Roy Heather: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Roy Heather: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
[Volume:625;Page:20267] 
HEATHER ROY (ACT) 
: 
 I would like to carry on from where the National Party member finished. The costs are a grave worry and I highlighted that point in the first reading debate and also in the second reading debate yesterday. It is becoming quite a pattern that every time we arrive at the Committee stage of any Government bill we seem to have a Supplementary Order Paper that introduces all sorts of new things. There is no opportunity for public scrutiny or ability for the select committee to look carefully through the new amendments that might arise and goodness knows what they might be. 
Supplementary Order Paper 348 inserts a proposed new clause 26A adding subsection (4) to section 167 of the principal Act. The subsection states: “The funds in the Employers’ Account must also be applied to meet the costs of entitlements …”. The Supplementary Order Paper also inserts a new clause 28A. It adds subsection (6) to section 197 which states: The funds in the Residual Claims Account must also be applied to meet the costs of entitlements for personal injury …”. Further new clause 29A adds subsection (4) to section 201 which states: “The funds in the Self-Employed Work Account must also be applied to meet the costs of entitlements for personal injury …”. The Health Committee should have been given the opportunity to scrutinise those amendments to consider their implications. Instead they will be rushed through tonight. I certainly will be opposing them on behalf of the ACT party purely on principle because we have not been able to scrutinise them properly. Also the public has not been given the opportunity to see them. 
The costs of this bill are a big unknown. There is a big question mark over what they will be. There is likely to be an increase in the costs of the scheme. In fact we were given information from the Department of Labour estimating a transitional cost of $12 million and an annual cost increase of $8.60 million. The department broke that figure down. Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) actuaries estimated that the corporation would accept around 1000 additional treatment injury claims each year with an average fully funded cost of approximately $9000 per claim. That was in the evidence they gave us. But we see when we look a bit further down the page that the Department of Labour background report had outlined the fact that it was very difficult to obtain data upon which to base claim number predictions and their costings. So they are saying on the one hand that we will have this many extra claims and it will cost X amount of dollars with a total cost of $8.7 million a year and on the other hand that really they have no idea and that this is in fact guesswork. This is something we should be very worried about. 
So the shortage of information about costs should be noted. It is also noted that the scheme is not funded in entirely the same way as other ACC accounts. That is where I am quite concerned about proposed new clauses 26A 28A and 29A on the Supplementary Order Paper. At the moment medical misadventure is dependent on levy income from the earners account with just under half coming from the non-earners account—that is Parliament’s appropriation. There are likely to be calls to reform the funding arrangements in the future and I think that those should be highlighted too. If the treatment injury fund is to become more closely aligned with other accounts in terms of funding—and I think the indications might well be there on the Supplementary Order Paper but they are something that none of us has had the opportunity to look at and investigate properly—then we should expect levies on health professionals to increase in the future. I think that is most likely to happen despite the fact that the Minister has said on many occasions that there was absolutely no intention to levy health professionals more to cover the increased costs. The Minister also said that the earner and non-earner accounts will be increased to cover the costs. 
So quite where the money—that unknown figure—will come from we do not know. We are really having a great deal of difficulty estimating how this whole thing will be funded. The taxpayer should be very concerned about that. We are just expected to take the Minister’s word for it that none of those things will happen. The bill is also quiet on compliance costs and several times during the process many of us on this side of the Chamber asked for a regulatory impact statement. The Minister said it would be coming. We have asked for it but we still have not seen it. We are expected to just pass this bill without having access to any of that very important information one would expect to have with any bill that will see an increase of costs because of taxpayer funding. Either the regulatory impact statement has been done and it is too scary to show anybody or it has not been done.