Accident Compensation (Access Reporting and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

I present to the House a legislative statement on the Accident Compensation (Access Reporting and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

💬 SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Accident Compensation (Access Reporting and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Workforce Committee to consider the bill.

ACC is a world-leading scheme that has become an integral part of our social support system in New Zealand and part of the fabric of our country. We know that not everyone is able to access the scheme equally. Advice I requested from ACC last year showed evidence of disparities in access to the scheme by Māori, women, Pacific peoples, disabled people, ethnic communities, children and young people, and seniors.

This issue was highlighted again recently by research from the University of Otago’s Te Rōpū Rangahau Hauora Māori o Ngāi Tahu, the Ngāi Tahu Māori health research unit. Their study found that, at least for some injuries, ACC supportive claimants, once they’re already in the system, appeared to be on par for Māori and non-Māori. I want to acknowledge the Associate Minister for ACC, Willie Jackson, for his work in this space, which will have played no small part in achieving this outcome.

As one of the authors of this study noted in the subsequent media article, this finding does not disregard that there are still issues in accessing ACC support for Māori. There is still a significant gap in the number of Māori filing ACC claims, and those who try to work out their injury on their own. Establishing routine ways of collecting data about accessing ACC support is vital to ensuring equitable injury outcomes for Māori.

As Minister for ACC, I want to continue the Government’s work towards addressing inequities in accessing the scheme, with this new package of reforms. The Accident Compensation (Access Reporting and Other Matters) Amendment Bill is the second package of reforms to this scheme. It works alongside the recently passed Accident Compensation (Maternal Birth Injury and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2022, which will help a significant number of women access support through the scheme that was previously unavailable.

The drivers of access disparities are complex. ACC has done a considerable amount of work to understand these drivers, but these amendments will provide more tools for us to use to inform future changes to the Accident Compensation Act and ACC’s practices. This bill amends the purpose of the Act and the functions of ACC to ensure that ACC focuses on access to the scheme by Māori and other population groups, rather than on only people who make ACC claims. Currently, the purpose of the Act refers to ACC’s obligations in relation to claimants receiving what they are entitled to under the scheme.

There is nothing in the purpose that deals with understanding how people with personal injuries, including those people who have not yet made a claim, are accessing the ACC scheme. Similarly, the Act does not expressly deal with what ACC is doing to understand how to support access to the scheme for all people with injuries covered by the scheme. Refining the purpose of the Act is intended to make it clear that, in line with the scheme’s overriding goals, minimising the impact of injury on the community is not limited to those which are claimed for.

The bill also amends the functions of ACC to expressly refer to its monitoring of access to the scheme in order to identify how to improve delivery of its services. This will make it clear how we expect the change in purpose to operate. These changes will support the delivery of our 2020 election manifesto commitment to return ACC to its original purpose of assisting all New Zealanders who have had an injury.

As I noted, with regards to the bill’s amendments to the purpose and functions of ACC, it is crucial that ACC monitors access to the scheme so that it can work to improve equity of access to and entitlements from the scheme. Currently, there is no requirement in the Act for ACC to report on how different population groups are accessing the accident compensation scheme. I’m introducing a new requirement for ACC to annually report on how Māori and other population groups are accessing the accident compensation scheme. The data collected will be invaluable in understanding who is accessing ACC and how, and, even more importantly, who is not and why not.

It’s vital that we keep working to better understand why some injured people in Aotearoa New Zealand may not be accessing cover, so we can make sure ACC is fair and fit for purpose for everyone. This bill will continue to build on the work that the Accident Compensation (Maternal Birth Injury and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2022 did on addressing the changes National made when last in office.

This bill brings forward eligibility for the minimum rate of minimum compensation from the sixth week to the second week of incapacity. Weekly compensation is intended to enable claimants to meet their everyday expenses and focus on their recovery. The minimum rate of weekly compensation recognises that some people are in very low-paid full-time jobs at the time of their injury, and their rehabilitation may be delayed as a result of an inadequate income. This change means that those claimants on very low incomes will not have to wait five weeks for their weekly compensation to be topped up to the minimum rate. Bringing forward eligibility will remove a financial hardship earlier in the recovery process, allowing people to better focus on their rehabilitation.

