Street Maryan: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled 
Street Maryan: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled 
[Volume:660;Page:9200] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I appreciate being given a chance to speak further on Part 2 of the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill. I will address two things in particular. I will pick up where I left off in my last contribution about work-related gradual process injury. There are just a couple of things I am sure that members opposite are not aware of; they may not have included them in their slash-and-burn approach to accident compensation if they were. 
Work-related gradual process injuries and in particular hearing loss were decreasing at the time that I had the privilege of holding the portfolio of the Minister for ACC. The point about that is that a range of workers have moved through their lives and they might have started by working in a quarry or an engineering plant in the 1940s or the 1950s when things like industrial deafness and injury through repeated exposure to noise and machinery were not as well researched or understood as they are now. Typically people with work-related hearing loss are men in their late 50s 60s or 70s. They are able to trace back perfectly easily to the start of their hearing loss which is not age-related but because of their occupation. A doctor could just look at them and ask where they worked when they started work. They might say they worked in an engineering plant or a quarry and the doctor would know for certain that the hearing loss was work-related and that it happened gradually over time. 
People who have benefited from receiving hearing aids have moved through the system so the number of those appearing in recent years has been declining. One of the worrying things—and this is where I want to come to my point about the 6 percent threshold on hearing loss before one is eligible for entitlements under this bill—is that we were beginning to see an increase in the number of young people emerging with work-related hearing loss. I would be very interested to know if the Minister has any awareness of this data and this research or if the Associate Minister for ACC Pansy Wong who is in the chair could speak to that. The concern is that young people particularly those working in social environments—I am thinking of nightclubs and bars where it is not “cool” to wear industrial earmuffs when one is serving drinks behind a bar—are exposed to continual loud music and noise. Suddenly we were beginning to see an increase in the number of young people with work-related hearing loss. This Government is now saying that those young people will have to demonstrate that they have a 6 percent or greater hearing loss before they are eligible for any entitlement. 
I will make another point about the hearing loss issue. One of the things that Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) did very successfully was to leverage down the cost of hearing aids. It used to be that it did not matter at what level one’s hearing was impaired and it did not matter whether it was a high-range or low-range sound that one’s hearing was impaired at audiologists would prescribe a one-size-fits-all hearing aid. Technology has moved on and now hearing aids are devised to accommodate low-range high-range or mid-range sound and can be tailored appropriately. It is true that the cost of hearing aids has escalated hugely but it is also true that the industry was absolutely gouging the price of them. ACC was able because of its huge size and the number of claimants it had needing hearing aids—