 Ladies and gentlemen, this lecture commemorates the life of one of our most distinguished judges and citizens. So Owen Woodhouse's compassion, generosity of spirit, and social conscience were reflected in his work as president of the Court of Appeal, president of the Law Commission, and chairman of the Royal Commission that recommended a no-fault accident compensation scheme. He made an immense contribution to New Zealand law and society. This Owen Woodhouse memorial lecture was established last year with the intention that lecturers will reflect Sir Owen's interests in the law, social justice, and social reform. The lectures hosted jointly by the Auckland and Victoria Law Schools and is given in Auckland and Wellington each year. Last year's inaugural lecture was given by Sir Kenneth Keith on the topic of promoting safety through law, national and international and by other means. This year's lecture has been given by Sir Jeffrey Palmer and will examine the Woodhouse report of 1967, the framework it established for New Zealand's groundbreaking approach to no-fault accident compensation and how this has been implemented during the last half-century. There can be no-one better qualified to discuss the Woodhouse report and the impact it has had. Sir Jeffrey worked alongside and was a close friend of Sir Owen Woodhouse. I understand that they first met when Sir Owen and the other members of the Royal Commission came to the University of Chicago to talk to some of the professors there. Sir Jeffrey had dinner with them and afterwards drove Sir Owen back to his hotel in his, I gather, uninsured Chevrolet. Two years later Sir Jeffrey wrote the white paper Turning the Woodhouse Report into Government Policy. He was later appointed as Sir Owen's principal assistant to the inquiry set up by the Australian Prime Minister to consider introducing a similar scheme there. Sir Jeffrey's book Compensation for Incapacity was the first full academic review of New Zealand's accident compensation scheme and he has written extensively on it since. Together with Sir Owen, Sir Jeffrey has been at the heart of pioneering the social vision of a no-fault accident compensation scheme. He has, as you'll, of course, be well aware, also made many other contributions to public life and to New Zealand. As Prime Minister, as Attorney-General, Minister of Justice, Minister of the Environment and President of the Law Commission, from the Bill of Rights to MMP to the empowerment of the Waitangi Tribunal to his current campaign for a written constitution, Sir Jeffrey has worked to improve New Zealand's constitution, its government and our society. His influence on New Zealand is profound and enduring. Would you please join me in welcoming Sir Jeffrey Palmer. Eina Iwi, o te moto, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou, koutou. Dean, that introduction was extremely generous and fulsome and I'm not sure it was properly deserved but thank you all the same. Now, this lecture is quite long. It's not just a nine-second soundbite and it's quite complicated because of the years that it covers and so what I'm doing now is putting up the structure of this lecture so you can follow it as I go because I've written 25 pages of fairly dense prose and without very many jokes in it and I will speak to the paper, I won't read it because that will send you all to sleep. You may go to sleep anyway but I will endeavour to avoid that. Now, the thing that I want to say first is that Sir Aran was a dear friend of mine and this lecture celebrates the importance of his contribution to New Zealand including his most significant, his recommended design of our accident compensation system and no lecture about him and his contribution can avoid dealing with Owen Woodhouse, the man. He was a complex, multifaceted human being blessed with a penetrating intellect and empathy. Those two things are not always found together. His compassion for people was perhaps his most salient characteristic. The number and range of his friends was astonishing both in New Zealand and overseas and he had the gift of friendship. He inspired loyalty and affection with the teams of people with whom he worked. He encountered many tough situations, especially in the Second World War where he was the commander of a motor torpedo boat in the Mediterranean and an intelligence officer as well. He visited, as has already been said, the Chicago Law School where I was lucky enough to meet him and that caused an enduring relationship that changed my life. Now, Owen was a warm-hearted visionary, blessed with wisdom. He believed that those in distress should be helped and the well-being of each one was of concern to all. He looked into the future to see how it would be and those qualities were reflected not only in his judicial decisions and his work as president of the Law Commission but also in reports on accident law. And in all of this, he carried his message through a unique prose style. Always spare, his prose had a limpid and crystalline quality. It was the result of pains-taking revision and redrafting. The Woodhouse Report in Australia went through nine drafts and these reports were powerful, elegant and persuasive. And as Sir Kenneth Keith said in the inaugural Woodhouse lecture last year, they were full of clear thinking and clear writing. Those were Owen Woodhouse's hallmarks. Now, we begin this story with the common law origins of accident compensation. The common law came to New Zealand with the first white settlers and it developed over time so that people who suffered personal injury by accident could recover damages. Assault and battery, of course, were always actionable in the courts and the great tort of negligence took much longer to develop. It developed over the latter half of the 19th century and expanded in the 20th