Dyson Ruth: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Dyson Ruth: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:660;Page:9140] 
Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) 
: 
 I took a call earlier in this debate which is with respect to Mr Boscawen on Part 1 of the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill. It is not a general debate on the history of the Labour Party and ACT’s view of it. When I took an earlier call in this debate I said I wanted to talk about three points in Part 1 of this amendment bill. The third point was about work capacity—the great leap backwards that the Minister of ACC is instigating. Unfortunately the Minister took a call as I was just about to make a point that I had hoped he would agree with and say “You’re right. We’ll change this and make it fair.” But because he interrupted me he did not get a chance to do that. So perhaps he might. 
The point is this: under the amendment that the Minister is putting through the House under urgency there will no longer be a requirement through the work capacity assessment procedure to ensure that the job that the person is determined to be able to do is a real job. I started giving examples of real-life New Zealanders who under the old system that is now being brought back into our society by this amendment bill were determined to be fit to be a car-park attendant a lift operator or in one tragic example a person was assessed as being able to work for 30 hours as a tap dancer. This is not a made-up story; I really wish it were. I wish it were funny. I wish that that person had not had to go through the humiliation not only of being fit to be able to be a tap dancer for 30 hours a week and getting the letter from the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) congratulating that person’s move to independence but also the humiliation of appearing on the Paul Holmes show with one leg showing that that person would be really hard pushed to be a tap dancer. That person had one leg but because that had not been the result of an injury it was not classed as being an issue for the assessor. 
That is the shonky nonsense that that Minister his Government and his supporting ACT and Maori Party members will bring back into this House. Why would members do that? Why would members do that to good hard-working ordinary New Zealanders who happen to have had the misfortune of being injured at work? Why would the Minister his colleagues and his supporting parties want anyone to have to go through the humiliation of having an assessment for a job that does not exist? Why would they want them to have the humiliation of being told they are fit to be a car-park attendant or a lift operator and then have no income and no job to go to? Being fit to do a job that does not exist is no help when one has to go and pay one’s grocery bill. 
I urge the Minister in the remaining stages of this debate to put in a little Supplementary Order Paper so that we do not have to put good hard-working injured New Zealanders through that humiliation. Review and appeal by Paul Holmes and John Campbell should be a thing of the past. We should have legislation that is fair that treats injured workers with respect and that gives them the support and rehabilitation they deserve in order to get back to a job so they can support their families. This legislation does not do it. It is a disgrace and it hurts people who do not deserve to be hurt by our law. All they have done is to be injured; I cannot imagine why anyone would want to make their life worse for them. 
The other two points I want to talk on in the remaining time—perhaps I will have time for only one—are in relation to clause 8 in Part 1 which repeals section 31. Section 31 relates to the ministerial advisory panel on work-related gradual process disease or infection. I am puzzled to know why the Minister thinks he has enough knowledge given that it is clear that medical experts internationally look to each other for help. But the Minister thinks for some reason which is of a puzzle to every single person in this Parliament let alone to the public that he knows better than every medical expert around the world. The evolution of understanding about gradual process disease and infection has been rapid. If our legislation is not based on the best possible advice to the Government then people who are affected at work who have asbestosis lung cancer hearing loss and brain injury because they have been exposed to solvents may not get the compensation and rehabilitation that they deserve. 
In this area New Zealand is woefully ignorant. The establishment of this ministerial advisory panel sought to move us to a place where we could be part of the international debate and where we could look at young men whose brain cells have been turned to mush by exposure to solvents when they have been doing their apprenticeships as spray painters. We might be able to stop future young men having that damage occur to their brain cells. But no the Minister knows better. “Let their brain cells turn to mush.” is what he says. He does not need any advice. He knows better than any other person what is wrong. 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. 
Hon RUTH DYSON 
: Before we adjourned for the dinner break I was talking about the work capacity process which has been significantly amended in Part 1 of this legislation. The work capacity process determines whether people having been injured and gone through some rehabilitation and perhaps treatment are able to be exited from accident compensation—or moved to independence as this process used to be called—because they have recovered from their injury and have been rehabilitated to the point where they can now be moved off the scheme. In order to determine that exit those people go through a work capacity process. Currently the work capacity process requires people to be determined as being able to work for 35 hours a week. That is about the level that we would consider that somebody would be able to keep his or her family. On a 35-hour a week wage it would be a bit of a struggle if it were a low wage but that is the minimum at which we can expect that to happen. 