In summary, this bill makes important changes to ACC that will ensure more transparency about how Māori and other population groups are accessing the scheme—including any disparities in access—and more support for claimants who have very low incomes or had very low incomes when they were injured. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. I’m pleased to rise on the Accident Compensation (Access Reporting and Other Matters) Amendment Bill first reading. National will be opposing this bill, and I’m going to articulate, in the time that I have, the reasons why. It’s quite simple, really—the first two parts of this legislation are legislating for something that doesn’t require legislation. The Minister has forgotten—and I appreciate it was a while ago, but from 1982 until 2006, ACC already published this information, Minister, but it didn’t need to be in legislation. They just did it because it was the right thing to do. So I’m not sure why the Minister has failed to do what the role of a Minister should be, which is to get the department to do the right thing, and that is to publish in-depth information around the cause of injuries in the year so that there is transparency around that. Because this bill is about access—this bill is about access, and there is no evidence that people are getting injured but are not getting referred to ACC. No evidence for that—there is no evidence.

💬 Jan Logie: Yes there is.

I’m hearing across the hallway, somebody said, “Yes there is.” Where is that coming from? Down the back. Listen to that: “Yes there is.” There is no evidence.

You don’t need this legislation in regards to implementing these changes. And, in particular, it does not need to be legally required to look into aspects around Māori access into the scheme. There’s been no evidence produced by the Government to show that Māori, or in fact any other population group, struggles to access ACC, nor have they shown how ACC even would be able to find that data in the first place. Actually, if you look at Māori men, they’re probably one of the highest users of ACC per capita, given their work in higher-risk industries. So the goal, surely, should be focusing on those people that are getting injured in this country and dealing with the issues in trying to prevent their injury. Surely that should be the focus: to stop people that are getting injured, getting injured; not by wondering why other people aren’t getting injured and trying to, you know, do some data collection around that. This bill is focused in the wrong place.

I was asking questions to the Minister, as she was providing a legislative statement, around the changes to eligibility for the minimum rate of weekly compensation. She didn’t answer my questions that I asked, because, in this, there is no articulation around how many people this aspect of this change would affect. This is around the eligibility of the minimum rate of weekly compensation: someone who would need to be working full time yet earn below the minimum wage. How many people are in that bucket and how many are affected? That has not even been thought through. This is not a new scenario, but this shows another example. The Government have not done the basics in terms of research around it; not even researched or even considered how many people this change will affect, and therefore the implications and the fiscal implications of that on our country. So, as I said, if we had the evidence to do something like this, then National potentially would be considering a different position. But National will not be supporting this legislation. It’s absolute nonsense, and we do not commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on this bill that is about increasing the equity of access to entitlement from this scheme. The Minister has already outlined the fact that this Government has taken steps to address the inequity of access to the scheme for women by extending it to maternal birth injuries. It’s really interesting to hear the previous speaker, Simon Watts, say there is no evidence of people struggling to access ACC. Well, that member obviously needs to get out more and talk to actual working people, because when I was an advocate for working people in my previous role, there were plenty of people that had had trouble accessing ACC. So, indeed, this bill is about access, Mr Watts, and that is what this bill is doing. It will reverse some of the incentivising of people to go back to work early, which was one of the first consequences from when National, in Government, changed the ACC legislation. This is a great bill. Ka mihi ahau ki tēnei pire ki te Whare.

[I commend this bill that is before the House.]

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It does feel somewhat bizarre to be standing in the House, debating something in urgency on a Friday—Friday afternoon, which it is now—for at least two parts of a bill that don’t need legislation for it to occur. My colleague has mentioned that over a considerable period of time, for about 30 years, ACC were publishing that sort of in-depth information, so there is no reason why the Minister could not ask ACC to monitor and put in their annual report Māori access, women, and people with disabilities. There is no need for this legislation. We are standing here, under urgency, debating a bill that the Minister can make happen anyway without legislation. It seems bizarre.

On the change to the eligibility for the minimum rate of weekly compensation, no regulatory impact statement has been done, so we just don’t know who this applies to, how many, and what the impact could be. I was desperately trying to think of what it might be. I guess it might be those that are perhaps on a training wage or a start-up wage. Perhaps that’s what it’s applying to, but the Minister hasn’t given us that information. So we’re sitting here, standing here, debating something that we don’t have any idea about how many people it might apply to and what the impact might be.

