Hutchison Paul: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hutchison Paul: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 27 February 2007. Volume:637;Page:7702. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
: 
 It is indeed salutary to hear Gordon Copeland from a party that supplies confidence to the Government point out that the Government should give this substantial amount of money back based on principle. He points out that the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) has recommended a risk margin of 111 percent and that at present it is 163 percent. My colleague Pansy Wong has an eminently sensible amendment in that she suggests a risk margin of 120 percent which is above that recommended by ACC. Gordon Copeland quite rightly suggests that the Labour Government should give this money back to the employers. The employers have paid it in good faith. They have paid it thinking that the employers’ account would be fully funded but it has gone well over that level. 
It is unfortunate that this particular phrase “give the money back” has such a familiar ring when it is applied to the Labour Government. I will not go back to the credit card again but let us just say for the record here again we have this mischievous Labour Government taking money from employers in the private sector and using it for the Government’s own purposes and for its own ideology. 
It is absolutely appropriate that we speak about the principles of this particular issue. We heard the Hon Mark Gosche talking about a rugby team and how one person should not have a premium different from another person’s. I absolutely agree with that. Premiums should be risk rated individually. This Government wants to pool the lot of them defying basic principles of insurance. It is unfortunate we cannot get it into the thick skulls of this Labour Government including the chairman of the select committee. This is the chairman who insisted that submissions to the select committee close after 2 weeks. He is the man who might talk about democracy but no he wanted to rush the submissions through quickly. In fact the time for submissions might have been even less than 2 weeks. There is absolutely no question that a lot of employers out there very much wanted to submit on this bill but Mark Gosche the chairman of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee prevented them from doing so by instructing that submissions would close so fast. 
One other principle is extremely worrying about this bill and that is the transitional provisions. They are ominous and unprecedented. In the Labour Government’s hurry to get this legislation through the levy consultations for 2007 and 2008 will be bypassed. The Labour Government says: “To hell with the levy consultations! Forget about democracy and forget about listening to the employers and the self-employed. We will just bypass the levy consultation process for the convenience of merging these two accounts.” Talk about principles! 
I say to the Hon Mark Gosche the chairman of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that he has certainly not displayed principles in terms of allowing time for submissions to be heard in a democratic way through this process. Certainly when we come to the levy consultation process we see that he has bypassed normal precedent.