 Well, thank you very much Dean Stockley and thank you very much everybody for coming along. It's a great privilege and as I've said it various times to the Woodhouse family and it's great to see so many friends from that family here tonight. While it's a great privilege it's also a rather daunting one when I think of that person whom I got to know really well. I've learned a great deal from various mentors over my life and times and for more than 50 years Owen Woodhouse was a major mentor and indeed he continues to be. I still think about his talents whenever I'm trying to think something through or trying to put words on a page. He emphasised the importance of getting the question right. He emphasised the importance of getting the facts right of seeking out the relevant values, policies and principles and balancing them when necessary. And of the ongoing assessment. He was also very insistent that we have ongoing assessment of changes in the law to see just what impact it has had. Also characteristics were clear thinking, clear writing, getting the first sentence right. They were critical as well. And so too was the international and comparative material. What could we learn from elsewhere? What lessons were there to be learned from elsewhere? I think I was having a discussion with Geoffrey Palmer about the timing of this last night in terms of who first came across Sir Owen. Geoffrey at that time was a graduate student in Chicago and when Sir Owen came partly because one of his co-commissioners had children at the University of Chicago but also because they wanted to meet up with Kelvin who was doing work on no-fault motor vehicle recovery. And so it's not exactly clear who of the two of us first met Owen. I met him in the library which some of you may recall, the law library at the back of Pembridge. And I see Pembridge today as surrounded. Must be getting rebuilt. And Jack Norther introduced me to the judge who was just starting out on his Royal Commission. And it was the first time I'd ever had a substantive discussion with a judge. He was really interested in what this young man, well I must have been getting near to 30 I think, had to say. And I think he also said it would be a good idea if people within the faculty took an interest in his Royal Commission. Now I'm sure that he did say the same thing to Colin Aikman who was then the Dean at Victoria and as I'll mention later, that led to a number of us appearing. Now you've got a number of names if you can see them on the screen behind me and I'll move through a number of different topics. But I'm talking about various places of peril and danger. They present themselves all the time and to mention some that I'm not going to discuss, consider the Korean Peninsula right at the moment. The 2004 Indian Ocean and 2011 Fukushima earthquakes and tsunami. The war of famine and cholera epidemic threatening 2 million Yemenis. The storm and flooding in Texas and the much more extensive flooding in Bangladesh in there in Nepal in which it is reported that 1200 have died. Now as I say tonight, I won't get into those matters but it is those are matters in which law has some part to play but inadequately at the moment. Not enough has been done in respect of those matters but I will be considering dangers and perils at work, dangers and perils at sea and on the battlefield and then after going through those three I'll come back to the ACC scheme and its extent and its extension and raise some issues at that point. Now I begin in terms of timing back in 1897 if I may. It's a time when labour law was getting established in serious ways in New Zealand. It's six years after Tragea whose name is on the wall behind me. Edward Tragea was appointed as the first secretary for labour in New Zealand and the chief inspector of factories. Another name that I picked from that time is Franz Kafka. This may be a bit of a surprise. But he was a brilliant young lawyer and he was appointed in that year to the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. In that year 1897 there's a very good lengthy article in the Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation by Walter Gaust Clay, barrister of the Inner Temple and it's about the law of employers' liability and insurance against accidents. Sadly that journal no longer exists. We need more comparative study of legislation. Although I notice that the Chief Justice recently cited to it but from the 1930s I think. Now in his very first sentence and that again goes back to a point I made about Sir Owen. Mr. Gaust Clay sees the existing law of employers' liability as being based on two essentially distinct principles. The first was compensation for a wrong and indemnity against apparel. Compensation for a wrong. The first had been developed by the courts. The second by legislatures. He was able to state the issue succinctly in that way because he had studied the law and particularly the legislation of 51 different jurisdictions. He also looked at some of the practice. He looked at the United Kingdom and many of its colonies. Many of the states of the United States, 15 European states. And he gave particular attention to the German law of insurance against accidents which had been adopted in 1884 during Chancellor Otto van Bismarck's long reign. That law he considered was probably the most successful part of social legislation undertaken in Germany at that time. In the light of that review, which just predated the First Workers' Compensation Act in the UK and predated the New Zealand one by