And I’d have to say that that’s pretty much par for this Government: that they don’t bother to do that due diligence to have a look at what the impact might be, what it might cost, therefore, what it might add to the budget of this country. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen with Minister Hipkins that he can miss a whole due diligence process that means low to mid hundreds of millions of dollars of extra money might be needed in his reform of vocational education, of the polytechnics. I know this will be much smaller, but it’s about the bad practice of not doing due diligence, not checking what the cost might be. And that’s how you get a Government that just spends money like water and doesn’t pay due diligence as to why it’s doing that.

So we’re opposing this bill at its first reading, but we’re willing to work constructively in the select committee, provided we get a bit more information to actually inform us why we are even looking at this bill. Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. We oppose it at this first reading.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m incredibly proud to be doing a short call on the Accident Compensation (Access Reporting and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Now, the House will recall that we had another bill in relation to ACC recently, on birth injuries, also brought by our excellent Minister for ACC, the Hon Carmel Sepuloni. That bill was brought to the House in order to increase access to a group of people that hadn’t been able to access ACC. This bill, in the same vein, follows the advice that she received showing there were disparities in access by Māori women, Pacific peoples, disabled people, ethnic communities, children, young people, and seniors. So I ask the National Party: if you were the Minister, if the National Party was the Minister, what would they do if they got that information? Nothing. That’s what they’re telling the House today: absolutely nothing. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a real pleasure to rise on behalf of the Green Party to take a call on this bill. I do just want to provide some context for why I’m pleased to be supporting this today. The purpose of ACC—it’s really essential in terms of our entire social safety net in this country.

💬 Andrew Bayly: Unbelievable!

Unbelievable, I’m hearing about that concept that I didn’t think was radical. However, that is how many people see it in this country. Its purpose is to enhance the public good and reinforce the social contract represented by the first accident compensation scheme by providing for a fair and sustainable scheme for managing personal injury that has its overriding goal of minimising both the overall incidents of injury as well as the impact of the injury on communities, including economic, social, and personal costs. So that’s everything that I hope everybody in this House supports, in terms of that goal. But there has been a real sense in the community that, actually, the agency has stepped away from that purpose. The sense of public good has not been actually reflective of the diversity that exists within our public.

I have to mention, briefly, that the first chance I had to participate in an annual review of the agency, the chair of the board was presenting; she presented for about 10 minutes, and, in my analysis of her presentation, over three-quarters of her time was spent reporting on the investment profile of the agency. The discussion of the rehabilitative purpose and the support for people in our communities was a minority of her presentation. It really was not a focus of the organisation. That was the chair who was appointed by the National Party. That reflection reflects public concern.

I think that I do want to commend the Minister for the aide-mémoires—the briefings—that she commissioned from the agency around how the agency was delivering for Māori, for women, for disabled people, and for Pasifika people last year.

When I heard from the initial speaker from the National Party Simon Watts saying that there’s no evidence that there is any issue accessing ACC for communities, I was just like “Do your homework, spokesperson!” There’s plenty of evidence in those briefings that there are significant barriers to accessing. Just a few of the examples held within those papers are: current ACC data at that point showed that Māori benefited less from the scheme than non-Māori. The disparity is evident across the spectrum from prevention care and recovery. I do want to note that that is in the context of this Government having put in a lot of work in terms of resourcing around the Māori strategy—and, actually, I will really acknowledge that—about trying to get their agency to be consistent with its obligations around Te Tiriti and delivering for Māori. But that is still the situation that we’re in, even in that context.

Pasifika had a very low awareness of the scheme—that was from research of 2005—or even what they do or how to access it. They are lodging fewer claims and getting even less support than their share of the population—that’s even more marked for Pasifika women. Pasifika people return to work more rapidly than other groups. Even Pasifika with serious injuries face significant inequities in receipt of treatment interventions, relative to Pākehā.

Women—we know that they are being paid out about a billion dollars less than men before the changes to birth injuries, which we’ll, hopefully, just start to claw that back just a little bit. Women claim less and are more likely to be declined cover. We know from Otago University legal academic Dawn Duncan’s work that the injuries that are most prevalent in female-dominated industries are things that are not covered by ACC currently—so they are burnout and they are mental injury through bullying and harassment in a sustained way that is not currently recognised by the legislation.

So the point about actually having the organisation do the research not just of the people who are getting it at the moment is essential if we are to have any hope of delivering for our communities, for our public, because we are not at the moment.

