News location:

Canberra Today 27°/29° | Tuesday, March 19, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Insurance scheme still ‘flawed’, says law chief

NEGOTIATIONS conducted by the Barr government have failed to address significant flaws in the proposed CTP scheme, says ACT Law Society president Chris Donohue. 

“Instead, they have put forward a series of ad-hoc changes that will push the proposed scheme from incoherent to utterly unworkable,” he says.

ACT Law Society president Chris Donohue.

“The proposed changes will do nothing to protect innocent road users from having their rights stripped away and handed to the insurance companies in the form of increased profits.

“The government, and now (according to media reports) the Greens, are choosing to ignore the hundreds of people who will no longer receive proper compensation. Hundreds of people who have paid CTP premiums in good faith and been injured by the fault of others.”
He says that while the Law Society has consistently supported the inclusion of all injured people into the scheme, it strongly opposes doing so at the expense of innocently injured victims.

“This is exactly what the Barr government and, it seems, the Greens are proposing to do,” he says.

“Under the proposed scheme, most innocently injured people will no longer receive common law damages, and their ability to receive income replacement as well as treatment and care will be decided at the discretion of insurers.

“Under the proposed scheme, claimants, without legal representation, will have to repeatedly argue their case before ACAT if they wish to dispute an insurer’s decision in relation to necessary treatment and care, loss of income, or capacity to work.”

Mr Donohue listed what hasn’t been addressed as:
• unequal power of insurers in disputes;

• the hundreds of injured people (such as the unwaged) who will not meet the limited exceptions, and who will no longer receive proper compensation;
• the arbitrary decision to exclude superannuation from gross income;
• the futility of having a quality-of-life payment of $350,000 for people with a whole person impairment of 100 per cent, where no-one will qualify for the payment;
• a wide range of further restrictions and losses to accident victims and their families; and
• the significant gaps in the legislation given the absence of the Regulations and the WPI Guidelines.

“The promised premium savings — now acknowledged to be well short of savings initially touted — still do not factor in the cost of the new bureaucracy needed to administer the scheme, and the costs of administering disputes inherent in the proposed scheme,” he says.

“The reported deal between the ACT Greens and the Barr government has major failings.
The Society calls on the Greens to hold the government to account and to continue to work to ensure the ACT’s CTP scheme is not dismantled in this unfair and unjust manner.”

 

Who can be trusted?

In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.

If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.

Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.

Become a supporter

Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Share this

2 Responses to Insurance scheme still ‘flawed’, says law chief

Christopher Emery says: 18 March 2019 at 6:13 pm

Is there a conflict of interest if profits are expected to move away from the legal profession to the insurance industry?

Reply
recycle says: 18 March 2019 at 8:55 pm

If you have to deal with the insurers you have to also deal with lawyers, yours and theirs. After years of assisting family member through NSW system, dealing with incompetent insurance company “bought” specialists who cut and pasted reports from other people’s cases ( actually left other people’s names in some reports) you may get reimbursed for past experiences but your own your own with future treatment. Even if you were at no fault in the accident. Surely ACT can do better than this.

Reply

Leave a Reply

Follow us on Instagram @canberracitynews