three years, 1900 was the date of ours, Gors Clay recorded, and he's still on the first of his 111 pages, that the conviction appeared to be growing, to be gaining ground, that the idea of employers' liability, the court made law, should be abandoned altogether. And the problem of where accidents should be seen as essentially one of putting on a sound economic basis a portion of the necessary taxation of the state, that is by legislation. He elaborated the reason for that preference in these terms. For as the care of the injured workmen and the support of those whom were he uninjured, he would have to maintain fall in the last resort upon the state. It is the duty of the state to provide that the funds required for the discharge of the liability shall be raised in an equitable manner from among its subjects. So he was looking to sharing of the risk and doing it in an equitable manner, and he was looking to taxation, as was happening in many parts of continental Europe. A similar appeal to community responsibility, to think of the first principle in the Woodhouse report, appeared in the following year in New Zealand in the preamble to the Old Age Pensions Act of 1898. Parliament declared that it was equitable, that word again, that deserving persons who during their prime of life have helped to bear the public burden of the colony by the payment of taxes and to open up its resources by their labour and skill should receive a pension in their old age. Mr Gors Clay's paper in its second page focuses on a matter which he saw as essentially separate from compensation for work injury. That matter was the precautions to be taken against accidents through state regulation, supported by the enforcement of penal provisions requiring the taking of care. The legislation he reviews shows that that distinction between looking after the injured on the one side or the family of the dead worker on the other was quite...that was distinct from the business of proper safety and regulation and enforcement. Even although the proposition that taught liability for negligence would help promote safe systems of work was to be heard over much of the following century, the rejection of that proposition, or at least its very limited role, had long been reflected in the imposition of distinct obligations on the operators of factories, mines, ships, shops and offices, many obligations to protect their workers. Consider the great efforts of Shaftesbury and Macaulay in the middle of the 19th century. That law, supported by an inspectorate and criminal liability, is to be found in New Zealand legislation dating back to at least 1846. A publication of 1896 by Edward Tragea brings together that legislation and shows that lengthy period for the new colony. A publication a decade or two later to introduce an international element would have included legislation designed to give effect to the first international labour conventions adopted in 1906. They prohibited the use of white phosphorus in the match industry and night work for women employed in industry. An early sign that employers were willing to take on such obligations who were willing to do that, wished to be protected by treaty from foreign employers who would otherwise be free of such obligations. That argument of foreign cheating was one which Samuel Plimpsall had already had to deal with in getting his essential safety measure protecting seafarers established. The preambles to those early treaties referred accordingly to the desire of the parties to facilitate the protection of work people by the adoption of common provisions. Now, I've so far mentioned several notable individuals including lawyers and legislation and treaties, but not the courts except very incidentally. The Tragea publication, like that of Gorse Clay, does both include the employer's liability acts from 1882 through to the 1890s. Those acts chipped away at the extraordinary 1837 decision of Lord Abinger and his fellow barons and priestly enfowler. Now, it's interesting for me for a number of reasons and I trust it's of some interest to you to go back to that case. By the time in 1837, by that time, the common law judges had established that an individual was responsible for his own fault and there could be as well vicarious liability to a third person for their servant's negligent conduct in the course of that employment. But what of the case presented by Baron Abinger and his colleagues of physical harm caused by the negligent conduct of one servant to another? Could the master be held liable to the injured servant? The case said the barons was unprecedented. We are therefore to decide the question upon general principles and in doing so we are at liberty to look at the consequences of a decision the one way or the other. The judgment continues with these hypotheticals, all concerned with transportation but transportation of a particular kind. I'll do the glass. If the master be liable to the servant in this action, they said, the principle of that liability will be found to carry us to an alarming extent. It's the kind of sentence that I don't think judges should be in the habit of writing. He who is responsible by this general duty or by the terms of his contract for all the consequences of negligence in a matter in which he is the principal is responsible, and here's the particular type of transportation, is responsible for the negligence of his coachmaker, of his harness maker or his coachman. The footman therefore who rides behind the carriage may have an action against his master