Page 771 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 19 March 2019
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weeks in hospital and another six months at home recovering from her physical injuries. She continued to need both physiotherapy and psychological counselling every week for years after her accident.
Shelley’s medical treatment and recovery care cost her and her family a six-figure sum but, because she was deemed to be legally at fault for the accident, she was not able to get help with these treatment and care costs through the ACT’s current compulsory third-party insurance scheme.
Shelley’s simple misjudgement, the kind that many of us may have made ourselves when driving, meant that she was denied access to support with her recovery. And worse still, Madam Deputy Speaker, Shelley says she was made to feel as though she did not deserve any support or sympathy because, according to the structure of our current CTP scheme, she was at fault for the accident, something that compounded the distress and anxiety that she experienced as a result.
Shelley’s story highlights why the ACT’s current compulsory third-party insurance scheme needs reform. There are simply too many people in our community with stories like hers, too many Canberrans who get injured in a motor vehicle accident and are unable to get the help they need to get well and to get back on their feet. That is a direct result of the design of our current scheme.
We believe that we can do better for Canberrans who get injured on our roads. Our current scheme relies on proving that someone else was at fault, which means that it covers just a little over half of all of those people who are injured in a motor vehicle accident each year. That deserves repeating: just a little over half of all people injured in a motor vehicle each year. People who are injured in single-vehicle accidents, people who are injured in blameless accidents caused by weather and road conditions or people who are injured in accidents caused through a moment’s inattention are all excluded from our current scheme.
Madam Deputy Speaker, every single one of Canberra’s 290,000 drivers has to pay the CTP with their annual registration, so we believe that everyone who gets injured on the road should be covered. That is the fundamental and significant change that this bill will make: to ensure that everyone who is injured in a motor vehicle accident is entitled to the treatment, care and support that they need to get better and to get their lives back on track.
In our current system, even those drivers who can prove that someone else was at fault often have to undertake a long and difficult legal battle just to get access to the help that they need. Since the government started this reform process, we have heard many stories from people whose lives have had to be put on hold for years and years, who went without income or had to spend huge amounts of money out of their own pocket on medical treatments whilst they fought protracted legal battles about their accident. The average time to resolve a CTP claim in the ACT at the moment is around two years. Some claims for serious injuries have taken longer than seven years to finalise. At the moment, about the same share of overall scheme resources goes towards legal and investigative costs as goes to treatment and care for injured people.
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