Wong Pansy: General Debate 
Wong Pansy: General Debate 
[Volume:652;Page:1636] 
Hon PANSY WONG (Minister for Ethnic Affairs) 
: 
 I think the way Darren Hughes MP carries on explains why he lost his seat and he has forgotten why Labour lost last year on 8 November. Labour according to him was doing such a fantastic job and he is now trying to tell New Zealanders that the voters out there made a mistake which is why Labour lost the election and he lost his seat. He is in total denial as are the previous Minister of Finance the Hon Dr Michael Cullen and the previous Minister for ACC the Hon Maryan Street. They live in denial. 
Labour members forgot that the Hon Dr Michael Cullen also put his signature on the pre-election fiscal update that failed to disclose there was a $300 million anomaly and a billion-dollar blowout in the non-earners account of the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) for the next 3 years. They chose not to tell the New Zealand voters. The Leader of the Opposition stood up and said he was really sad to have visited the people who lost their jobs at Sealord and that $1 billion should be spent on housing improvements. But we know what happened with the billion-dollar blowout in ACC. 
The National-led Government has been forced to take a hard look at the accident compensation schemes but that is nothing new. We voted against the amendment bill that was brought to the House last year as we knew that Labour continued to live in denial. It was very obvious that Labour members were ruining the accident compensation scheme which was set up as an insurance scheme. They were using it as a de facto funding mechanism for whatever they saw fit. That is nothing short of being reckless. 
Let me use some examples. There was a letter written by the previous Minister for ACC the Hon Maryan Street to the chair of the board of ACC Ross Wilson asking him to use the ACC contract for service providers of home care to force the providers to go into a collective agreement and collective bargaining. Labour members were running the unions’ agenda putting the unions’ wishes ahead of accident compensation claimants and the affordability of the scheme. That is nothing short of reckless. 
It gets worse than that. Last year among all the changes that the Labour Government brought into the insurance scheme it endorsed people committing suicide by allowing an entitlement to compensation in such cases. In the accident compensation scheme there has been a longstanding provision that compensation would be paid to those surviving suicide only in cases where the attempted suicide that caused the injury was due to mental illness. The Labour Government removed that provision so that there would be an entitlement to compensation in the case of anybody who attempted suicide. Anybody else who does that is actually committing a criminal offence. 
Those are only two examples of the reckless behaviour of the previous Labour Government and those members will remain members of the previous Labour Government for a very very long time. All Labour did was to shift the boundary for claimants and to defer expenditure so that people pay higher levies in the future. The two reports the inquiry report and the latest PricewaterhouseCoopers report show that the time is up for the investment return to disguise the incompetence and the cost blowout in the accident compensation scheme. If the National-led Government does not address those issues in 4 years’ time we will be looking at households having to pay over $2000 overall in levies for accident compensation coverage.