and this opened up possibilities of significant awards of damages after a jury trial. It was the pot of gold at the end of the common law rainbow that people sought. And in order to do that, you had to demonstrate negligence for the part of the defendant. And that meant that many people couldn't possibly succeed. There were three main defences available. Contributory negligence, which for a long time was a complete defence and then it was reduced by the percentage of contribution. Then there was the common employment rule which said that you couldn't recover from the employer if you were injured by another employee. Third, that the plaintiff had voluntary assumed the risk. Those defences, of course, were modified or abolished by statute over time but the plight of the uncompensated victim created a social burden that was too heavy to bear with the result that both England and New Zealand at about the same time adopted workers' compensation which gave you modest earnings-related payments and hospital and medical expenses in the event that you could not succeed at common law. But you could pursue that remedy at the same time as common law and it also, in those days, workers' compensation gave coverage for industrial disease in some ways more generous than the existing Act does for industrial disease. Now, what happened with this system was that it was a liability system in which you had to prove negligence but if you didn't have any money, that is to say the impecunious defendant was a real problem to this social objective so compulsory insurance was introduced in order to, if you got a judgement, you could get some money. 1928, New Zealand put compulsory insurance on motor accidents for motor cars because motor cars were a potent source of accidents and the compulsory liability insurance existed for employers as well. Now, while all this was going on in a happy little legal system dominated by the common law, the welfare state had been developing gradually, notably with the Old Age Pensions Act in 1898, and then came the Social Security Act in 1938 that provide comprehensive flat rate payments for people with disability of various kinds and also that established a public health system of legislation. So these systems continued together for a long period of time until they, without any great expression of public opposition to them, until a Royal Commission was established by the government in 1967. That had been preceded by a committee on absolute liability that couldn't really agree about the principle. The Royal Commission, however, was set up very carefully to ensure that it reached a result. Now, that was the background to the common law action. Enter the Woodhouse Report. Three Royal Commissioners, one was the former Secretary of Labor, another one a prominent public accountant and Sir Owen himself, then a judge of the Supreme Court. What he produced was a revolutionary report and it owed quite a lot to Sir William Beveridge's 1942 report in the United Kingdom. Now, the first point of substance that I want to make is this began life as a legal law reform, but it had messianic tendencies. It wanted to take over the entire welfare system and in some ways that is the most important outcome of this lecture that I want to convince you that there is unfinished business here as a result of the Woodhouse Report and it needs to be addressed. Now, the Woodhouse Report was written in optimistic language, even inspirational. It really was based on five simple principles and those principles were community responsibility, comprehensive entitlement, complete rehabilitation, real compensation and administrative efficiency. Now, the report itself was notable for the sustained attack that it conducted on the common law system. It said that a waste was a feature of the system, very big administrative and legal expenses so that much of the money that was exacted was never reached the injured person at all. There are also very long delays in this and personal blameworthiness wasn't really the rationale for the law because negligence required individuals to meet a community average standard. So, as the Woodhouse Report put it, reprehensible conduct can be followed by feather blows while a moment's inadvertence could call down the heavens. Liability insurance of course had blunted or removed the deterrent effect of tort law. An assessment of lump sum damages at once in one time had a lot of guesswork involved and speculation. It tended to overcompensate smaller, lesser injuries and undercompensate really big ones that went on for a lifetime, people who were quadriplegic, for example. And the process of adjudication was a lottery. I'm old enough to have appeared in jury trials involved. It was so exciting, so dramatic, so wonderful lawyers for love, that sort of thing. But it was pretty socially futile. It was a gambling game. What would happen is, if you were in a personal injury practice, you would settle the large number of the claims and you'd try one or two of them. And that was how the system worked. Accident prevention was impeded by the system quite dramatically. And so what the Woodhouse Report had to do was to convince the decision-makers that the action had to be got rid of. We're the only common-law jurisdiction, I think, that has thoroughly done that so far. And one might wonder, as people did at my last week's lecture, why that was so. I have very clear understanding about that. It was because the best at interests were able to prevail elsewhere. The lawyers were quite pernicious about it in Australia. So John Kerr didn't help either. But there was in England a Royal Commissioner 14 who came out here, and boy, they produced a report of the most hopeless character. Now, what the Woodhouse Report said was that all taught laws to be swept away. Everyone who was injured by accident, whether it was at work on-road playing rugby or anywhere else would be compensated. No new money would be needed because it would all be paid for by the funds that were compulsorily exacted to paver the taught system and workers' compensation. Now, that was magical in political terms. And, of course, the waste was emphasised. 