Expert: Dan Smith - 9/5/2005

Question
Dear Dan Smith,
I live in New Zealand. New Zealand has a "no fault" system of insurance for injured workers. Workers compulsorily contribute 1.2 percent of all earnings to the Government thoughout their entire working lives.
The system was supposed to prevent the proliferation of time-consuming and expensive litigation for injured workers. However, the poorly-written legislation for the system is causing much confusion.
I include here two parts of the legislation and the particular instance to which it needs to be applied. I include the instance to give you a framework to place the legislation against grammatically.
The main issue is in the following fragment of a sentence here:

"the claimant's earnings as an employee (from employment with that employer) in the 52 weeks immediately before his or
her incapacity commenced "

In the 52 weeks immediately before my incapacity commenced I had worked at two different jobs, for different employers, as a permanent employee each time.
I worked at Job A for 15 weeks. Then had no job for 10 weeks. Then I worked at Job B for 26 weeks before my accident occurred.
I count 41 weeks of earnings.

IPRC Act 2001
9.Earnings as an employee: what it means—
 1)''Earnings as an employee'', in relation to any person and any [tax year], means all source deduction payments of the person for the [tax year].

IPRC Act 2001 Schedule 1:
 34.Weekly earnings if earner had earnings as an employee in permanent employment immediately before incapacity commenced:
calculations—    
(2)This subclause applies to any weekly period of incapacity after the 4 weeks described in subclause (1). The claimant's
weekly earnings for any such weekly period are calculated using the following formula:

a  
—  
b  
where—  
a is the claimant's earnings as an employee (from employment with that employer) in the 52 weeks immediately before his or
her incapacity commenced  
b is the number of full or part weeks during which the claimant earned those earnings as an employee.  

If you wish to view the entire INJURY PREVENTION, REHABILITATION AND COMPENSATION ACT 2001 it is available, free, online at:http://www.legislation.govt.nz

Thank you for even reading this far, I look forward to your comments.
Yours sincerely
Michael Hills

Answer
I am not the person to ask about this issue. Such legal questions involve not only grammatical structures but also precedent in interpreting the law. In short, the grammatical details of the legislation do not exist in a vacuum, and nothing I could say on the subject basent a professional understanding of that context would have any value. You should consult an attorney who specializes in this kind of law in New Zealand. That is the only kind of expertise that matters.

Sorry not to be more help. Anything I could say would risk crushing hopes that should not be crushed or fostering hope that should not be entertained. You don't need that, even from me.