Page 1540 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 14 May 2019
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The other thing I want to address is the churlish slight that the Chief Minister made on me, my office and, in particular, some of my staff members. He paid particular recognition to Ms Le Couteur for being across the detail and for her commitment to the process, with no recognition of the enormous amount of work that my office has done on this bill, often in collaboration with Ms Le Couteur’s office and with Mr Barr’s office. For him to deliberately exclude the staff of my office, who have put hundreds of hours into this project, I think is pretty ordinary for a Chief Minister.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (10.51): I was not planning to speak at this point, but given that the other two parties have, it behoves me to briefly restate the Greens’ position on this. The Greens are of the belief that the new scheme is, on the whole, a fairer scheme for the people of Canberra. I think we need to be very clear that, because this is a scheme relating to very complicated situations, dealing with a lot of people literally in very painful situations and dealing with different facts, some people will do better than others.
However, overall we believe that the proposed new scheme is something that will be fairer for the vast majority of people who are involved in motor vehicle accidents. As Mr Barr said, the new scheme will cover 40 per cent more people than the previous scheme. Given that those people also were injured in motor car accidents, we actually think that is a really good thing. To be able to do this without increasing the cost for everybody is also a really good thing. To do that, obviously there have been some movements, compromises and trade-offs.
We have worked on this for many hours. When I say that, I include the people sitting behind us and the people in the directorate who have done an awful lot of the work, given all the competing requirements to get the best possible scheme. There will be a review in three years, because I acknowledge—I am sure we all acknowledge—that there will be some things that need tweaking. I am confident that we will be improving our CTP scheme as a result of our debate today. I am also confident that the work we have done has improved the scheme, compared to its first iteration.
I mention one final thing, because it is not in the amendments. One of the things that we are very pleased about is that the original scheme had some very weird stuff relating to being guilty of fairly unrelated offences. For example, if you were a bike rider and you did not have your helmet on but it was your leg that was injured, you could have had your benefits considerably reduced. I am very pleased that the government has removed all of that; so we will not be debating it.
Clause 1 agreed to.
Clauses 2 to 13, by leave, taken together and agreed to.
Clause 14.
MR COE (Yerrabi—Leader of the Opposition) (10.54): I seek leave to move amendments to this bill which have not been considered or reported on by the scrutiny committee.
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