Page 1411 - Week 04 - Thursday, 4 April 2019
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Lastly I note the ability for insurers to receive significant penalties for not complying with their obligations. At the moment it is up to 100 penalty units, which for a corporation is $80,000. I believe this should be higher given that we are talking about extremely well-resourced and profitable companies and that there is some effort involved in prosecuting a case against any of these companies, and we are discussing this further with the government.
It remains to be seen whether these improvements will keep insurers in check. I am hopeful they will. I note that under the previous system the basic job of the legal system was to keep insurers in check. It has been a private insurer-based system in the ACT for a very long time.
The worries about insurance companies are innate in this type of CTP model; it is privately underwritten. This is not necessarily the scheme the Greens would favour, if we were in a position to design our own. We would seriously look at a government-run model possibly similar to the one used in Victoria through its Transport Accident Commission although one that is much more generous from a WPI point of view. This model should have been available for consideration in the citizens jury process, and I also think that this model should be looked at during the three-year review. Nonetheless, for now the government favours a privately underwritten scheme and the new model being proposed has several advantages over the current one.
I will quickly point out a few more amendments the Greens negotiated to this bill to make it fairer and more orientated towards the needs of accident victims. Amendments to clauses 51, 90 and 101 mean that people of retirement age but who were still working at the time of their accident will now be able to access defined benefit income replacement payments for up to two years. That is much fairer than the original proposal which limited payments based on statutory retirement age.
People injured in a motor vehicle will now have 13 weeks to decide whether to receive benefits through the workers compensation scheme or CTP scheme. Originally this was only 4 weeks.
Lastly I will mention that the original bill proposed removing benefits for a whole range of people who were injured while committing certain traffic offences even though those offences may have been completely unrelated to the accident. They included, for example, cyclists not wearing helmets, drivers whose passengers were not wearing a seatbelt and situations where a blood test detected a driver’s past cannabis use but which did not necessarily impair the driver.
The blanket approach of excluding people committing an offence could have created perverse and unjust outcomes. Imagine, for example, that a person was driving safely through a green light when they were T-boned by a car who ran a red light. If the green light driver’s passenger did not have a seatbelt on, under the government proposal the driver would lose access to many benefits even though they had been hit by a driver running a red light. That is really unfair, particularly considering that that person may have had their life drastically changed due to injury.
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