for a defect in the carriage owing to the negligence of the harvest maker or for drunkenness, neglect or want of skill in the coachman, nor is there any reason why the principal should not, if applicable in this class of cases, extend to many others and the court continues with suggested liabilities in respect of other classes of domestic servants. The chambermaid, the upholsterer, the cook, the butcher and the builder and throughout the word used as servant, not employee or worker. The court essentially concluded the case against the injured servant in this case with this assessment. The inconvenience, not to say the absurdity of these consequences afford a sufficient argument against the application of this principal to the present case. In that largely unreasoned and unprincipled way the common servant doctrine or fellow employment rule was established with serious consequences getting in the way of injured workers in many parts of the common law world. It's striking that in 1939 or fully 100 years later the House of Lords, while finding that the doctrine was based on personal apprehension rather than on principle and that, they quote, there were none to praise and very few to love it held that the doctrine could not be overthrown by judicial decision. It was too long established, they said and Lord Atkin was one of those judges and it's interesting to compare what he had said just a few years earlier right in the middle of the Depression in respect of the snail and the bottle in the case of Donahue and Stevenson. Now, it's important as Sir Owen would have insisted to look at some of the real facts at that time. This is 1837. At that time they thought about the railways. They might have taken account of the fact that railway construction and operations in the UK were developing rapidly. There were already about 500 miles of track and up to 900 workers who can hardly be thought of as servants serving along with other servants in the household thinking back to the various categories of servants mentioned. Further as an effect and cause of railways development came big increases in mining and metallurgy and the use of the blast furnace. The rapidly developing industrial revolution with its manifold dangers to the increasing numbers of industrial workers and the resulting serious injury appear to have passed the barrens by. You will I hope agree with my assessment that that ruling was extraordinary both as a matter of principle and fact. Now I now move to a second place apparel of danger dangers at sea. As I said at the beginning I'll come back to work accidents, the work place, the ACC scheme and its scope. Edward Traguia included among his collection of labour legislation that which gave particular protections to seafarers. For at least six centuries national legislation or national practice had required masters of ships to go to the aid of those in distress at sea. That obligation took general treaty form only in 1910 and it was included in New Zealand shipping legislation a few years later. The legislation said a master or person in charge of a ship shall so far as he can do so without serious danger to his own ship, her crew and passengers render assistance to every person even subjects of foreign states at war with his majesty who was found at sea in danger of being lost. And if he fails to do that he commits a crime. Now that obligation has been accompanied by a quid pro quo for at least 1566 and that year Pope Pius the fifth and calling on fishing vessels to come to the aid of those in peril provided the balance. Payment should be made to those who took that action. Now some law and economics scholars in addressing this area of law failed to mention the legislation and the treaties. It seems they're not interested in the written law. They put the matter essentially in economic terms in terms of economic incentives. But surely as a great French law of the sea expert has put it, the ideas of humanity at the base of the 1910 convention are above all discussion. The obligation of assistance is demanded by humanity a word that will occur quite often in this address. It's a word that Owen often used in thinking and writing about injury prevention, rehabilitation and compensation. That humanitarian demand appears to be often ignored, who think solely in terms of the market and zero some games. Think of all the actions of good citizenship being displayed right at the moment in Houston and no doubt in Bangladesh and so on. Where so many are in peril, if not at sea certainly in very deep water and who I imagine are not contemplating that there will be a quid pro quo. They are doing just their humanitarian duty. Now I come to my third area an obligation of assistance is to address on the battlefield. In 1859 at Sulphurino, Honoury do not a Swiss citizen who was hoping to get Napoleon to assist him in financing development in Algeria, Honoury do not finding this massive casualty rate after that awful battle arranged instead of a loan from the Emperor but he arranged succor to the casualties in their many thousands. He proceeded on the basis of tutti frittali we are all brothers, no line was to be drawn between friend and foe. His efforts led along with efforts of others of his compatriots to the formation in 1863 of what became the International Committee of the Red Cross and the adoption in 1864 of the First Geneva Convention for the amelioration of the sick and wounded in the field. It provided for the protection as neutral of hospitals and ambulances and of those who work there. It