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Canberra's first citizens' jury has already delivered its verdict on ACT's compulsory third-party insurance, opting for the most radical of the four options presented to them: a five-year scheme that would cover everyone in a car accident regardless of fault.
One juror, however, didn't take part in the final day of what he called a “grossly corrupted” and “misleading” process, after he felt the group was blindsided at the last minute with key information used in the presented schemes.
On the final weekend of the process, Luke Hitch said a key factor in the chosen model – an injury calculation tool known as whole person impairment (WPI) – had been glossed over and not thoroughly explained.
"We were blindsided, it was just in there," Hitch told ABC. "WPI has been around for 20 years or more… they could have got that information to us in October. In any criminal jury situation this would be binned based on the fact that the jury had been misled."
The chosen scheme will see payments for medical treatments, income replacement, and loss of quality of life be limited to people who reached a 10% WPI threshold. This could reduce premiums on the 285,000 cars registered in the ACT by an average of $130.
Hitch told ABC that on the final Saturday, the jury was given a 30-minute briefing session on WPI and another scale called ISV, and that until the jury asked for more information, the organisers “were quite happy for us to just roll on and make these decisions in this vacuum really.”
When asked if they wanted to investigate the methods further, the jury declined.
"At that point I said I think it's been grossly corrupted… it's broken and I walked away," Hitch told ABC. "In the first instance they were uninformed and then once they wanted information they were quite clearly misled. They really did portray (WPI) as quite benevolent, a simple, great process."
Another juror told ABC that the group was not presented information about “edge cases,” such as those people whose injury falls below the 10% threshold. The juror also said the group was not presented with the calculation on the reduction of total compensation in the ACT until they had specifically asked for the information on the last weekend.
Geoff Atkins of scheme designer Finity Consulting denied that they withheld information on WPI from the jury in the first sessions. But due to the technical difficulty of the measure, he said the material was "phased in" so that it came at a "logical time", ABC reported.
DemocracyCo, which ran the process for the government, said the jury received all the necessary information and the information identified as necessary by the stakeholder reference group, which included lawyers, insurers, health professions, government, and consumer representatives.
A spokeswoman for the ACT government, meanwhile, said the process was independent and robust, allowing the jurors to examine a range of perspectives on CTP insurance schemes in a timely and professional manner.
"The jurors overwhelmingly favoured the model chosen," the spokeswoman told ABC. "The inclusion of a minority report in the final jury report is a transparent way of the jury being open about any dissenting views on the chosen model."
