Key developments
- SIRA Review of Legal Support for Injured People in CTP Scheme
- Regulatory Impact Statement and Draft Design and Building Practitioners Regulation 2020
- Inquiry into child protection and social services system
- 2020 Review of the Compulsory Third Party insurance scheme – supplementary submission
- Review into the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth)
- Mandatory Disease Testing Bill 2020
- Inquiry into High Level of First Nations People in Custody and Oversight & Review of Deaths in Custody
- Inquiry into the Climate Change (National Framework for Adaptation and Mitigation) Bill 2020
- Anti-Discrimination Amendment (Religious Freedoms and Equality) Bill 2020: response to questions on notice
- Consumer credit reforms
SIRA Review of Legal Support for Injured People in CTP Scheme
The Injury Compensation Committee contributed to a submission to SIRA on its independent Review of Legal Support for Injured People in the NSW CTP Scheme (‘the Review’), which is inquiring into whether current legislative, regulatory and service provision of legal support promotes the objects of the Motor Accident Injuries Act 2017, and the feasibility of expanding the Independent Legal Assistance and Review Service into the CTP scheme.
The submission outlined various concerns, many of which we have raised previously with SIRA, including that:
- the current regulated fees under the scheme are inadequate and fail to reflect the true costs of providing legal services today. In some instances, this leads to claimants being denied access to justice and also results in overall increases to scheme costs; and
- the legal funding available to claimants in the workers compensation scheme (managed by the Workers Compensation Independent Review Office) should be extended to claimants in the CTP scheme to enhance access to justice.
Following a meeting with the independent reviewers on 9 December 2020, we submitted a supplementary submission to the Review team, providing further information about the types of matters that legal practitioners should be able to recover legal costs for. The submission reiterated the points made in our original submission, that costs should be made available for legal services provided at any stage of the review process.