also protected houses of the wounded. Further the generals were to issue an appeal to the inhabitants to their humanity to bring help to the wounded. Those who did so were to remain free. It will not surprise you that the very first of the fundamental principles of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is humanity and that the law of arms or the law of war or the law of armed conflict is now commonly referred to as international humanitarian law. Now another name that I have from the 1860s is Florence Nightingale. She was flatly opposed to do nonce ideas of having National Red Cross societies. She saw their responsibilities or the responsibilities suggested for them as belonging to governments alone. Governments should not be able to get rid of those obligations by having these voluntary organizations. She failed in that opposition as is demonstrated by the fact that there are now nearly 190 National Red Cross societies around the world, National Red Crescent societies. But she was much more successful and this is a much more important part of her contribution. She is much more successful in insisting on accurate statistics. She collected the facts about military deaths and she was able to show by looking at them that it was more dangerous to be in the barracks in the British Army than it was to be in the battlefield in the Crimea. She demonstrated this very effectively and visually by using pie charts. One of the first people to use pie charts. And those charts were not just descriptive, they were also prescriptive. She was in the business of persuading the government to improve military hygiene. She took on the army top brass and was successful in that endeavor. Just a week ago the Australian Chief Government Scientist declared that she should be known as the lady with the lamp. I have it on good authority that she was not a very good nurse. But she should be known as the lady with the logarithm or the patron saint of mathematicians. That government, Chief Government Scientist, drew several lessons from her life. The first was that mathematics was critical to our lives and societies and the last was that evidence was to be used to make a difference in distancing healthcare policy. Florence Nightingale corresponded with a great number of people including Sir George Gray and part of the correspondence is about lessons to be drawn from the first New Zealand census. Again she suggested how in New Zealand hygiene among Maori populations might be improved. And one of her letters to Gray she said you will do a noble work in New Zealand. It was about the time he was coming back from Cape Colony to New Zealand. You will do a noble work in New Zealand but pray, think of your statistics and the word statistics began with a capital S. Now in again in 1863 came the first detailed statement of the Laws of War. It has at its core humanity competing with military necessity. It is general orders 100 issued by President Lincoln for the armies of the North in that very destructive civil war. Francis Lieber prepared that text. He was a real polymath. He also had sons on both sides of the battle and he spelled out a very detailed text including a ban on waterboarding. It's not something that's new but it's that ban. At the same time well the following year 1864 there were principles stated in much shorter form for the battle at Gate Pa. They were stated on the Maori side by Henry Taratoua and in which in that battle there were 250 Ngaturangi warriors and they defeated a British force of almost 2,000. Those laws provided that unarmed soldiers were to be saved as were the wounded or captured and soldiers who flee to the house of a priest. Unarmed Pakiha women and children were also to be spared. Now that body of law has been greatly elaborated over the following 150 years and it's been extended beyond the field to the shipwreck and people at sea in difficulty to prisoners of war in 1929 and in 1949 a date which is significant to civilians in occupied territory. Further changes were made in the 1970s to develop the law in respect of internal armed conflict, methods and means of warfare which had not been addressed since 1907 and improved methods of implementation. Now one of the principles that has been carried forward all the way since 1899 and it's included in one of those 1977 texts is what is known as the Demartens formula. A formula drafted by Frederick Demartens who was a leading Russian or some would say Estonian international lawyer and one of the principle negotiators in the Hague in 1899 and 1907. The latest version says in cases not covered by this protocol or other international agreements civilians and competence remain under the protection and authority of the principles of international law derived from established custom from the principles of humanity and from the dictates of the public conscience. In 1996 the International Court of Justice spoke very strongly in support of that clause. They said that court said the continuing existence and applicability of that clause was not to be doubted and it was an affirmation that the principles and rules of humanitarian law apply to nuclear weapons and saying that the court rejected the arguments made by the Russian Federation and the United States among others. Now there are obviously terrible breaches of this body of law and a good deal of cases of successful application which don't get the same press. I just want to touch on one matter which has been prominent recently and I'll do this quickly. It's a matter about which there's