Bradford Sue: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
Bradford Sue: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 2) — First Reading 
[Volume:644;Page:13955] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 Overall this bill makes a number of beneficial changes to the current accident compensation scheme and the Green Party will be supporting it to go to the select committee. However we believe that this bill should be improved in four key areas and we will reconsider our support in the future depending on whether at least some of the issues we are concerned about are addressed positively in some way during or after the select committee process. 
The first of our concerns is in regard to the cover relating to mental injury. Although we welcome the proposal to extend cover to mental injury caused by a traumatic event experienced while at work we think that this bill should go a lot further. The Green Party believes in fact that cover should be broadened out to include all mental injury covered by accident work-related gradual process disease or infection or treatment. This would effectively restore the position that existed under the Accident Compensation Act 1982 before National’s so-called reforms to the scheme in the 1990s. 
Getting down to the detail of the bill it seems to me particularly anomalous that cover will extend under this legislation for example to a person who suffers a mental injury as a result of seeing someone die in a car crash while at the same time a health professional who suffers a similar mental injury as a consequence of witnessing a series of deaths and other trauma as a result of his or her work—a paramedic or someone like that—will not get cover because his or her problems are caused by a series of events and are not a one-off experience. So at a minimum the Green Party would like to see the bill amended to correct this particular anomaly. 
The second area about which we have particular concerns relates to cover for work-related gradual process disease and infection. Although we are pleased with the provisions contained in clause 10 of the bill as far as they go we believe that they fail to address the most serious inadequacy of the current legislation as highlighted by the Ministerial Advisory Panel on Work Related Gradual Process Disease or Infection which reported back to the Government in March 2006. This issue is the difficulty faced by claimants in proving where there is no clearly separate and antecedent physical injury that conditions such as regional pain syndrome or multiple chemical sensitivity are personal injuries as defined in the principal Act even when the causation test under section 30 is met. The bill should be amended so as to ensure that claimants who have conditions such as these but without a discrete antecedent physical injury and who meet causation criteria should be able to get cover for work-related gradual process disease or infection injury. 
We would also like to see cover extended to those who contract serious illnesses or impairment as a result of being the children or grandchildren of workers who have been exposed to toxic chemicals such as dioxins. So-called third-party cover should be made available to these people without any further mucking around. Although some of the issues I am discussing here are highly technical as is the case with a lot of accident compensation law I remind the House that behind the sometimes mind-bending detail of law and regulation are real people who are suffering daily because of the often unfair and even at times cruel way in which so much of our accident compensation system still operates despite improvements made since 2000. 
The third area of particular interest to the Green Party in this bill is that of vocational rehabilitation and we are pleased to see that the circumstances under which vocational rehabilitation can be provided are extended. However the extensions all relate to people who are entitled to receive weekly compensation or who would have been entitled to receive it but for the fact that they qualify for national superannuation. The original Act and the new bill completely ignore the needs of people who may have little chance of finding employment without vocational rehabilitation but who are denied weekly compensation because they are non-earners or not potential earners as defined in the Act at the time of their personal injury. People in this situation often end up languishing on a sickness or invalids benefit for a considerable period of time or on no benefit at all if they have a partner with significant earnings. If they do qualify for an invalids benefit they may potentially be able to access the training incentive allowance through the Ministry of Social Development but others will have no support for vocational rehabilitation whatsoever. Often such people end up in debt through a student or private loan just in order to have any prospect at all of getting back into the workforce. We would like to see the bill amended by providing for an obligation on the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) to provide vocational rehabilitation for claimants who cannot get weekly compensation but who are vocationally and medically assessed as having little chance of getting full-time work with an earning capacity similar to their earlier employment without such rehabilitation. 
The final area of particular interest to us is that of vocational independence. We welcome the provision in this bill to require occupational assessors to take into account earnings before the claimant’s incapacity occurred and I hope that this should preclude ACC from forcing highly skilled people off weekly compensation and into inappropriate low-wage jobs. Our overarching policy in this area is that the vocational independence provisions of the Act should be repealed altogether. Losing one’s job is still at times a consequence of injury and it is not fair that someone should lose his or her compensation because even though that person is medically capable of some types of employment he or she has the skills to undertake that person cannot find a job in those areas due to the state of the job market at the time. We believe that the vocational independence assessment should be abolished. Provisions already exist in the Act for the corporation to negotiate or if the claimant does not agree to deem certain activities to be contained in an individual’s rehabilitation plan. Job search requirements can be one such deemed or negotiated activity under current law and people can be booted off compensation if they do not take reasonable steps to obtain a job. The extra step of vocational independence assessment is not necessary and is a very blunt instrument. 
Although availability of appropriate work may not be such a big issue at the moment in the current economic climate this will not always be the case just as it was not the case during much of our recent history. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I was aware of many claimants who were exited from weekly compensation and who then spent months if not years unemployed because there were no jobs available for them for which they were either vocationally or medically suited. The loss of employment such people suffered was a result of personal injury yet through no fault of their own they found themselves without a job without compensation and receiving either an unemployment a sickness or invalids benefit or no benefit at all. Some people are of course still in this situation to the present day. 
We would like to make a number of other improvements to this bill but I will not take up the House’s time with them now as I am sure we will have plenty of good submissions on these and related matters at the select committee. I look forward to the select committee process and to hearing what people who have a deep interest in the matters covered by this bill have to say. I hope that despite the unfortunate time of the year affected individuals and organisations will find the time and energy to make submissions to the select committee. As I said earlier this bill does make some progress towards improving our accident compensation system but there is a long way to go before we are even close to meeting the Woodhouse principles. The Green Party is supporting this bill in going through its first reading because of the useful steps forward it takes but we will reserve our position in later votes depending on whether we can make any progress on at least some of the matters I have talked about today.