Moroney Sue: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Moroney Sue: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 It is a pleasure to get a call albeit under urgency for a bill that the Labour Party does oppose and that is why we are putting forward new Part 3. When legislation is done in urgency when it is rushed through the political process and when the Government is not listening to what people are saying then that is the very time that reviews are so important. When legislation is made in haste; when it is not being considered seriously deliberately and using the normal process that is the very time when what the House calls unintended consequences occur. There could be no more serious time for unintended consequences to occur than when they affect some of the most vulnerable in our society and that is people who have been injured. Often or mostly they are injured through no fault of their own. 
I hope the Committee will seriously consider new Part 3. We know of a policy change made in the area of sensitive claims under the accident compensation scheme. It has not been a legislative change made by the National Government but a change to the practice of how people with sensitive claims are treated. It has not even been a legislative change but the numbers are horrific in terms of the people who are no longer getting treatment for that very important issue. For example in the area that I come from Hamilton in the Waikato the number of sensitive claims that has been accepted by ACC has reduced in the order of 70 percent. So 70 percent more of those people in our community are wandering around without the counselling help they need after having suffered serious sexual abuse. That is an example of the sorts of numbers affected through just a simple policy change that has happened under the National Government. 
This bill makes legislative changes that will have serious consequences for people who suffer hearing loss through their work. It will have serious implications for the families of people who have committed suicide or perhaps people who have attempted suicide themselves. We do not know what the impact of these legislative changes will be. I have heard no information coming from the Government on any research or any evidence that it has been able to put before the Committee to say what the impact of these changes will be. So under urgency into the unknown goes this Government once again with the most vulnerable in our society. 
Yet I hope Government members pick up this opportunity to say that they are only human that maybe they have not got this right and therefore that they would like to take up the Hon David Parker’s proposal to review what the impact of these changes has been annually not only in 12 months’ time but also in another 12 months’ time and then annually thereafter—assuming that this very bad legislation goes ahead and that all those on the Government benches still go ahead and vote for this bill even though some Government members and this has been quite obvious from their speeches over the course of the last 24 hours do not actually understand what they are voting for. It is the strong contention of members on this side of the Chamber that because of the very vulnerable nature of the people being considered here and of the way in which their rights are being retrenched under this legislation we need not only a one-off annual review but also continual annual reviews. 
The nature of hearing loss in particular is that it is not immediately obvious what the impact is for the people who are affected by it. Hearing loss is one of those things that happens gradually over a period of time and often people do not even realise when they first start suffering occupational hearing loss that it is in fact happening to them. 
Before I was elected to Parliament the job that I undertook was training health and safety reps in the workplace. So I am absolutely appalled that this legislation is going through because I heard the stories every day of my working life before I came into this place about the impact on not only working people but also their families and workmates when things go wrong at work. These are not isolated situations. If anyone in this Chamber were to get a group together of 25 randomly selected New Zealanders in a room then he or she would find that every single one of those people has had some claim before the Accident Compensation Corporation at some stage in their life. That is how all-encompassing this issue is.