Page 1423 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 6 April 2005
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
had no insurance scheme and was self-insured. We met the cost of any liability ourselves. In 1997-98, the then government purchased a reinsurance service and that was paid for by premium payments by the relevant government agencies. Under these new arrangements an obligation was established for agencies to notify incidents that may lead to a claim. This requirement is for agencies to notify the ACT government’s insurance authority, or ACTIA, as soon as they become aware of an incident which may—and I stress may—lead to a claim, and the period of that notification must be within 12 months of the agency becoming aware of the incident.
This means that it may not often be in the same year as the actual incident. Agencies may not become aware of the incident until some time after the event. For example, the maximum period that claims under reinsurance can go back to is 1 July 1994. An agency could have become aware in 1998 of an incident that happened in August 1994; as long as that incident was notified within the insurance year, that is, 1998, it is acceptable to be covered under the reinsurance policies.
In relation to the department of health, the first thing I want to say is that the notification is about incidents and not about claims themselves. It is about incidents that may lead to claims and not all incidents end up as claims. ACT Health has been notifying incidents since its current insurance arrangements were put in place in 1998. These arrangements required health to notify the insurance authority, ACTIA, within one year. What we have seen, though, is a failure by the previous government to put in place the necessary protocols to ensure that this reporting actually occurs.
No protocols were in place within ACT health, prior to the election of this government, to ensure that notifications actually occurred within the required period, even though it was the Liberal Party that established the reinsurance arrangements, even though it was the then Liberal government that knew what the arrangements were because they approved them. They did not put in place mechanisms to ensure that the protocols were in place and that notifications were made. The government has identified this failing and has rectified it.
We have been left to tidy up the mess left by the previous government, tidy up the lack of process left by the previous government, and we have done so. In applying the new protocols, it is true there were a large number of incident notifications that were captured and notified towards the end of the 2003-04 insurance year. Let me outline the circumstances of this. In the Canberra Times report today there is a reference to 165 incident notifications. At least 50 of these incidents occurred prior to November 2001. Of the remaining 115 notifications that were made in June 2004, 104 were not late notifications. ACTIA advises and ACT Health advises me that nine out of the 10 claims that relate to ACT health that had been previously denied or not offered reinsurance coverage relate to incidents that occurred before 30 June 2001. So nine out of the 10 were incidents that occurred during the administration of the previous government. It is the failure of the former Liberal government to put in place appropriate protocols to ensure that notification was done within the appropriate time frame that has led to the these circumstances. The hypocrisy of the Liberal Party on this is made manifest by these facts.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .