Collins Judith: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Collins Judith: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20290] 
JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 The point has been made—and I will repeat it because it is a good point—that when we have bills like this or any bills they should have a title that clearly shows where to look to find a particular piece of law. In this Parliament all we do is create law and it is very important from an access to justice point of view that the name of a bill reflects fairly what is in it. Frankly the title Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) does not cut the mustard. 
There is one issue I would like to speak about and it concerns treatment. It concerns me somewhat in these final phases of the Committee stage. When we look at what is now to be defined as “treatment” in terms of what we used to call “medical misadventure” but we will now call “treatment injury”—which takes away any concept at all that anyone might be to blame for anything—there is provision under section 33(1)(f) inserted by clause 13 for the provision of prophylaxis. One of the great things about having a doctor in the House is that I quickly looked at this and said to my colleague Dr Paul Hutchison: “Paul doesn’t this include condoms?” and he said: “Well yes it does but it also includes antibiotics and other things that are used to prevent infection or other things from passing across.” The trouble is that it does not seem to me that there is sufficient definition to say that we are talking just about antibiotics and issues like that because treatment by its nature according to the definition does seem to include the provision of condoms. I cannot for the life of me believe that that is what the Minister in the chair Ruth Dyson intends. Perhaps I am reading it wrong. I am hopeful that the Minister will take a short call to clarify the issue because it does seem slightly bizarre. 
In particular I mention a comment that we made in our minority report about the cost of this. Whatever we do with these sorts of provisions we need to be aware that someone pays a cost and the someone happens to be the employer and the employee. Everything that is paid by the employer in terms of compliance costs means that employees end up with smaller wages. It is one of the reasons why people on the average wage can shift out of this country go off to Australia and get themselves $9000 per year more than they can in New Zealand for the same job. 
The Health Committee had some estimates from the Department of Labour but frankly the stated cost of $8.6 million annually with a one-off cost of $12 million is a significant amount of extra compliance cost—and of course we do not know just how open-ended it will be. Some of us can remember that the domestic purposes benefit when it was first being promoted was going to cost a few million dollars a year and now it is a massive drain on the finances of this country. Sometimes with the best of intentions we may think that things will cost only a certain amount. Unfortunately the Minister has not taken a call on this issue. I would like to give her that opportunity.