We know that for disabled people—and let me just say that, in terms of the paper around ACC’s delivery for disabled people, they acknowledge that ACC does not record disability status. So putting this in legislation, making sure that that basic information is there to be able to meet their needs is a really important step. We know, like the disability communities have been telling us for years, that the inequity of provision and support available for disabled people—if their disability is a result of an accident versus those where disability is a result of illness or birth—is profound. It is a massive inequity in our community. That is compounded by the fact that people with disabilities going into our ACC system are often put into what they call a “mixed-cause dilemma” about what is the cause of that injury that you have now. Is it a result of the fact that you have this disability, or is it a result of this accident? So they are absolutely finding this system a nightmare, and there are significant barriers to them being able to access the support that other people in this country are currently able to access. So there is a need.

The Greens wrote alongside 27 significant organisations—including unions and the Māori Women’s Welfare League and the Disabled Persons Assembly and Help and Wellington Rape Crisis and the Association of Pelvic Organ Prolapse Support—to ACC earlier in the year, when there was the new chair of the board, and said, “Look, we know there’s legislative change that’s needed but there’s also things that can be done within the organisation, through leadership.” So some of that could have been actually commissioning a study by WorkSafe looking at the types of injuries that women commonly suffer in the workplace, and in unpaid work that they do at home and caregiving. So this legislation enables that to happen. It gives them the legislative certainty that that is within the framework of their work, which they currently don’t have.

We also noted that the outcomes for claimants deemed vocationally independent needed to be investigated, which is about getting the agency to be considering outcomes; not just whether people are no longer receiving ACC and are assuming that that is a benefit. I do hope, and will be exploring through the committee whether the framing of these amendments will help us get to that point as well.

If we go back to the purpose of the legislation and that public good and recognising the cost of injury on our communities, then that takes us to beyond just getting off ACC. We see that in those, I think, reasonable assumptions we can make that Pasifika are being deemed rehabilitated sooner than all other population groups because, actually, they can’t afford to be living on 80 percent of the minimum wage, and function and support their families. So they’re going back to work sooner than they should be, because they need that additional bit of income. That is not serving, I would argue very strongly, the purpose of ACC. So we’ll be exploring that within the process and, also, recognising that the procurement model also has an impact in terms of who is able to access the services and whether those services are being too tightly framed to meet their needs.

Anyway, big long rant. This is a very good step. The Greens would have like to have seen a Te Tiriti clause in here—recognise that that needs to be developed with iwi and Māori. We support that work happening in the interim, but this is good progress.

Kua tae mai te wā mō te kai o te ahiahi. Hei te rua karaka ka hoki mai anō. Kia ora.

[It is now lunch time. We shall resume at 2 o’clock. Thank you.]

Sitting suspended from 1.01 p.m. to 2 p.m.

The House is resumed. Members, before the lunch break we were debating the first reading of the Accident Compensation (Access Reporting and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. We’re up to call No.7. I call Toni Severin.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. On behalf of the ACT Party, we’re actually going to support the Accident Compensation (Access Reporting and Other Matters) Amendment Bill through this first reading, to select committee; however, we do have some concerns.

When you read through the departmental disclosure statement, there has not been a regulatory impact statement done or a cost-benefit analysis. For good policy to be made, these are vital to be able to understand how this bill is going to have an impact on costs for New Zealanders. We all pay into this scheme, and the scheme has been going for 50 years, and I do know for certain that we do not have data on particular people, especially around women, Māori, Pasifika, and the disabled. We’re all good for having good data to be able to implement good service, good delivery, and make sure that everybody has the right access that they require; however, because this also has an element that is going to be financial—where they’re going to help the rate of minimum weekly compensation—we’re not sure how much that is actually going to cost, which is something that I think we do need to know, because, in this world of a cost of living crisis, it does affect working-people’s fees. Levies will go up depending on what is required.

Also, as the Greens previously said, when we get these reports, there is a lot of financial stuff about our investments and how well we’re investing our money, but there is very little about how we are servicing some of our people here in New Zealand. The biggest thing, of course, I do know, is that we have moved into a world where a lot of stuff is online—and also connectivity for a lot of people. I also know that some people don’t necessarily go to the physio or to other treatments that they need for rehabilitation, who would possibly fill in those forms and help. Some of them only go to their GP and are then expected to do a few things online or follow through online. So that can also be a major access problem that we may need to look at in the future. But, overall, we’re saying we’ll let the public and we’ll let the officials come in and see what we can nut out on this very small bill.