40% of the money did not go to the injured people. And so this was... took a bit of... took a bit of digesting by the Government of the day. It looked very attractive, and this is heading three. The scheme looked very attractive when it came out and people used to read these things in those days. And newspapers used to report them too. These days, of course, have gone. But adopting this report took quite a long time because it was going to deprive insurance companies of a significant portion of their business and transfer those funds to the state. And that made a few in the ruling National Government nervous, which is why they got the white paper commissioned. And the white paper really was a vote of confidence in it. And the reason that I got to write it was that I had known Owen. So you see, Owen was a real operator. He knew how to get things done. Now, only half of the Woodhouse recommendations were actually implemented. Key provisions were rejected. This makes it quite difficult to judge how the Woodhouse reform model would have worked had it been enacted. The Woodhouse model has not been tried yet, and that is a really important point to appreciate why unfinished business still exists. The major policy issues on which it did not prevail included the administrative arrangements, quite a lot about eligibility, the causes of and the degrees of incapacity, had the report been adopted as it was written, it would have been much easier to integrate the scheme into the wider system of income support that New Zealand has and still has. And just remember this. This is my favourite paragraph of the whole report these days, 309b. Informal and simple procedure should be the key to all proceedings within the jurisdiction of the board. Replications should not be made to depend on any formal type of claim. Adversary techniques should not be used and adrift to legalism should be avoided. Well, that never happened. Well, at least it did happen to begin with, but it doesn't happen now. It hasn't been achieved that way. There have been constant difficulties about all that. But one thing over the 45 years since enactment has remained constant. There has been no political appetite to return to the common law action for damages. The accident compensation corporation, as it now is, has developed into a large and significant public organisation, big footprint in New Zealand life. Look at the 2017 annual report, 1,500 staff, 1.95 million new claims, 85% of the total expenditure of the money went to claimants or for services on them. It has an investment portfolio of $37.3 billion, and it reported improved satisfaction levels from claimants, not that those levels are very high yet. And there is a whole lot of statistics about how quickly they were paying people and how quickly they resolved things. I won't go through them. And only a week or two ago, it announced the corporation did that it was doubling its investment, a huge business transformation programme to 669 million forecasting that would make staff 10% more productive. Now, this brings me to the topic of finance delivery and administration. Financing the scheme is a critical issue in it, and it revolves around the relative merits of payers you go compared with a fully funded private insurance scheme. And there have been enormous gyrations over time about how the scheme should be financed and big disputes about it and scandals about it and ministerial resignations about it. Now, this was designed as a government scheme of social insurance. It must have the final backing of the state, oh and see, is for this reason that a formal system of funding regarded as essential to the stability of the scheme. And that is a quote from the Woodhouse report. So, you see, employers objected to the levies. There were often political disputes about this. I'm trying to summarise many years of history here, but I just want to say to you that one thing that is constant has been disputes about the levies. Woodhouse recommended flat rate levies. The employers got graduated levies. And all the economists in the world have tried to say that, in fact, you need to internalise the costs of accidents so they reflected in the product and all the best economic research has been done on this has failed to make the case. You just can't show that that works. And the social insurance model, of course, was not followed. And there was, of course, the short-lived experiment to allow private insurance companies to write insurance for this earner scheme that was passed in 1998 and repealed by the new Labour Government in 1999. And when, of course, the scheme was changed in 1998 to provide full funding, that was a privy to the introduction of competition from insurance companies. And we still have the system now where it is fully funded. Now, you don't fully fund the education system or the medical system. You know that those charges are going to come to the Government. But why is this different? I don't think that's an easy question to answer. Social insurance is quite different from private insurance. But our scheme was one with social goals and social purposes for a compassionate and just society. And some of the attacks on the scheme by some of the economists have been full of assertion about inefficiency, moral hazard, policy failure, objections that seem to be based, I think, more on neoliberal ideology than on sound economics. Likewise, a proper understanding of the purpose of New Zealand schemes suggests that