Injury Prevention, Rehabilitation, and Compensation Amendment Bill

Madam Speaker

The Green Party supports this short, and for Bills concerning Accident Compensation, unusually simple Bill. The primary purpose of the Bill is to merge the ACC's self-employed account with its employers' account. This is a sensible move. There is no good reason why a self-employed person carrying out a business should be levied differently from a person who registers a company that employs him or her as its sole employee.

Yet that was the consequence of the anachronistic legacy of the two separate accounts that flowed from the National Party's failed privatisation of accident compensation in the 1990s.

This Bill presents an opportunity for the National Party to distance itself from the hard-right policies and the Hollow Men of the Brash years. It is a chance for National to show that it is acting in the interests of New Zealanders who have the misfortune to be injured, rather than in the interests of its mates in the insurance industry.

Yet what we see in this House is the National Party opposing this Bill, apparently on the basis that the merger of the accounts would make it more difficult for some future National-led government to privatise ACC. It is time for the Members on the National benches to come clean about their ACC privatisation policy. Who wrote it, or at whose behest was it written?

Was it written by Steven Cosgrove of QBE Insurance, who reportedly met with Dr Brash in August 2004 to discuss the "reprivatisation of ACC"? Or was it written by Ross Chapman of the same company, who reportedly met with Dr Brash in July 2005. Or perhaps by the CEO of the Insurance Council itself, Chris Ryan, who reportedly had numerous meetings and communications with Dr Brash and Dr Hutchison on the privatisation of ACC.

It is also time for the Members on the National benches to come clean about some other matters in relation to its ACC privatisation policy. Did National receive a $1million plus anonymous donation, through one of their dodgy trusts, from the Insurance Council in recognition of its privatisation policy, as Nicky Hager claims in "The Hollow Men" he was advised by a confidential National Party source?

It is time for the National Party, who had the temerity to make allegations of corruption in this House for most of the past year, to come clean about its links with the insurance industry and the funding it may have received from it. It is also time for the electoral law to be changed to ensure transparency in funding of political parties. Whatever the links were between the National Party's ACC privatisation policy and the allegations of it receiving substantial donations from the insurance industry, the public, in the interests of democracy, has the right to know.

What the National Party forgets, or chooses to forget, is that its short-lived privatisation of workplace accident insurance was a disaster for people injured at work. A few weeks ago I received an email from one such person, who is still suffering under the sorry legacy of that scheme through the transitional provisions of the 2001 Act. His email has a subject line "Work Aon Unfair and Ruthless" — it is an email that I believe many other Members of this House have received.

He says: "the thought of having to pay out money to injured people is an insult to their agenda so it goes without saying that they will put whatever obstacles in the way of injured people to avoid paying any money. They are not operating under the ACC laws. Work Aon's efforts in the field of accident compensation are probably the worse that you could possibly come across.

I have been told by some doctors that it was commonplace to have to wait for more than a year for their bills to be paid. What a way to run a business. It would appear that they felt their first duty was to the organisations that are paying levies to them and to their shareholders, not for the injured people that are unfortunate enough to have to rely on them for compensation as a result of the government allowing big business to arrange their own cover."

The letter writer goes on to detail a sorry sequence of events, including Work Aon refusing to accept medical reports from specialists who have examined him, and referring him to their own tame specialists, whose opinions they then preferred.

This highlights the problem with privatised workplace accident insurance that the National Party just doesn't get, or chooses to ignore in the interests of its friends in the insurance industry. The National Party says it wants to introduce competition into the scheme. But the competition the National Party proposes advantages only the employer — there is no competition for the injured worker. ACC is not a normal insurance arrangement. Cover, compensation and other entitlements are prescribed by statute, not by contract.

The easiest way for private insurance companies to be profitable and gain market share in accident compensation is to deny cover and entitlements that an injured person is entitled by statute to receive. They can do so in the knowledge that the accident compensation law is extremely complex, and the injured person will often not know how to challenge an unfavourable decision.

They can do so in the knowledge that many claimants will not be able to afford the legal representation they need to challenge an unfavourable decision. They know that the health professionals doing the assessments will often be contracted to the employer, and the perception, if not the reality, is that their assessments are far from independent and unbiased. They know, too, that the purportedly independent review process involves a reviewer appointed by the employer, further undermining any perception of fairness and independence.

The consequence, of course, was that the private insurance companies in 1999-2000 deliberately or negligently refused to extend cover and entitlements that they were bound by statute to extend. They knew that most injured people would not challenge these erroneous decisions. That was a far easier way to reduce their levies and increase their market share than spending money advising their employer clients how to reduce risk.

The other thing the National Party refuses to understand about accident compensation is that it is a no-fault scheme. This distinguishes it from most insurance arrangements, where the insurance company can recover funds expended on a claim from the party responsible for the action that gave rise to the claim. That is not a possibility where it is deemed no-one is at fault, and this too leads to competing private insurance companies attempting to minimise claims expenditure by wrongly declining claims.

These are the reasons accident compensation should be retained in the public sector. The National Party's blinkered view that everything that is private is good and everything that is public is bad is one reason that they are not yet fit to be in Government again. The Green Party believes there are some things that the private sector does best, but there are some things that the public sector does best, and accident compensation is one of them. Despite the shortcomings of the public ACC scheme, and I am the first to accept that there are still some significant shortcomings, particularly regarding the definition of personal injury, the public scheme operates infinitely better for injured workers than the National Party's privatisation experiment that they propose to revert to did.

I am please that New Zealand First, who supported the disastrous ACC privatisation experiment back in the late 1990s, is now supporting the aspects of this Bill that merge the Employers' Account and the Self Employed Work Account. At least it appears they have moved on and can now see sense.

The National Party, however, still seems to be stuck in a time warp promoting yesterday's failed policies. Their record in accident compensation is one of failure and duplicity. This is the party that went into the 1996 election campaign promising that they would not privatise accident compensation. Yet by the end of the next Parliamentary term they had partially privatised ACC.
If National are serious about again sitting on the Government benches, they should front up to this House and to the public of New Zealand and tell us the full story, for better or worse, of their links with the insurance industry. They should acknowledge that their ACC privatisation of the late 1990s was a disaster for injured people, and repudiate that policy.

They should also withdraw their misguided opposition to this simple Bill that does no more than rectify an anomaly that causes wildly fluctuating ACC levies for self-employed people and redress the situation that different people carrying out essentially the same business with the same injury risk can pay vastly different ACC levies just because of how they have chosen to structure their business.