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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (6 September) . . Page.. 2932 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

the financial impact would most particularly be felt in the arrangements for special assistance for people who sustain injuries and believe they are entitled to payments for compensation for things like pain and suffering.

Based on current experience, the increase in the cost of the scheme for changes to the special assistance provision would be upwards of $5 million a year. The increasing costs associated with the reinstatement of rights affected by the transitional provisions-that is basically the retrospective element of this legislation-is estimated at around $5.85 million in total, or just under $3 million per year for two years.

If we pass these provision we will, all things being equal, be very unlikely to have a budget surplus for 2000-01. These provisions would substantially wipe out that forecast surplus and they would amount to a very considerable impost on the territory fiscus for which there is no conceivable justification.

Ms Tucker is asking us to help contribute to the expenses of people, in some cases which are quite inappropriate, at the expense of far more important social objectives to which that money could be put. As a general rule, I do not believe we should be spending $5 million on giving people lump sums for pain and suffering. I believe we should be compensating serious and permanent injuries, as we do under the present legislation. We should be compensating people for related expenses, such as medical expenses, in appropriate circumstances. We should be providing that people's ongoing need for counselling and assistance is laid out generously in legislation, as it now is.

The victims assistance scheme, which is now operating on a interim basis, is a substantial step forward in enabling a whole host of people, who are sometimes marginal and sometimes serious victims of crime, to have their concerns, their ongoing needs, addressed. We have paid for that new scheme out of the savings we have made from the reformed criminal injuries compensation scheme. We should not now go back to the bad old days of the past and restore those arrangements, which were so clearly inappropriate for this territory and indeed for most other parts of Australia.

Mr Speaker, I think this legislation is inappropriate. It amounts to an attempt to reopen the debate which was fully had last year. It is true, of course, that the actual debate on the bill occurred in the early hours on the morning because the Assembly had seen fit to debate other matters earlier on the same day. I might say that there is an increasing trend in this place to have debate that goes into the evening and even into the wee small hours. Members seem to feel that we should do other arguably less important things during the day and push important business to those sorts of hours. That is not the government's choosing. If members wish to do that then they can hardly be asking the government to take responsibility when they get decisions out of that process which they do not particularly like.

I see no reason to reopen these issues. I think Ms Tucker is responding to special pleading on behalf of the legal profession in particular. A large number of people have come through my door propelled by indignation and anger at the decision made last December. These people have been not accurately briefed or informed by their lawyers. They have been told that there is no access to payments whatsoever, that they cannot have medical costs or expenses met from the scheme. They have been told that there was no warning of this decision, et cetera. Many of those things simply are not accurate.

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