been a good deal of controversy. It relates to the resolution adopted late last year by the Security Council relating to the Middle East. It was adopted on 23 December last year in the last days of New Zealand's membership of the Security Council. The New Zealand action and co-sponsoring it and voting for it has been criticised. And has been the subject of much ill-informed comment including by the recently appointed Foreign Minister in his first few days back in May. Now New Zealand voted in favour along with 13 other members including France, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom and the United States as is well known and now I make four points about it very briefly. The resolution first reaffirmed that the occupied Palestinian territories were subject to the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949 concerning the protection of civilians in armed conflict. And that convention includes a prohibition on civilian settlements in occupied territory. And that position of prohibition on civilian settlements had been taken by the legal advisor to the Israeli Foreign Ministry as long ago as November 1967 just a few months after the June war. And it was taken unanimously by the International Court of Justice in 2004. Third to counter the argument that the resolution was unbalanced and the resolution condemned all acts of violence against civilians called for immediate steps to end them and called upon the parties to act on the basis of international law. My final point about that event about that resolution is that the 4th Convention was actually in draft before World War II. We had a conference in 1940 not very good timing. The ICRC commentary to that convention says this about the delay and it's very cautious ICRC writing as they're renowned for that caution. The events of World War II they say show the disastrous consequences of the absence of a convention for the protection of victims in warfare. So a strong statement, disastrous consequences of which we're all pretty well aware. Now let me come back to the business of work injuries and beyond. I go back again to the late 19th century partly as a link to the reference on the overhead behind me to the international labour organisation. The bodies that were set up in continental Europe, the one that France Kafka was involved with for instance, had very interesting functions and composition. The German associations and those in Austria were formed by groups of employers within a particular industry. Their boards had equal numbers of employer and worker delegates. They had large powers of self-management and they had two different functions as you might have guessed. They first of all were involved in setting and gathering the premiums from the employers and making decisions on compensation for injuries and deaths on a no-fault basis. And second, they had the role of proposing regulations to promote safety in the particular industry. They had the function of appointing inspectors and the function of enforcing the regulations against employers and workers in the event of breach. The exercise of these important powers was subject to supervision and appellate control by government insurance officers. Kafka, to come back to him, was a very senior member of such an office in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which was then known as the Manchester of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There's a great recent book about Kafka in which his office writings have been translated with some really interesting commentary. And you find him dealing with businesses which were trying to get into a less expensive risk category. You find him resolving particular compensation claims on appeal. You find him trying to improve safety standards, for instance, in quarries. Some of you may remember how Joseph Kay came to his deaths by being stabbed in a quarry in the trial. And after 1914, he was becoming increasingly concerned as well with the rehabilitation of the many servicemen wounded in the Great War and the establishment of psychiatric hospitals for them. Slightly macabre, to notice that one of the psychiatric hospitals was proposed for the town of Frankenstein. Now, the composition of these associations can be linked, I think, to what happened when the International Labor Organization was established in 1919 at Versailles. The Treaty of Versailles doesn't have a very good name, but the International Labor Organization was one of its major products. That constitution provides for a tripartite representation. Each of the now 187 members of the International Labor Organization is represented at the conference which adopts International Labor Conventions, now almost 200 of them. Those delegations have two government delegates, one employer delegate and one worker delegate. And the governing body, the executive body is similarly composed. Those responsible for the preparation of the chapter of the Treaty of Versailles and for the setting up of the organization justified it in this way. Universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice and conditions of labor at that stage exist involving such injustice, hardship and privation to large numbers of people as to produce unrest so great that the peace and harmony of the world are imperiled and an improvement of these conditions is urgently required. No doubt. They had very clearly in mind what had happened in Russia just less than two years earlier and what was happening in terms of social and economic turmoil across the whole of