Abstract
This article presents a history of New Zealand’s accident compensation scheme as a struggle between two competing normative paradigms that justify the core reform of the replacement of civil actions for victims of personal injury with a comprehensive no-fault scheme. Under ‘community insurance’, the scheme represents the community taking moral and practical responsibility for members who are injured in accidents, while for ‘compulsory insurance’ the scheme is a specific form of compulsory accident insurance. Understanding the history of the scheme in this way helps explain both the persistence of the scheme and important changes made to it by different governments.