Brownlee Gerry: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Brownlee Gerry: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:609;Page:6651] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (NZ National—Ilam) 
: 
 No new tax! No rise in income tax! Just levies on nearly everything that has anything to do with a Government service in this country—levies imposed by Helen Clark and her Ministers on electricity on petrol on roading on alcohol on tobacco and on various food products. In respect of the latter today we heard of the possibility of McDonald’s and other fast foods being additionally taxed. The Minister who stands up and says that the Government keeps its promises must know that by 2005 this Government will be one of those Governments that the people will wish to heck had never kept its promises. 
I want to tell members what this bill is about. It deals with the motor vehicle levy that used to be applied to the registration of motor vehicles each year. It is the accident compensation levy and it pays for the cost of motor accidents. One of the things about the old system was that if the accident compensation account had a good year vehicle registration went down and if it had a not-so-good year the registration went back up again. This Government has pegged the registration fee at the higher levels. The cost to register the family car I believe is now $212. This additional tax will be built into the cost of petrol and it will never come off. The registration fees will never go down and this levy will never come off. That means that New Zealanders are now paying far more for the cost of accident compensation cover on their motor vehicles. 
The worst of it is that we all get levied at the same rate. It does not matter whether people are 70-year-old pensioners who drive to where they do a few hours’ work every week or to the supermarket to church or to the bowling or golf club and who drive perfectly safely never causing any sort of an accident. Those people will pay the same amount as the boy racer who screams up and down Queen Street squeals his wheels around corners rams into people and in certain sad circumstances causes very severe injury. Under this system no distinction is made at all between a safe driver and a poor driver. That is because this Government has an ideological belief that we need a one-size-fits-all approach to everything. We have an accident compensation system that does not measure people’s worthiness as far as their accident records are concerned; it simply says that the worst person in the pool sets the fee. The unsafest driver will now set the fee that every one of us will have to pay for our motor vehicle registration. That is this Government’s promise of no new taxes. 
One of the things I observed when walking around supermarkets recently—and I do that frequently in my electorate— 
Hon Chris Carter 
: Ha ha! 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: The member over there laughs. It is quite true I do. Looking at what is going through the supermarket tills is a very good indicator of how people are feeling. But the most telling thing is looking around supermarket shelves now and so often seeing something that someone picked up in aisle B being dumped somewhere in aisle C. That is because people are watching the pennies and have either found a cheaper product or decided that they simply cannot afford to take it. That is happening far more now than I have ever seen before. That tells me that New Zealanders—average hard-working New Zealanders—are starting to feel the pinch. They are starting to understand what it means for New Zealand to have $200 a week wealth per capita less than Australia—man woman and child. They are starting to understand what relative poverty is. They are starting to understand that under this Government all that is ever going to happen is that another levy or charge will be put on them—and all in the name of keeping a promise not to increase taxes. It is an absolute disgrace. 
I was thinking today about the extraordinary situation of a State-owned enterprise Meridian Energy investing some $1.2 billion initially and then a second tranche of $1.2 billion—so $2.4 billion of taxpayers’ money over a period of time—in Australia in order to make it a higher performing business. What is the advantage to any New Zealander in that? If that State-owned enterprise was doing so well if its balance sheet was in such a strong position might it not have repatriated some capital to the shareholder? It might have paid a huge dividend back to the Government so that the Government did not have to tax the living daylights out of poor hard-workers up and down the country so that we did not have to have this extra 4c on our petrol this time. Do members remember the other 4c in the dollar tax? The Deputy Speaker in the Chair would because it apparently all went to Auckland. I am from the South Island. Transit does not have a single roading project for the South Island on its books for the next 10 years and every time we go to the pump we are paying an extra 4c for Auckland roads. Now we are to pay another 4c or 5c for the accident compensation levy on every litre of petrol and it is never ever going to come off. 
As I said before people are starting to wake up. They are starting to realise that when Helen Clark promises no new income tax she is certainly not promising to keep her hands out of the pockets of hard workers because this Government has just gone fishing like one would not believe. We had the electricity crisis this year. That multi-billion investor in Australia—the company that could have returned a huge dividend to the taxpayer; a repatriation of capital but chose rather to put it all into Australia—was part of the electricity crisis here. Rather than saying let us get some more investment in New Zealand the Government’s only answer is to tax a bit more. Its only answer is to put a levy on to every consumer. Every time that consumer flicks on the lights he or she will be providing a few more dollars—cents in the case of a light but over a month it would be dollars—for a company owned by taxpayers to invest in Australia. I think that points to a Government that is out of steam and ideas. It has no idea at all of how to make life a bit easier for the average New Zealander. 
I note that today is Thursday. It is a payday for many hard-working people around the countryside. I wonder how many of them are just hanging out to get their hands on their pay in the hope that the Eftpos overdraft will survive through to midnight tonight. More and more people are being put in that position because this Government does not care about wealth creation. It does not see that a nation being prosperous is about individual citizens living well. Instead whenever it has to deal with an issue it simply comes up with another levy that is another tax. 
Is it not extraordinary that while the foreshore and the seabed are being discussed at the moment the Government performs the amazingly duplicitous act of saying on Monday that it would legislate away that right and then by Thursday saying that it is entering into negotiation? The Associate Minister of Justice is talking about compensation. Where will that compensation come from? It will come from the pockets of hard-working New Zealanders—the same sad group that will soon wake up to the Labour Government and realise that they have to abandon it if there is to be any hope of improving their lives.