Page 2551 - Week 07 - Thursday, 18 June 2009
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MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Treasurer, Minister for Health, Minister for Community Services and Minister for Women) (10.52), in reply: I thank members for their contributions to the debate today.
This bill seeks to make amendments to the Road Transport (Third-Party Insurance) Act 2008. The nature of these amendments is to finetune the legislation, providing necessary adjustments in advance of competition entering the compulsory third-party insurance market in the ACT. Members of the Assembly would remember that this bill was introduced on 2 April 2009.
While being necessary, these amendments are largely technical, as Mr Smyth pointed out, and somewhat esoteric.
When the new CTP legislation was introduced last year, coverage in relation to traders plates and unregistered vehicle permits were carried forward under transitional provisions which were set to expire in October 2009. This was to enable appropriate provisions to be drafted to incorporate them into the new scheme. These provisions have now been drafted, and they appear within the bill.
The amendment bill seeks to replace those transitional provisions with the CTP legislation to enable the legislation to pick up traders plates and unregistered vehicle permits so that they will operate as part of the new CTP scheme. In terms of the CTP scheme as a whole, this means that traders plates and unregistered vehicle permits will no longer be separately dealt with under the old third-party scheme. This is a positive outcome for the territory in moving to a scheme of CTP insurance that has the health and wellbeing of those injured in a motor accident at its core. Addressing traders plates and unregistered vehicle permits in this bill well before the October deadline is the key to allowing the benefits of the new CTP scheme to come into operation for these classes of vehicles.
Transitional provisions will remain in place for vehicles that have an existing traders plate attached until that plate is reissued under the new scheme. As traders plates have a common expiry date of 31 December, it is expected that by 31 December 2009 all traders plates will have been renewed, after which the transitional provisions will no longer be necessary.
In relation to the coverage of unregistered vehicle permits in the ACT CTP insurance scheme, this responsibility has been transferred to the Nominal Defendant. These permits were previously insured by the sole and default insurer currently operating in the ACT, being the NRMA. As the sole insurer, it was, simply and quite frankly, the easiest thing to have NRMA responsible for providing third-party insurance to cover unregistered vehicle permits. However, as competition in the CTP market in the ACT is expected to commence later this year, it is not considered appropriate to continue with this situation. In other states, the task of handling unregistered vehicle permits is either periodically tendered out among participating insurers or assigned to a single insurer. The ACT market is simply too small for these permits to be foisted upon an insurer that may not have a major market share with which to absorb the additional administrative costs.
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