Rahui Katene

Injury Prevention, Rehabilitation, and Compensation Amendment Bill

Rahui Katene, MP for Te Tai Tonga

Third Reading; Wednesday 24 February 2010; 8pm

The purpose of the Injury Prevention, Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill is stated as seeking to improve flexibility in the ACC scheme.

Flexibility is a wonderful thing. The definition of flexibility is to increase movement, with a bit of stretching. While physical flexibility may well be part of an effective ACC rehabilitation scheme the only stretching this Bill appears to indulging in is stretching of the truth.

For in improving flexibility what the Injury Prevention, Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill is actually doing is reducing entitlements and Crown costs which in turn will decrease access to ACC cover and lower the compensation for vulnerable populations.

Mr Speaker, we always say in the Maori Party that our past informs our present.

Two years ago in 2008, the Maori Party supported the Injury Prevention, Rehabilitation, and Compensation Amendment Bill which improved access and entitlements to compensation for some disenfranchised groups.

Those groups were itemised as seasonal/casual workers, those in non-standard work; those mentally injured by trauma; those between work; young people who are injured.

The responsibility to support all of these groups of vulnerable citizens is repealed today in the third reading of this Bill.

While the context provided for the bill is to make ACC "affordable and fair" the changes will disproportionately impact on vulnerable workers and low-income families as the Bill decreases access to cover and decreases the level of compensation to these claimants.

Mr Speaker, we are on the record as supporting the right of all of these groups to receive entitlement to compensation and cover. We are hardly likely to turn around and reneg on that support, a couple of years on.

But even further back into history, I think we can not go any further into this debate without looking at the very foundations of the scheme in the first place.

The Human Rights Commission went to the Select Committee reminding Parliament of the origins of ACC as a form of social insurance. They discussed the original scheme as being a trade off between the right to sue for compensatory damages and comprehensive, no-fault cover in the event of an accident.

As other speakers have noted, the ACC scheme was established following a 1967 Royal Commission into Workers' Compensation in New Zealand.

The Royal Commission was established to address the inadequacy of workers' compensation benefits as well as other anomalies around coverage. The report produced by the Commission, known as the Woodhouse Report recommended replacing tort liability for personal injury with a new, universal, 24- hour, no-fault approach to compensation and services to the injured.

The Woodhouse principles remain important today: community responsibility; comprehensive entitlement; complete rehabilitation; fair and real compensation; administrative efficiency;

Some forty years after it was introduced, it is impressive that a report by PriceWaterhouse Coopers on a review of the ACC scheme concluded that the current ACC scheme is consistent with the Woodhouse principles. But they went even further, and suggested ACC adds considerable value to NZ society and economy, and performs well in comparison internationally.

In fact in the last ten years, ACC's investment team has been one of the top performers, and has outperformed even the Cullen Superfund at far less the cost of fund managers.

Mr Speaker, I remind the House of our policy position regarding ACC. The Maori Party supports the right for employees to be treated fairly and with dignity; and to a safe and healthy workplace. Out interest is in holding employers accountable for preventable workplace related deaths and injury; indeed one of the private members bills we have developed is a Corporate Manslaughter Bill.

This Bill is based on similar and innovative legislation in the United Kingdom, The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, which has been described as a landmark in law. In the UK, companies and organisations can now be found guilty of corporate manslaughter as a result of serious management failures resulting in a gross breach of a duty of care.

Why would we put up such a bill? Quite frankly, there is a widespread acknowledgement in recent years that New Zealand has a serious problem to deal with. New Zealand sits in the 23rd position in the league table of fatal accident rates with much higher rates than the best countries.

In fact in a 2005 survey of the annual reports of 100 large companies for the Department of Labour, the following deficiencies were noted, despite thirteen years of the Health and Safety in Employment Act 1992.

Only 30% of the companies reported having arrangements for consulting employees on health and safety and only 15% of companies mentioned setting targets in health and safety.

So there are some big issues around the very concept of injury prevention that need to be addressed.

And of course a major one for the Maori Party is the fact that access for Maori has been consistently lower than for other groups.

The data available demonstrates that Maori receive treatment at a lower level to non-Maori, and where services were accessed they were accessed later and they exited programmes earlier. Even although ACC undertook initiatives to improve access through information programmes and better engagement with Maori communities, these programmes have not demonstrated significant success to close the delivery gap.

We have raised before the fact that Maori are disproportionately involved in very dangerous occupations such as forestry, road works, construction etc.

Our biggest fear about the possibility of privatisation is that private insurance companies would make the insurance premium higher than the current ACC levies, especially for dangerous jobs, because of the high possibility of getting hurt.

The insurance premium will more than likely be too high for Maori to be motivated to take out that insurance.

Then there is the problem of going to court, as insurance companies continually try and go to court to try and resist making insurance payouts.

The changes will then place the onus on the taxpayer to go out and find an insurance policy that will meet their particular needs; a change that I think wouldn't be at all beneficial for the Maori community. In short, transforming the 'levy' into a 'premium' will simply not give us, as the advertisements say, the piece of mind.

Finally, Mr Speaker, the Maori Party came to this Bill conscious of a large range of concerns that have come in from our constituents.

We were approached about:

* Opposition to increased levies (especially from motorcyclists);

* Opposition to sexual-abuse compensation rules;

* Opposition to a threshold of a six per cent hearing loss before a person is entitled for assistance for hearing aids;

* Concerns over privatisation

* Concerns over reduced coverage.

While many changes may seem to be minor the cumulative effect could undermine the concept of ACC as it is currently understood.

Over and above all these changes, we know that injury is the leading cause of death for Maori for the first three decades of life. Maori are over-represented in injury statistics across all age groups, and in employment and sports. Most of these injuries are preventable.

As Dr John Broughton reported in his 1999 report Injury to Maori: Does it really have to be like this?, "Although the frond will eventually die, it need not wither or die so soon or before its time."

Mr Speaker, there are far too many issues associated with a full and comprehensive injury prevention scheme, to approve the changes put forward in this Bill. We must oppose this third reading.