NZ's ACC scheme 'national treasure'

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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.

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".