Those people have to be determined as having a real job and I will come back to that in a minute because I want to explain the difference between what Nick Smith and his colleagues in National ACT and the Maori Party are proposing to do to the integrity of this assessment and what the situation is currently. The third part is that under the current legislation what a person was earning before the injury is taken into consideration. So if one is in a very high-earning job and one has a significant injury one cannot be determined as fit to work in a very very low-paid job. I use the example of a Minister of the Crown. Ministers of the Crown get paid quite well compared with the rest of the country. If a Minister has an injury currently the Minister could not go through the work capacity assessment process and be determined as being fit to be a car-park attendant because that is not a real job in New Zealand as there are no car-park attendants; he could not be determined as being fit to be a lift operator because we no longer have lift operators in New Zealand; and he could not be determined to have any other capacity to do a job unless that job was one that a person could get in New Zealand. We are real about what capacity we have and about what jobs people might be able to get. 
But the other consideration that is currently in the law is that the earning capacity of the Minister is taken into account. So not only could the assessor not tell a Minister of the Crown that he is fit to be a lift operator—because there is no such job so he could not do that—but also the assessor could not say that the Minister is currently earning around $200000 a year but that in the work capacity assessment process the assessor has decided that the Minister could get a job cleaning a Minister’s office. The assessor could say that you are able to do that and that your injury has left you in such a state that you can do that job. Well you could not currently do that Mr Chairman—not you personally—unless you were a work capacity assessor. But an assessor could not say that one is off accident compensation and able to do a job that was well below one’s current earning capacity. That is a fair way to treat injured people. 
Under this amendment that goes. A person can be determined to have any job at all whether or not it is real so we could see the Minister having an injury and being determined as being fit to be an interplanetary traveller. That might be the job that he is determined fit to be in and I hope that he does well on that galactic travel. He will not have to be assessed on only 30 hours as currently the situation is for 35 hours a week. That is not bad on a Minister’s salary because it does not matter how many hours a Minister works but if one is on a minimum wage then the difference of 5 hours a week is huge. Nor does the assessor have to take into that calculation pre-injury earning capacity. 
The work capacity assessment process is in a word unfair. That is what Nick Smith is responsible for doing to injured workers in our country and Labour will oppose this every step of the way because it is just wrong. 
The final point I will make in this contribution to Part 1 is with regard to the clause that I most resent. It is the clause that I have found the Minister in the chair the Minister for ACC has inclined himself towards making the most distasteful comments on which are the comments that I personally know from holding conversations with people outside this Parliament have been extremely hurtful to them and their families. It is clause 10 which inserts new section 119 in the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Act. This part of the Act allows people who have wilfully inflicted an injury on themselves or people who have attempted or committed suicide to have entitlement granted to them if they are still alive or their family if they are dead. I would just ask the Minister one question and that is what he has against people who commit suicide. I ask what it is about their families that makes them less worthy of recognition under a comprehensive injury prevention rehabilitation and compensation scheme. I ask what it is about people who are dead because they have deliberately committed suicide who have deliberately considered that they wanted to end their life had had enough of this world and had nothing to live for quite literally. Why do those people’s families not deserve their earnings-related compensation and support for the funeral grant in the same way as the family of a person who falls asleep loses control of his or her car accidentally smashes into a tree and dies deserve that funeral grant? Why is that family more deserving than are the families whose husband wife son or daughter chose to take their life? 
How can that be fair? Well it is not fair. It is a huge insult to people who have ended their lives for an often inexplicable reason. It is made even worse because the family members of someone who has chosen to end his or her life always ask themselves whether they should have done something more to try to prevent that. They ask whether there was something that happened today yesterday last week or last year that they could have done differently that would have stopped their husband wife brother sister son or daughter from taking their own life. 
On top of the huge question that they have as to why they lost that person on top of the guilt they feel and on top of asking themselves what they could have done better—questions that cannot be answered because their family member is dead—the Minister is saying that because their brother sister son or daughter deliberately took their life rather than the death just happening in a car crash or in a plane crash or when that person was walking across the road this family is worth less to New Zealand society in terms of what support we should give them than the family that lives down the road. That is just a total disgrace. The Minister had the audacity to quote Sir Owen Woodhouse. Well Sir Owen may well have a comment to make and he is more than capable of making it directly to the Minister. But I have to say to the Minister that by saying that Sir Owen Woodhouse said originally—