Turner Judy: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Turner Judy: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:634;Page:6014] 
JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I rise on behalf of United Future to speak to the first reading of the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill. United Future will be supporting the bill going through to the select committee. However we are not averse to some of the provisions that were originally in the Accident Insurance Act of 1998 which National Party members hark back to; we suspect that the opportunity to engage with the private sector was never given enough time to bed down and that some opportunities in that area have been lost to us. But we recognise that this amendment bill is about addressing current problems with the current system. It is an opportunity to bring in some much-needed fairness and that is what we have focused our support on. We do not think that hand-wringing and looking back will make any measurable difference to particularly self-employed people who are currently faced with a lack of certainty over their accident compensation levies. 
I want to deal firstly with a comment made by the New Zealand First speaker regarding the renaming of the medical misadventure account to the treatment injury account. We all agreed that under the old system which was changed in a previous amendment bill—and I am pretty sure New Zealand First supported the change—when medical misadventure happened a considerable amount of time had to be taken to prove it had happened before the person who had suffered medical misadventure could get the compensation and help that he or she needed and was looking for. A person would have to prove that medical misadventure had happened. There was a complete shift in thinking around that issue to an approach that acknowledged that a treatment injury had happened and that left the issue of blame to the professional bodies that dealt with that and got on with the job of making sure the person in need of support and compensation received them in a timely way—hence the change of name from the medical misadventure account to the treatment injury account. The need to change the name of the account as the Green member suggested was overlooked during the passage of the previous amendment bill and we are tidying that up right now. 
It is really good that we are making work-related injuries more clearly defined and that the levies are set according to the risk posed by the activity that is intended to be undertaken rather than according to what has proved apparently to be the flawed approach of thinking that self-employed workers were particularly high-risk people just by virtue of being self-employed. Evidence has now been amassed to suggest that that is not true. Although it is true that there seems to be some clustering of self-employed people around particular high-risk industries and occupations such as forestry fisheries and farming being self-employed in itself does not pose a higher risk. The Hon Mark Gosche rightly asked whether a self-employed plumber should have to pay more in accident compensation levies than a plumber who works for a company pays. Obviously the risks in those situations are identical and it therefore seems that that inconsistency does not make sense. 
However a Maori Party member raised a question that I also noticed as I was scrolling through the commentary on the bill. I hope this question can be answered in the select committee process. It seems that those who currently contribute to the employers’ account will now be propping up those who currently contribute to the self-employed account. I think that that situation is of concern and has a potential downside for one half of the equation. We need to look very seriously at that situation to make sure that what we set up is truly equitable and truly fairer—certainly that is the intention of the bill and we support that. 
I also think that questions raised by the National Party beg an answer and I am hopeful that the select committee process will explore those questions. I note that National members have talked about their concern that this legislation will somehow undermine prevention provisions that are currently in place. They are also concerned that its provisions will be less efficient than the current system and they picked up on some concerns that there will be less clarity in respect of funding than the bill purports to provide. 
United Future has one other concern—and it is probably our No. 1 concern—that we really want to hear some advice back from the select committee on and I imagine there will be some submissions around this issue. Our concern is about the transitional provisions that are intended so that the provision can take effect from 1 April 2007. The bill provides for the usual consultation process on the 2007-08 regulations to be bypassed because of insufficient time to consult on the regulations. We have a huge warning signal sounding that we would be bypassing a process that has always been robust and able to highlight any difficulties that may be unwittingly proposed. So we would like to hear some feedback on that particular issue. We think that measure is slightly alarming if not very alarming and I imagine that people who make submissions to the select committee will pick up on that issue and make some recommendations. I hope the select committee can find a way to weed-whack its way through that little problem and come up with an alternative approach so that we can move ahead with the very noble intention of improving the current provision of accident compensation as it exists right now—not what we might want the scheme to look like and what our policy may prefer it to look like—so that it is completely fair for all those who participate in the business community and are currently very disturbed at the lack of fairness that they experience on a day-to-day basis. 
United Future is happy to support the first reading of the bill.