Compulsory Automobile Liability Insurance in Australasia

Abstract

THE RECENT enactment in New York of a compulsory automobile insurance law has once more focussed attention on the recurrent arguments for and against compulsion in this field. To Australian and New Zealand lawyers, such arguments are merely of historical interest. For more than a decade, all Australian states and New Zealand have accepted compulsory insurance schemes which generally go further in providing automatic compensation for automobile accident victims than any other jurisdictions in the common-law system, except Saskatchewan. Unlike most of the legislation in the other common-law countries, compensation frequently emerges from the enactments as an end in itself, limited only by the difficulties of financing any improved system, and not by any deeply ingrained desire to retain individual responsibility in the field. The touchstone of the Australasian legislation was the New Zealand Motor Vehicles (Third Party Risks) Act of 1928.1 It was viewed by its proponents as an experimental measure, independent of any prior intrusions into the remedial area of liability.2 The Massachusetts compulsory insurance system, with its retention of a considerable area of individual responsibility, was expressly rejected as the pattern of the New Zealand Act.' In his second reading speech in the legislature, the Attorney-General, Mr. F. J. Rolleston, affirmed that the Government believed that the most effective way of dealing with automobile accidents was to provide compensation, wherever possible, for injured road users.4 The scope of the Act itself confirms that collective responsibility is admitted to be an aim in itself and not merely a palliative to satisfy uncompensated plaintiffs. The most important feature of the legislation is the extent of the compulsory indemnity requirement. All owners of motor vehicles6 are required