Click photo to enlarge
Denise Powell, president of Acclaim Otago, an ACC claimant
support group, and Dunedin lawyer Peter Sara reflect after
making submissions via video conference relating to
proposed changes to ACC legislation. Photo by Craig Baxter.
New Zealand's Accident Compensation scheme is a "national
treasure which needs to be preserved", Dunedin lawyer Peter
Sara said yesterday.
He was commenting, via a video-conference facility at the
University of Otago, to a Wellington-based parliamentary
select committee considering proposed changes to ACC
legislation.
Dropping the threshold of vocational independence for injured
people from 35 hours a week to 30 hours, as proposed in the
revised legislation, was a cost-cutting measure which had
"absolutely nothing to do with rehabilitation".
He also criticised moves to limit hearing-aid provision to
people with occupationally related hearing loss of 6% or
more.
Many workers who had experienced damagingly high
industrial-noise levels earlier in their lives were now
suffering the effects of that exposure, and now could be
further disadvantaged, he said.
Mr Sara, who was acting for the Otago-Southland branch of the
New Zealand Meat Workers Union and was making submissions on
their behalf, was also making submissions in his own, private
capacity.
New Zealand's ACC scheme offered positive features not found
in many other countries, he said.
Denise Powell, the president of Acclaim Otago, the ACC
claimant support group, said group members did not accept
that ACC was facing such a financial "crisis" that
entitlements for injured people had to be reduced, as most of
the proposed law amendments suggested.
Many members remembered "the dark days of the late '90s and
early 2000s", when privatisation and work-capacity testing
were implemented.
Members well remembered the various "suitable" job options
identified by occupational assessors; such as car-park
attendants and stock clerks, Mrs Powell said.
Real rehabilitation and compensation were needed.
The original vision underlying the ACC legislation - of the
community protecting everybody for the whole period of
incapacity in a truly equitable way - should be maintained
and "not just consigned to some obscure part of New Zealand's
social history".
