Moroney Sue: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Health and Safety Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 25 August 2015. Volume:708;Page:6132. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): I really do thank you for giving me this call Mr Chair because in my first call on this part Part 6 I was about to put a question to the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety that I really would like an answer to. I raised a similar question around a different clause that had the same effect in Part 5 but the responsible Minister was not in the chair at the time and I really do feel that if he had been he would have given us an answer. There was a serious discussion that the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee had in quite a lot of detail around the injury prevention programmes that are funded or jointly undertaken by ACC and WorkSafe. I am referring now to clause 249 of Part 6 which amends the Accident Compensation Act. I was kind of in mid-flight asking the Minister this question when my last call finished so I really appreciate the opportunity to put this question directly to the Minister.Where the select committee came to was that we were so concerned to make our views known about this that we included it in the commentary. We got some advice from the officials about what it would mean and the reason for that is that I had raised a concern that where currently ACC injury prevention programmes do have a requirement on them to reduce the overall impact of ACC levies on the work account—and that some would say is right and proper for ACC; I have got a question mark in my mind about that—what this bill does is that it actually applies that same thinking to WorkSafe injury prevention programmes. Why should I be worried about that? Well actually sometimes a good workplace injury prevention programme will actually increase the impact of ACC levies on the work account.How does it do this? Well it does this in two instances in the main. The first is the perverse and strange impact on the ACC work account levy—the fact that some injuries are so expensive that if we are paying to support the person with the injury for the rest of their life it can be more expensive than if the injury that they incurred had killed them at their workplace. As harsh as it is to discuss that in the debating chamber it is just a reality that sometimes if someone dies in the workplace which is what we are trying to prevent that is less expensive for the work account of ACC than if they were seriously injured. If they are injured when they are a young person it could have a lifetime effect on the work account of the ACC levies that is much larger than the payment that would be made in fact to their family if they had died. We do not want that. We do not want that perverse incentive.We want to make sure that these workplace incentive programmes are saving people from dying that they are bringing down that dreadful workplace fatality record that we have here in New Zealand and that we are seeing that the deaths in agriculture which we know have totalled 104 over the last 5 years are reduced. So we do not want a workplace injury prevention programme that somehow does not pass muster because it cannot necessarily prove that it is going to actually lead to a reduction in the impact of the levy rates on the work account. That is example one.Example two is with regard to occupational disease. These are things that people may not even know about at the time. A good workplace injury prevention measure might actually increase the education and should actually increase people’s knowledge and education about occupational disease and the impacts on that and it might lead to therefore more claims being made against the ACC levy work account. People understand that the symptoms that they are displaying some years down the track from the exposure—it might have been a chemical exposure. It might have been an exposure to asbestos. There are many kinds of hidden things in our workplaces that can cause people occupational disease and that is often a long way down the track.