Europe. The drafters and the resource of list of areas in which improvements were required they also so set out general principles and one of these principles, it's really striking to read when you think it's nearly 100 years ago, one of these principles was that men and women should receive equal immuneration for work of equal value. So there you have that proposition stated and we're still even in New Zealand a long way from achieving that. They also as with the two earlier Labour conventions I mentioned made the point that they had to be international regulation of Labour conditions because the failure of any nation to adopt humane conditions of Labour is an obstacle in the way of other nations which desire to improve the conditions in their own countries. If the Dutch were to prohibit the use of children and minds they might be worried that the Belgians would get ahead of them but if they were all bound by the same treaty obligation that wouldn't happen. Now those principles developed and that mechanism developed was reassessed in 1944 it's interesting to see these things happening in the middle of warfare. In Philadelphia when the International Labour Conference met with President Roosevelt in attendance and the conference was under the chairmanship of Walter Nash the only other New Zealand minister who has chaired the International Labour Conference is Jim Bolger. So two significant contributions and they set out the fundamental principles which include the proposition that Labour is not a commodity an idea that was challenged really by the very use of the word contracts in the Employment Contracts Act that Labour is not a commodity and there are various other important principles stated there and you can relate them back to Roosevelt's Four Freedoms the Atlantic Charter and Declaration of 1942 and also if you want more detail go to William Beverage's report in 1942 leading to major social reform in the United Kingdom. Beverage had as part of his first principle the proposition that a revolutionary moment in the world's history is a time for revolutions not for patching a revolutionary moment in the world's history of revolutions not for patching. Now the International Labour Organization under the enthusiastic leadership of Albert Thomas its first director adopted a great number of conventions New Zealand had no interest at all in the ILO just as it had almost no interest in the League of Nations until 1935 in the election of the first Labour government in 1938 New Zealand became 21 international Labour conventions including three relating to workers' compensation. Now in terms of workers' compensation I should go back to 1900 or slightly earlier, 1900 the year when Workers' Compensation Act was passed for the first time and just before that was the disaster in the Brunner mine in 1896. That killed all 65 miners working there they left 39 widows and 192 children as well as elderly dependents. I'm grateful to Hazel Armstrong for some of this material I should say. The funds available from a government of post-Levy on coal production and from the friendly societies formed through the miners unions were not adequate to cover the costs of such tragedies and the 1900 Act was passed in substantial part as a consequence. Now a great deal has been written about the periods from 1900 on to New Zealand and I'm not going to add to it tonight and indeed time is passing but there have been all these debates up to the 1960s and 1970s they're written up very well by a great number of people including Hazel's as I just writing as I just said. Also a very good book by Ian Campbell who was a long time senior member of the Workers' Compensation Board staff and by Geoffrey Palmer and I would expect that in future lectures in the series and in the associated symposiums some of that experience will be reviewed in a wider context as Sir Owen would have wished but if I could just go back again to the reference I made earlier to Owen talking to Colin Aikman and this does go to the point about close relationships within our society between the universities and many others. Colin reported to us at morning tea one day that he'd had this conversation with the judge and wouldn't it be a good idea for us to make submissions and four of us did. Colin Ivor Richardson, Peter Mackenzie and I and it was great last night to have Peter in the audience and for him to correct one or two other things I'd said. Now apart from the social welfare department that group of four was the only group the only set of submissions arguing for a universal scheme Colin made a good argument that the final phrase routinely put into Royal Commission in terms of reference was wide enough for the commission to go widely as of course it did. Now in terms of my own thinking and we talked about this a number of us at a 2003 conference by the teaching and legal system which began with Priestley and Fowler I was aware of the inadequate and chancey law common law and legislative remedies a matter which had been emphasised by Terence Eisen's recent book The Forensic Lottery influenced by the preamble to the Social Security Act of 1938 and so on also influenced by the ILO conventions in respect of which New Zealand was in breach because of the six year time limit for compensation in New Zealand also the beverage report was important in my thinking. Now I'd just take three lessons from the last 50 years of debate since the report was published the first concerns the questions to be asked and answered the 1967 report like the 1897 article distinguished