through the submissions. That rhetoric lacked quite a bit of substance frankly. We had claims about breaches of International Labour Organization conventions that New Zealand has not even signed up to. There were claims that the changes proposed were in breach of the underpinning principles of the scheme even when some of those changes were to realign scheme entitlements with the royal commission report. Self-inflicted injuries were one such example. 
I will come back to the Woodhouse report in a moment but one of the games the submitters and even the committee members played was the game of “my statistic is bigger than your statistic”. A really good example of that concerned motorcycle accident rates and it came up during protests about motorcycle levies. It was not necessarily directly related to this bill but those protests became the sort of vanguard of disaffection at the proposed changes in accident compensation. But it was a bit ironic really because the protest was about levy increases at the same time as motorcyclists also rallied against the perceived cuts to their entitlements that this bill might give effect to. But the worst of the statistic-versus-statistic exchanges were about the annual reports of Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) and those exchanges continue in the House today. The Labour Opposition has attacked the veracity not only of the data that its Ministers put their signatures to but also of the people who prepared the data. They attacked the employees of ACC the actuaries and the Auditor-General’s staff which is a shame on that Opposition. 
Even now the Opposition denies there is a financial problem. We have heard of climate change deniers but now we have a large group in this House who are finance change deniers including the previous Minister for ACC Maryan Street who put her signature to a $2.4 billion deficit and who now denies that that is a problem. In her call she described insolvency as a situation when liabilities exceed assets but she did not say why that was not a problem to her. She thinks that all a Government has to do is reach its hand into the pockets of hard-working levy payers even at a time when economic conditions do not warrant it. When the reality of the sort of nonsense that went on over the last 9 years started to bite and the last financial report presented the House with a $4.8 billion deficit the Opposition still denied the problem—finance change deniers. 
I do not intend to cover-off any of the specific changes in this reading; I will leave that for the Committee stage of the bill. But I will touch on some of those underpinning principles and the suggestions by some that the changes in this bill are against the principles of the royal commission report. I wonder whether many who have referred to the Woodhouse report have actually read it. I suggest they do read it because it is a very illuminating insight into a different time and a different place. The Woodhouse report contains the five cornerstone principles that Rahui Katene listed—principles that I and my party very strongly support. But it also gives some pretty revealing insights into the society of that time and the reasons why workers’ compensation was framed in the way it was. I will give members an example: clause 413 talks about cover for women which is something that Ms Beaumont is very strongly in favour of of course. I quote: “And we have attempted to resolve the administrative problem associated with minor mishaps to housewives by recommending that for 14 days their families might well take the strain themselves.” The report was replete with references in the masculine form not only because that was the way reports were written in those days but because it simply did not contemplate that women would participate in the workforce to the degree they do now—much less get injured. The report was written about cover for external force injuries to men who worked on building sites railway lines in forests and so on. 
Forty-two years later life has changed considerably and the royal commission report in my view is simply not able to cover all the new issues that the scheme faces: treatment injuries sexual abuse and occupational overuse syndrome. Whole industries like the information technology industry were not even around in 1967. The principles that that report established are strong and enduring but we should be careful not to deify the report. We should not treat it like some sacred cow the details of which will endure for all time. The report simply is not capable of being that. Even from the financial perspective the whole scope of the scheme as anticipated by the royal commission report has changed so much that now it is unrecognisable. The appendix to that report contains an estimate of scheme costs and if we compare those costs—even on a cash basis only and forget the arguments about full funding—what it reveals about the way in which the scheme has grown beyond any sort of comprehension that the report authors contemplated is quite compelling. If we take the figures in appendix 9 and plot them against population growth and inflation we find that while there has been an eightfold increase in average salaries in New Zealand there has been a fifty-onefold increase in the cash costs per person to manage the scheme. Most of that growth has occurred in the last 5 years. By any measure that growth requires a response and this bill is a very good start along that path. I support the intentions of the bill I look forward to debating the merits of those individual clauses in the Committee stage and I commend the bill to the House.