Page 1545 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 14 May 2019
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The citizens jury was clear that there needed to be a balance so that people who were more severely injured and were not at fault could potentially still access common law but there would be reasonable, good coverage for everybody who was injured. The citizens jury did look at WPI. My understanding is that this was where they saw the balance.
Yes, of course it restricts some people’s access to common-law payouts, but I think we must also be very clear on this. It restricts some people’s access to common-law payouts but the reality with this change is that 40 per cent of people who will get payouts and are expected to get financial support under the new system were 100 per cent restricted from any access to common law under the old scheme because they could not prove someone else was at fault. I think we have to remember this.
The new scheme has the advantage of allowing people who are not at fault to also receive benefits and promotes early access to treatment and payments. It also has the major advantage for the community of Canberra, with the exception of the legal community, of avoiding protracted legal action in many, many cases because many people will not have to establish fault to get full compensation. Protracted legal cases can delay people’s access to treatments and payments and increase the cost of the scheme.
Of course, this scheme is not precisely the scheme that the Greens might have proposed had we had the task of doing the scheme from scratch, but this has many benefits over the existing scheme, and its fundamental principles have been considered and agreed on by a citizens jury—that is, a bunch of ordinary Canberrans who were given access to a lot of the facts about this and were asked to make the judgement about expanding it to cover everyone injured or continuing the restriction to only people who could prove it was someone else’s fault.
They spent several weekends looking at it, and I think you could say one of the fundamental conclusions they came to was that it would be a fairer scheme to expand it to all people who are injured in car accidents rather than a subset of those people. I think that we really should respect that decision. It is a fundamental, ethical, moral decision as to where we want to go. Personally I am siding with the citizens jury on this one. I would prefer to see all injured Canberrans have a chance to have their medical expenses paid and, if necessary, some income replacement rather than a smaller subset having a potentially larger payout. That is what we are talking about here, we have to remember.
The other thing that has not come up here—and I should mention it—is that the major criticism that we have received for supporting the new scheme is that it is claimed to give more power to the insurance companies. I am not sure if it is going to give more power to the insurance companies than they have at present. Insurance companies seem to me to be pretty powerful at present. But there are a few things to say on that.
The first is: if we were doing a scheme, it possibly would be like Victoria’s, a government-run scheme. The Greens have not bothered proposing this as an amendment because we cannot imagine either the Liberal Party or the Labor Party
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