Beaumont Carol: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Beaumont Carol: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 I want to take this call to look at a number of the provisions in Part 1 of the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill. I believe that a significant number of these provisions are not only unfair but also discriminatory. These points were raised quite strongly by a number of submitters and by our Human Rights Commission an organisation I have a great deal of confidence in. It seems not to have caused any concern across the Chamber. It has not led to any reconsideration of some of these provisions but let me just comment on a few points. 
First of all and I would be interested in the point of view of the Minister in the chair the Associate Minister for ACC. The Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) has a number of strategic priorities and some of these directly relate to this question of fairness and not being discriminatory which I believe a number of provisions in Part 1 are. Strategic priority one is “Ensuring New Zealanders have confidence in ACC”. That is ensuring all New Zealanders have confidence in ACC not just some New Zealanders. Of course those older New Zealanders with less than 6 percent hearing loss may not have such confidence in ACC any more after these provisions are put into place. 
Strategic priority three is that ACC needs to be “People-focused with good outcomes”. I guess those people who are being considered as rehabilitated if they can go back to work for 30 hours a week as opposed to 35 may not feel that that is such a good outcome for them. 
Then strategic priority four is “Open and fair access for all New Zealanders”. I will go through some of the provisions in the bill and see how they stack up against those strategic priorities. Fairness is something that is valued very highly on this side of the Chamber. It does not seem to me that the inequality that some of the provisions in this bill put into place is at all worrying to the Government. 
I am very glad that the Maori Party will be voting against this bill because it is quite clear that these changes—and this advice was given by Te Puni Kokiri—are likely to have a disproportionate effect on Maori as Maori are more likely to be employed in high-risk jobs to be from low-income families and to have higher rates of imprisonment. That is one of the inequities of the various provisions in Part 1. 
Then there is the issue of gender. When the National Council of Women submitted to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee it was very scathing about the fact that no gender analysis was done at all of the proposed impact of those changes on women. It was quite clear that there would be a disproportionate impact on women. It made this point in its submission: “women are more vulnerable to negative outcomes through a lack of social services and the stringent reductions set out in this Bill will reduce those services further. In addition many of the service providers—counsellors physiotherapists home care workers—are women who depend on ACC funding to deliver their services.” So there is a disproportionate impact on Maori and on women as a result of these changes. 
In my earlier contribution I also talked about the impact of the hearing loss threshold on older New Zealanders. For the reasons that I articulated before the fact that we are now much better at protecting our hearing in the workplace means that fewer younger people with hearing loss will be coming through. It is an issue for people who have already been in the workplace and who have worked in very noisy industries. By nature these are older New Zealanders. They are certainly being disproportionately impacted on by that provision. 
Then of course there are the implications for younger New Zealanders who are specifically affected by one of the provisions in this bill which I will come back to in a minute. This is very troubling. I do not know whether members opposite other than perhaps members of the select committee took the time to look at the submission of the Human Rights Commission. As I said at the start it is an organisation that I know that everybody in this Chamber has confidence in. The Human Rights Commission talked about a number of provisions. It talked about the reduction of potential weekly earnings for young people to 80 percent of the minimum wage. It talked about the implications of reducing compensation for loss of potential earnings to 80 percent of the minimum wage in situations where young people under 18 have been incapacitated before they have been able to work or while they are in full-time study that commenced before they turned 18 and continued until they were injured. 
Having analysed that provision the commission stated: “The difficulty is that under the Bill people in this position will continue to receive 80% of the minimum wage for the entire time that they are in receipt of the benefit as there is no provision for this to increase after a certain time (as in the case for example with low income employees). As a precipitating factor is their age this appears to be prima facie discrimination.” That was one of the provisions the commission talked about. 
It also talked about the reinstatement of the former approach for calculating long-term compensation for non-permanent employees. It noted: “The Regulatory Impact Statement admits that the effect of the change proposed in the bill will achieve a levy reduction of $13 million but that it will also reduce weekly compensation for some casual workers. To reduce compensation for seasonal and part-time workers is to effectively penalise one of the more vulnerable groups in society”—I repeat: it will effectively penalise one of the more vulnerable groups in society—“and one that is most in need of state support through a period of injury and rehabilitation since they are least likely to have savings to fall back on.” 
In other words they are people with hardly any money who are working in a precarious sort of arrangement who do not have savings and who are being disadvantaged by these provisions. Certainly the commission recommended the retention of the present formula. 
It also looked at the issue of increasing the threshold for hearing loss which I have talked about quite a lot tonight. I will not go back over all of that but I note that the commission stated: “There does not appear to be a percentage measure for any other form of personal injury. The Commission therefore considers that the requirement that a claimant has sustained 6% loss of hearing before being eligible for treatment amounts to intra-ground discrimination as it imposes different criteria for those claiming compensation for hearing damage as opposed to other forms of injury.” There we are: there is another example from the Human Rights Commission. 
The commission also talked about limiting compensation for self-inflicted injury and suicide. With regard to this provision it concludes that again “it results in intra-ground discrimination between mental and physical injury and creates an extra hurdle for people with mental injury.” Before it is too late I would urge members opposite if they have not already done so to look at the Human Rights Commission’s submission. It has gone into this in quite a lot of detail. It looked very closely at these provisions and it has found a significant number of them to be discriminatory. I think we are duty-bound in this House to take note of that and we are also duty-bound not to pass legislation that is discriminatory in the manner that the commission has noted. I would urge members opposite to look at that submission and see whether there is a chance that we can fix up those provisions. 
I would also like to talk about a number of other provisions tonight. The first relates to changes to vocational independence and this is where we are to substitute 30 hours for 35 hours. That will mean that a person’s capacity to engage for 30 hours in work for which he or she is suited by reason of experience education or training or any combination of those things will be deemed to be rehabilitated and able to go back into the workforce and therefore will be ineligible for accident compensation. Where that is combined with the provision relating to no longer having to take into account people’s pre-injury earnings it is a double whammy. It is a double whammy in the sense that one may be declared rehabilitated if one can work 30 hours a week so one can earn only 30 hours’ wages and at a rate significantly less than previously