Page 2312 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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New South Wales, for instance, has a scheme where there is a levy in the CTP that goes straight to a fund so that those who are catastrophically injured and who will never be able to return to the life that they once had and who will require lifetime care automatically slot into this scheme, as it should be. That does not stop that person who was injured going after other forms of compensation. But the care will often be a large component in the compensation paid, and the compensation paid, of course, has a direct effect on premiums. We should work to isolate that element and ensure that people with catastrophic injuries are treated with dignity.
While it is not a CTP case, I am sure members know of the young lady who waited eight or nine years for compensation after eating some fast food. They will get an enormous payout now but that family has gone through an enormous amount of trauma on top of the injury to their daughter. So we need a scheme that looks at those that it is quite clear will never have the same level of life due to their catastrophic injury. They need to be treated better. The community is unsure of how the NDIS will operate in that regard, but if it does not cover those catastrophic injuries then the government need to tell the Assembly what they will do.
Recommendation 10 of the committee is that the Road Transport (Third-Party Insurance) Amendment Bill 2011 in its current form should not be supported by the Assembly. It is quite clear that the effects of the 2008 reform package are just starting to move into the system. These schemes have long tails and the long tails do affect those who are injured, often those who are injured the most. There is a view that we should take it a little bit easier.
It was interesting. We put a question to one of the witnesses. We asked the witness: “What do we do? How do we make this better for all concerned? How do we get better outcomes for the victims? How do we ensure that the ordinary person who registers their car, or the company that registers their company’s vehicle, get a better deal on CTP?” The gentleman simply said, “You have just got to reduce the number of motor vehicle crashes.”
As Ms Le Couteur said, we are treating symptoms. What we have got to do is have a firm commitment to treating the cause of motor vehicle crashes. We all know what causes them. It is speed, alcohol and drugs. It is not wearing seatbelts and it is weariness. People need to make sure that they play their part. The government has to ensure that the road safety message is out there constantly. But it is not just the government. We have all got a responsibility here. If you are in a car with somebody who is clearly tired, make them stop or take over the driving yourself. But if we really want to have a much cheaper scheme, the best way to do it is to attack the cause. The cause is the accidents. In the main, accidents are human failings.
Some accidents are road related—the design of the roads. Nobody would deliberately build a road that does not work but we need to constantly monitor the roads that we have built. If there are roads that are causing accidents, they need to be fixed. We need to look at motor vehicles and the safety that we now build into them. Vehicles are much safer than they were. I understand that about two per cent of motor vehicle crashes are caused by mechanical failure. That is two per cent too many. We need to
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