ACC overhaul off to MPs
Barrister’s plan to fix national accident compensation scheme system is four years in the making
‘‘We started this world-leading work but have never taken the intended next steps, and now 50 years have passed and the job is not finished . . . We no longer have a no-fault personal injury system.’’
Warren Forster
A solution to fix the notoriously broken Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) system will today be presented to MPs.
Warren Forster has completed an almost 100-page reform plan that offers a people-focused, single system for all, to replace the current scheme that he describes as discriminatory and, he says, wastes resources arguing the causes of impairments.
Rather than the proposal becoming an ‘‘election football’’, he hopes it will gain cross-party co-operation to adopt what he believes would be a cheaper, fairer option within a decade.
He will present the document to MPs at Parliament today.
Forster, a barrister who spent four years researching the country’s social insurance scheme as part of the Law Foundation Te Manatū ā Ture o Aotearoa’s International Research Fellowship, said ACC ministers were kept abreast of the reform during its development.
He had spoken with hundreds of people.
The reform offered a road map of how to finish what Sir Owen Woodhouse intended in a 1967 royal commission of inquiry, he said. The groundbreaking blueprint that Woodhouse laid out to create a single system of care and support, no matter the cause of a person’s impairment, had stagnated at the first stage.
ACC legislation was passed in 1972 for injuries considered to have been caused by an accident.
‘‘We started this world-leading work but have never taken the intended next steps, and now 50 years have passed and the job is not finished,’’ Forster said.
‘‘As we reflect back on the past five decades, we can see the reintroduction of fault. We no longer have a no-fault personal injury system.’’
Forster’s report states: ‘‘We can become world leaders again in the field of care and support for all of our people, or we perpetuate the fragmented, incomplete and broken system that history has shown does not work.’’
He recognised that its interaction with the proposed income insurance system – for people who lose their jobs through redundancy or illness to receive up to 80 per cent of their usual income for six months – would have to be carefully managed.
His reform would provide four enforceable rights to social and income support, habilitation, and healthcare, implemented over time, and the development of a sustainable funding model.
It would eliminate fragmentation of services, and he believed billions of dollars would be saved by integrating administrative costs and removing the requirements for boundaries within and between ACC and the health and welfare systems.
The reform’s funding would require innovation to become financially sustainable and move away from relying on taxation or levies.
Forster proposed a sovereign wealth fund, similar to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, that would help to increase ‘‘intergenerational equity’’.
The new Ministry for Disabled People would consult and codesign the reform, he said, and it would meet the requirements of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and human rights commitments.