Page 1605 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 14 May 2019
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government’s amendments are an improvement on what was in the exposure draft, because I believe that the number of discussions that we have had about them and our incomprehension is part of the reason for the changes.
I would also have to agree with Mr Barr’s comments that, whether you think it is good or bad or just incomprehensible, it appears that all these sorts of schemes do it. I was told by a lawyer that, in fact, it was all different in Victoria, and he was correct. It was different in Victoria but it is kind of just the other way around. It did not, as far as I could see, actually improve the situation. It possibly made it worse.
The way it works in the bill is that a person could combine a physical injury and a psychological injury that relates to the physical injury. They could not, however, combine a physical injury with a separate, discrete psychological injury that was not the result of the physical injury. I spent lots of time thinking about both—about discrete psychological injuries that were not the result of physical injury. I will not bore everyone with my thought experiments because it is incredibly confusing.
There are two proposed amendments: one from the Liberal Party, which purports to allow the combining of physical and psychological injuries in any circumstances. The other set of amendments is from the government. These essentially make some clarifications but keep an approach whereby separate and discrete psychological and physical injuries cannot be combined. However, the government amendments do allow something new—that is, that an injured person can now receive quality of life benefits related to separate psychological and physical injuries.
We think this was a good improvement and we support it. It is a better outcome for injured people than the one proposed in the current bill. We do not support the Liberal Party amendment. We are not in any way sure what it would actually do, because it is very unclear to us, totally unclear to us, what impact that would have on the number of people claiming whatever WPI they might be claiming.
As Mr Barr said, and as I have reiterated, there are not any motor vehicle accident schemes, to my knowledge, in Australia that allow combining two primary psychological and physical injuries, as well as combining the secondary induced. They do one or the other. This is a very vexed area. The important thing, from my point of view, is that there will be a review in three years.
As I said, we have discussed this. We have discussed this at great length with the government—possibly at inordinate length—and I have received the assurance that this issue will be part of the things that are reviewed in that three-year review. That will mean that we will have something of a handle on whether this is a real issue or whether it was just a very bizarre possibility—something that we thought might be an issue but in reality was not something that we should have worried about.
The Greens support the government’s amendments. We do not support the Liberal Party’s amendments. We look forward to the review of this system in three years to establish what impact this actually does have and the best way to deal with a multitude of injuries. I have to agree that the concept of adding up injuries has issues.
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