privatisation is no more appropriate for accident compensation than it is for the Social Security Act, about which I have a lot to say in a few minutes. Now, of course, there have been many statutory reconstructions and changes over the scheme, far too many to go through here. The initial idea was it would be set up under a board of three and the model for that was the Ontario Workmen's Compensation Board that Owen had had a look at. But he wanted to be under the general responsibility of the Minister of Social Security, now the Ministry of Social Development, and to be attached to that department for administrative purposes. That was not followed. That was a critical failure. That is the reason why these two programmes continue together as the old ones did. So the next big change that caused difficulty was 1982. I was in the house then and tried to change a lot of this and quite a measure of success for an opposition doing that. But that set up a board, a board to look at it, more business-like it was said by Derek Quigley, he was the Minister. And what I thought about that was that it was stakeholder representation, really. And so I don't think that it has been at all successful in generating policy. The actual policy development came, of course, at the beginning from the old Department of Labour. That was incorporated into the Ministry of Innovation and Employment and whatever else it is. It's a lot of things and it's a big department and ungainly, it's got some competence except it hasn't got much in this area. And I don't think that ministry has been an effective policy advisor on this scheme and I don't think it's the right ministry to be giving the advice. And the policy generation capacity of ACC itself has turned out to be pretty haphazard and unsatisfactory. Of course the Treasury's always taken a pretty strong interest in this scheme because there's a lot of public funds involved in it. And very uneasy tensions inhabit the shared interests of the scheme in various parts of the government. They're not easily resolved. So I don't think that the administrative problems that have been difficult for the scheme throughout, they've never been addressed in a very satisfactory fashion from a policy point of view. And there's been a lot of public dissatisfaction at various times. This accident compensation corporation is an outlier in the government system. It's had a lot of controversies in recent times. It's been an independent inquiry over claims handling done by Miriam Dean QC. There have been efforts made to turn the scheme into something that it's not and was never intended to be. Havring a board hasn't added value in my view. I think a Department of State would have behaved in a way that would have been superior to that of the corporation. I think it would be better to hand the matter over to a Department of State operating on the conventional principles of ministerial responsibility, a classical system from the Westminster system that we seem to be forgetting about here. Now, one of the failures, perhaps two of them, lie in accident prevention and rehabilitation. The Woodhouse report was emphatic that these were priorities. They haven't been. The money answer always dominates in this sort of thing, especially in the political decision-making system. How much money am I going to get if in doubt follow the money? The Royal Commissions tried to have an integrated scheme, but of course it didn't own, the accident compensation system has never owned the regulatory department that deals with safety. If you remember the terrible problems we had with safety at work and the problems that we got into over the coal mine fiasco and the fact that we got rid of the light-handed regulatory model and introduced one that was much stronger and it was necessary to do that, but you can't do that through anything like the ACC. They don't own the regulatory machinery, so they're never going to be leaders in that and although they've published good statistics in recent years, there hasn't been enough analysis of the statistics to get the insights into accident prevention that you really need. Now, on rehabilitation, they haven't been as successful as they should have been, although there's been a lot of money going on to rehabilitate accident victims that they didn't get before. There's Don Renne, who used to be an adviser to the original corporation and is now the chair of the Law Society Committee on this. He writes about this and he said that ACC should be a world leader in the rehabilitation of injured people, but really it's aim has been to get claimants off the system, which is a different thing. And indeed, I think there is validity in that point. Now, the changing, I think, the administration of the accident compensation system needs to be considered. It can be strongly argued that if accident compensation was administered through a Department of State that the policy-making would be better considered and better aligned with other income support programmes which are designed to alleviate poverty. Now the story gets even worse. It's a return to legalism. Over the years, legislation on accident compensation has become longer and more complex. It's less generous than when it began. It's more restrictive. And the problem has been this, and it's well set out in the decision that the Chief Justice in a case in the Supreme Court said. The Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 2001 provides cover on the basis of line drawing which reflects policy choices. Such line drawing has resulted in legislation which is tactical. Approach is taken to the interpretation of provisions under earlier accident compensation legislation need to be treated with some caution and considering the current legislation, you've got a problem. You've got to decide which act you're