prevention of injury from rehabilitation and compensation next incapacity in terms of widening the question incapacity should not be limited to injuries at work nor indeed to workers the position that was taken by parliament after the change of government in 1972 in principle the scheme should include incapacity should include incapacity caused by illness a subject which was the subject of study including careful costings submissions and proposals made by the law commission in the late 1980s and 1980s but unfortunately that step has yet to be taken principle just cannot justify the distinction that is drawn between the entitlements of those who lose their leg in a car accident and those who lose their leg to cancer and it's encouraging that that matter is still back on the agenda and being pursued. So one issue is trying to work out the right questions and just seeing how principle applies once you take in that case a wider view the second lesson yet again is about taking the facts seriously. That's the subtitle of an excellent 1996 book by three Canadian scholars one of whom is also a New Zealander they reviewed the evidence largely from North America of the efficiency of the tort system and it's alternatives relating to automobile accidents, medical accidents product related accidents, environmental injury and workplace injuries they said they wished to move away from the theoretical debates about the appropriate normative goals of the tort system and the doctrinal implications that each entails the tort system they conclude cannot successfully achieve all three of the goals they identified, deterrence compensation and corrective justice the empirical evidence leads them to a bleak judgement, that's their words, about the tort system as a compensatory mechanism. Now that conclusion had of course already been reached by the Royal Commission in 1967 and by the Law Commission in 1988 we were greatly helped to take the 1988 exercise by many submissions 1698 and by the work of expert consultant showing the great value of interdisciplinary work we had Ian Campbell whom I mentioned earlier who completed an excellent PhD and published a book on the whole matter in his late 70s, a lesson to many of us so we had Ian, we had Professor Les Castle on underlying economic and public policy principles, he took me off not knowing about Adam Smith's writing on jurisprudence, thought I was a not very lettered lawyer and very good help too from two Australians who came to Sir Owen's funeral Richard Cumston and Richard Madden for good advice on actuarial and policy matters and rehabilitation. I just mention two other facts which are comparative or two other questions. The first one is about the proportion of GDP that the scheme absorbs, it's still under 2%, a proportion which over the years has been a good deal less than the proportion of Australia's GDP absorbed workers compensation and road traffic injury premiums which of course have a much narrower coverage and second, how do the administrative costs of operating the scheme compared with those of other schemes, usually under 10% of the premium and related income in any particular year compared with 30% or so in other systems. A third matter concerns the need for bipartisan support and for the fostering of that support. Over the years there's been far too much political bickering so far as I can observe with insufficient attention being given to the facts and to the underlying policies and principles. I trust that I'm not being too optimistic in drawing positive lessons from the very brief life of the privatisation of injury insurance in the early 1990s and the failure of the incoming government in 2008 to give effect to the policy that had announced the previous year in opposition of re-establishing a competitive market to provide accident insurance. PricewaterhouseCoopers had undertaken an independent review in 2008 and that concluded that the current highly regarded ACC scheme is consistent with the Woodhouse Principles, adds considerable value to the New Zealand society and compares very well in comparison to alternative schemes and operation internationally. So there you have an independent report calling attention to the facts and to the principles and maybe that helped introduce reason and appreciation of the facts for the incoming government. Now I come finally to a conclusion in some senses. I trust and I should try to get this right. I trust that I've given you a sense of some evidence that Sir Owen and his person and in his work has taught to this country's great advantage. He drew on the wisdom of the ages. He drew on strong values, on wide experience, on facts and was a great New Zealander. I end with, not with the quote from Shakespeare that you have on your invitation that challenged me too much to try to work out quite how I could use it. But you might go and look at it. It's Hotspur, the young Percy and Henry IV Part 1 trying to persuade a reluctant lord of the importance of getting involved in the rebellion against Richard II which led to his downfall and the installation of Henry IV. But I end with one great friend of Owen's, one of his naval colleagues left in and commander Dennis Glover, DSC and there are words that at one point I tried but I didn't expect any great success to have included in the judgment of the New Zealand Court of Appeal. This is what Dennis Glover said, I do not dream of Sussex Downs or quaint old Englands, quaint old towns. I think of what will yet be seen in Johnsonville and Geraldine. Thank you.