I’d also like to mention, even though here in the House we’re still operating on Tuesday, when the rest of New Zealand is on a Friday, this bill was mentioned on Tuesday and we only saw it yesterday. So it would have been nice to have had a little bit more time in investigation. I know that it’s not always possible; however, I did not see this one to be of urgency. It is definitely something that needs to be accounted for, but I’m not sure if it needed to be in urgency for its first reading, during this time period. There are many other things that are happening in our communities that require more urgency than, necessarily, this bill. As we are saying, we do love to have great data, to understand how to deliver great services and access, but there are still many questions to be answered. I hope that the Minister and officials and the public out there can help us with this. So I support it in its first reading. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a short call on the Accident Compensation (Access Reporting and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. This bill simply follows from previous improvements to the Act, which were on maternal birth injuries. This change would ensure that ACC focuses on all New Zealanders rather than those who made a claim, because now there are a lot of inconsistencies in the Act itself.

For me, the best part, though, is for those who are on low incomes, because the 80 percent earnings threshold is lower than the minimum rate of weekly compensation itself. I just want to tell the previous speaker, Toni Severin, that this bill is worth urgency because it affects a lot of people. It will help a lot of vulnerable people—the group of people that’s been in the Minister’s speech previously. So it is a good bill, and I commend it to the House.

This is a split call. Chris Penk—five minutes.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. As others have said on the National Party side—I mean, we’ve made our position pretty clear—it’s not obvious either, as a matter of common sense or as advised by the Minister’s office or regulatory impact statement or similar, what the need is for this bill. Particularly, we’ve heard from the Labour contributors to the debate that it’s important to help vulnerable people. Of course it is. People who need the services of ACC are vulnerable by definition. They’ve suffered some accident or injury, of course, otherwise they wouldn’t be eligible for the scheme. Now, if it were necessary to establish that such access was not possible, then, of course, research can and should take place, but it doesn’t need a piece of legislation to do that.

This is, with all due respect, the Plain Language Act of this week. And I say that with all due respect. Let’s just say it’s as good as the Plain Language Act, and everyone can assign the value however high or low they wish, accordingly. But in any case, ACC doesn’t need to be legislated to look into it, and just to the point that Toni Severin made, the ACC scheme’s been going for 50 years. This week feels like it’s been going 50 years, so I won’t prolong it any longer. But let’s hear the justification for this at select committee. But we can’t support it in the meantime.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Just acknowledging the previous speaker’s comment about this bill being as good as the Plain Language Act—that’s a great compliment, I think, for this bill. It’s an excellent bill. The piece I like the most in this bill is the reduction of the stand-down period for people who have been injured and are entitled to ACC, from six weeks down to two weeks. For working people who are no longer able to go and earn wages anymore and they become injured, reducing that stand down makes a huge difference to their availability to be able to pay the rent. It’s an excellent bill, I look forward to seeing the submissions, and I commend it to the House.

It is a pleasure to stand and take a short call on this bill that isn’t about nothing. This isn’t a bill looking for a problem. This is a really great bill to help to ensure that we have better equity and health outcomes for more New Zealanders. And it is because of that that I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, well, this is a bill I could go on for hours about. ACC, of course, is one of the great New Zealand innovations, and you’ve got to give credit to those people who put it together initially, because it is one of the great schemes in New Zealand.

The interesting thing I find about this bill is that it’s really charging ACC with looking into its own processes and, if you think about that from a logical perspective for a Government agency, it’s not necessarily the best way of doing things. I would have thought that, if we needed to look into the transparency and levels of access to a scheme, you wouldn’t really charge the people charged with protecting the scheme from the people who want to access it to look into that.

So I think that, whilst getting ACC to look into some of these things or having some of these things looked into is a perfectly logical way to go about things, from our perspective, we’d like to see what comes out of them at select committee. So I don’t support the bill at first reading, but I do think there’s some irony, I guess, in getting the gamekeeper to look at how they protect their own. I think there could be other ways; obviously, that will come out in the course of the select committee work, and I look forward to seeing how that goes. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. As we’ve already heard, this bill addresses the disparities in access to the ACC scheme for Māori, for Pacific peoples, for disabled peoples, for women, for ethnic communities, for children and young people, and for our kaumātua—our seniors.

So this Labour Government has already started some of that work in addressing these inequities—for example, extending the ACC cover to maternal birth injuries for women. This bill continues this Labour Government’s plan to look after all New Zealanders. You would think that the National Party would support this bill and all New Zealanders, not just their rich mates. For that, I commend this bill to the House.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That the

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Education and Workforce Committee.