under. That legally is not terribly straightforward for a start. Nor, she says, is the legislation easy to follow. It contains much cross-referencing repetition and circularity in expression and indeed the 2010 amendments that came after those made things even worse. Well, then you have the business of people who apply for a benefit. They get a review in front of an independent reviewer who conducts a hearing. That's organised by a company contracted to the ACC, owned, I'm told, by the people who do the reviewing. That seems an extremely strange arrangement for a state scheme of this sort. But then you can appeal to the District Court, remember Owen said you weren't supposed to have legalism in this, we've got legalism squared in it now, and there can be an appeal on the point of order of the High Court. But just take this point. Neither the accident compensation scheme nor the Social Security legislation allows you to get the Supreme Court of New Zealand to adjudicate on what the appropriate interpretation of the statute is, the interpretation of a vital pellet court is. He have got two massive schemes which are designed to help people, lots of them, and you cannot get a proper adjudication on the interpretation of the statute, and that really is quite wrong from a rule of law point of view. Now, if you look at the way in which this has gone, the search of the Ministry of Justice's judicial decisions online record show there were 437 accident compensation cases in the High Court and Court of Appeal between 2003 and February 2018. There have probably been thousands in the District Court. This was a scheme to do away with the need for lawyers when claiming compensation for personal injury. Now the legislation is so intricate that lawyers are often needed. Constant legislative fiddling with the scheme is produced in justices. Eligibility depends on which of the statutes of the injured person may be subject to. ACC has become highly legalistic. This creates unfairness. The way in which medical evidence is used to deny claims has attracted much focal opposition from in the community. An extensive study done by the University of Otago, led by Warren Forster, and he's got a law foundation grant to do more work on this as he's currently doing. Let me give you the conclusion to that Otago study. Over time, causation has come to be applied in a narrow, technical and legalistic way. Because of this, any dispute with ACC involves legal advice, legal representation, and complex medical evidence. Causation is inherently arguable and difficult to assess. This is redolent of what we were trying to get rid of in all of this. This is exactly the sort of thing that the Woodhouse report was designed to prevent. Now there are efforts afoot to improve the dispute settlement mechanism, but when I last looked at it, nothing seems to have eventuated despite all the work that has gone into this. Now this brings me to what is a really important and critical element of this matter. The future pattern of income support and ACC, and the relationship between ACC and the rest of the welfare state. Because this has been through many iterations, this accident compensation system. But one thing that has been constant in it is that discrimination exists in public programs between programs that relieve some misfortunes, but not others. One lottery replaced another. The person laid low by cancer, heart attack, or a stroke is treated much less generously than the person who suffers accidental injury with the same or similar incapacity. The first group, of course, is impoverished by a drop in income compared with the person on ACC. And as Professors Walter Blum and Harry Calvin, whom Owen met at the University of Chicago and he met them because of what they had written on automobile plans in the United States then, on no fault, they said this and I quote, private law cannot borrow goals from public law fields without accepting the obligation to make a proper public law analysis. In the case of automobile compensation plans, this analysis shows that the special problem cannot be solved adequately without solving the larger problem. What is the larger problem? Poverty. And that is the difficulty that we're still in. The discrimination revolves around the fact that in 1975 there was an election campaign with superannuation for people over the age of 60. It was the most important issue in that campaign. And the fact that we got New Zealand superannuation removed any possibility of having any money to do anything in relation to this for a long time afterwards. And of course, if it's made to do that, we had the Thaddeus McCarthy's Royal Commission on Social Security 1972, but he didn't deal with this. So Iva Richardson's Royal Commission on Social Security on much wider issues, far too many wider issues, did deal with it, but didn't get anywhere. The fourth Labour government did introduce a rehabilitation and then incapacity bill in 1990. That was based on a Law Commission report that was authored by Sir Aaron Woodhouse when he was chair of the Law Commission. And that bill was designed to extend the scheme to sickness, but it wasn't preceded by the incoming national government. So the Australian Woodhouse report was designed to overtake the Social Security system there and put in this new system that was based on the 1967 Woodhouse report in New Zealand. But for a number of reasons, the aim of integration has never been achieved and those issues need to be addressed because serious social inequalities stem from the preferential treatment enjoyed by accident victims not only in income support, but also in the rehabilitation that is available to them. Now I come to another mystery. The Social Security Act 1964. That has recently been rewritten by the New Zealand Parliament and it's quite an interesting act. I notice that there are distinguished judges in the audience and some of them have been very critical of the Social Security Act. And I said in an article a few years ago it's been a convoluted mess for many years with the vital importance to many thousands of people. In fact, it was the top candidate for the booby prize of the worst statute on New Zealand books. And the Social Security Rewrite Bill, which has got a convoluted history all of its own, that was introduced under the national government and it was passed by the Ardern government only a week or two ago and we recently had a function in Parliament with celebration for the Social Security Act in which I said there was unfinished business. But remember what Anne Tolley said when she introduced the Social Security Rewrite Bill. This is a classic. This bill, she said, rewrites the Social Security Act 1964. After more than 50 years, the Social Security Act is long overdue for a rewrite. When it was first passed it had 135 sections. It has since grown to 523 sections and of those only four remain unchanged. 240 sections have been repealed and most sections have been amended multiple times. In one case, 286 times. All together this makes for a very disjointed and confusion bill. She was absolutely right. And the rewrite bill was intended to be policy neutral. Well Labour Party, how I voted against it because it contained a number of new measures they didn't agree with. Even Government took those out by supplementary order paper but the National Party voted against it because it didn't agree with some of the things they put in. But anyway it was passed and it is a policy neutral act and it doesn't contain the views of any one political party. And it's reorganisation and it's a long, long act. It's reorganisation makes planar the current landscape and structure of the law and it just does, I think, make clear the issues and problems of the current law and what is needed to make coherent change. I mean, you even have things like the winter energy payment coming in here now. In the 28th of May, the two ministers, Carmel, Sepuloni and Jan Lovies, said they would set up a welfare expert advisory group to focus on a number of issues that need attention here. There's a lot more work to do in this area but I don't see any move to integrate accident compensation to the rest of the welfare system. There are a lot of other issues as well. I've already dealt with the difficulties about disputes which the two systems share and you only have to look at Justice Paul Davidson's recent decision on a case dated from the tribunal where he had to look at where the loans were income for the purpose of the Social Security Act and that's, you know, when you read that decision you wonder, where are we getting to? When I was an MP, I couldn't understand how it was the constituents could be advised by reading the Social Security Act, you just couldn't do it. We were able to perloin or otherwise acquire a copy of the manual which was kept under lock and key in those days and once we got a copy of the manual Margaret, who did a lot of the work on this sitting in the front row here, we were able to get some money for the constituents. It was really helpful but, you know, that is not the way that things should be conducted. Now, I want to say that it's hard to resist the conclusion that income support programs in New Zealand had developed hapazit an unprincipled way that is both confusing and unnecessarily complicated. Earnings related benefits for accident victims with some compensation and not economic losses provided under ACC. Flat rate income tested benefits are provided for those who are sick or otherwise incapacitated. Then there is a generous universal scheme for those over the age of 65, that's in a different statute and has different tests and different adjustments for inflation and a whole lot of unfair things like that. There's just no consistency. And I think substantial evidence is available that the future demographic pressures are going to render that scheme unsustainable. We've also got a KiwiSaver Act, which is designed to make it more sustainable. But, you know, when I lived in the United States, I taught property law. Property law in the United States is a bit like English feudalism. It's still based on those structures. They never had the 1926 English property law reform act. I read an article in the Yale Law Journal called The New Property by Professor Charles Wright in which he said, look, what we've got here is a whole lot of things which are like new feudalism. The relationship of the citizen to the state is a sort of vassalage state. And I think an objective observer would be pardoned for thinking that the entire income supports the zeal and amounts to a new form of feudalism, where different classes of people are subject to unequal distinctions lacking in principle. The state provides for some people, but with different hooks to be jumped through, with different results, depending on the amount of help available. And the dependence on the state is so strong that it's important that the law governing these matters be free from discretion as possible, that it's clearly stated and that it's fair. Now, if you look at the Work and Income website, you will find there 62 different benefits and payments that people can apply for. The variety is just remarkable. Then you've got the Inland Revenue Department. They've done work on the five social policies they administer for working for families, child support, student loan payments, and KiwiSaver. And in 2017, the IRD did a paper saying making tax simpler, better administration of social policy. Now, I think that shows you the challenges involved in delivering social policies within a tax administration programme and the need for improvements. So we've got a families programme that provides for a variety of tax credits for families, generous income levels depending on the number of children. And then we've got the veterans programme for all pensions. When I was at the Law Commission, we read the veterans legislation and that's recently been reviewed. When you consider the totality of the income support system, it could be seen, I think, as evolving towards something quite fresh. Either a negative income tax system or looked at another way, it guaranteed minimum income. Such an approach does not look out of the question when one examines these disparate New Zealand support programmes that really don't conform any more to any ascertainable principle that I can see. Indeed, it's been stated that the income of a beneficiary needs to be reframed as an income the recipient is titled to as an economic unit in New Zealand society. I think the need to produce some coherence out of these disparate programmes is pressing. The present pattern is the antithesis of joined up government and it ought not to be beyond us to review this jointed programme provided a unified integrated scheme for income support for all forms of disability and retirement on the basis of carefully articulated principles. We should make them as free from discretion as possible and we should have them as free from legalism as possible, and we need fair dispute settlement mechanisms with proper statutory interpretation. Now obviously any re-engineering of the New Zealand welfare state is going to be difficult but at present matters are confused and complex and we need a new simplicity based on fairness. Now there are a lot of problems to be confronted when you do this. Increased life expectancy poses serious issues for universal retirement income. The overall affordability issue will always be present given the high cost of transfer payments. What can be afforded and how does it rank in terms of political priorities is an issue that's never going to go away. Then there's the future of work and the degree to which new technology may render jobs more scarce and that has to be affected into the equation. An accident compensation did take support to higher income brackets. Is this preferable it has to be asked to redistribution to the less well off? Levels of immigration pose issues as well. What are our obligations to people who arrive here and what about the prospects of increased migration that will be caused by climate change in the future? Well there are as I will say in the conclusion some lessons for policy makers in New Zealand from this Cook's tour of 50 years of New Zealand confusion. There are important lessons here. Unexpected results come with any scheme of this character. Lofty aims can easily be blown off course. Changing political ideologies admit a sort of blunders and constant ledges of the fiddling lead over time to incoherence. I've got a whole other lecture about how we make law in New Zealand but I won't bother you with that now. But what we're talking about really suffers from our failure to make law properly. Claimants have encountered in the accident compensation scheme serious difficulties in securing quick and fair decisions from a scheme that promised to provide decisions without technicality. Lines have been drawn as the policy understands but those lines between injury and disease are frequently problematic and seem very unfair to claimants. The impact of the scheme on the public health system needs to be thought about. The encouragement that the scheme has provided to private medical practitioners flowing from ACC, paying for treatment in private hospitals and for rehabilitation to get people back to work is a significant issue. And the ACC has challenged many ways to a degree and it has, I think, assisted the development of private health providers. Now that might not be a bad thing but for all of this the welfare state that we have has become increasingly incoherent. Now of course the scheme has improved the plight of accident victims compared to what was available at Common Law. Many people can claim and have their hardship relieved and persistent criticisms of ACC in recent years about how these lines are drawn, how the medical issues are assessed and there have been changes in administration and decisions of ACC have become more restrictive and similar to a liability insurance scheme not a social insurance scheme. Now the Woodhouse report made clear the recommended scheme was to be temporary order of things because he saw and envisaged being extended to sickness and until that discrimination is removed social justice will not have been achieved. The abandonment of tort actions remains the most legally significant aspect of the scheme and the policy of rejecting the tort system has been a constant feature of the New Zealand landscape since the enactment of the scheme but in no other Common Law jurisdiction has that been achieved. I think the ultimate issue that is raised by the accident compensation saga is one of social philosophy. The 1967 Woodhouse report was based on the principle of community responsibility. The question is how should that principle be translated for a different world more than 50 years after the report. We do not seem to be willing to grasp the nettle and design what is a rational and humane system of income support. We seem to have lost our mojo when it comes to big reforms. Fairness demands a policy response and one that has worked through. That is what the Woodhouse legacy is saying to us today if only we would listen. The Woodhouse vision was admirable. The performance of the scheme that was adopted and proved matters substantially for accident victims but there is unfinished business. The future remains uncertain. What we need is a fresh infusion of Woodhouse boldness and vision. Thank you.