Belich CamillaCAMILLA BELICH (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's a pleasure to take a call on the Accident Compensation (Interest on Instalment Plans) Amendment Bill. Now as a previous speaker our spokesperson on ACC Rachel Boyack stated we will be supporting this bill. But that doesn't mean we don't have some questions for the Minister that we will need to go through at the committee of the whole House stage and just some issues that I think are important to raise during this first reading.I don't think there's disagreement that the fact that ACC charges this debit interest is a necessary part of their business model. But you know it's not an ideal situation to have a bill which imposes retrospective validity on actions taken by a Government department that the regulatory impact statement states quite clearly is in order to avoid legal challenge by members—by businesses. And yes they are businesses. They are not technically necessarily individual people but they could be single director companies. They could be individuals whose right to take legal action—I think is probably as far as I would go with this particular advice—is taken away. I've looked through the information provided although obviously having this through urgency means there's not a huge amount of time to go through all of that information. There isn't a New Zealand Bill of Rights Act vet. But I think we can all agree that retrospectivity in legislation is not a great place to be. And that's not putting the blame on the Government necessarily. The Government relies on ACC to independently conduct its operations legally and obviously this is an issue that has traversed different Governments of different colours over the years. But the Government does have a responsibility to make sure that the legislation they put up is addressing something in an appropriate way. And as I've said we are supporting this but there are a few issues in relation to that.So I think the main issue really that I wanted to highlight is the difference in opinion which I think was foreshadowed by Rachel Boyack between ACC and the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) in relation to the need for this legislation. Now that is also not ideal. Ideally you're getting advice and there's a clear way forward in regards to a situation where you have MBIE who's offering policy advice and ACC who's the agency involved. Ideally you'd have them having the same opinion. In this case perhaps it's not surprising that ACC thinks that it acted you know perfectly legitimately—Hon Matt Doocey: [Laughs]CAMILLA BELICH: —and there is an argument to say that they did. I don't know if that's necessarily that funny but it's not surprising is it?Hon Matt Doocey: Well of course they're going to have the view they acted lawfully. CAMILLA BELICH: Exactly. The Minister is interjecting and in fact reemphasised the point that I was making which is of course ACC has that view. MBIE has a different view and they have provided advice in the regulatory impact statement to say that potentially there does need to be a change. There were really two options provided to the Government moving forward. The option one was status quo no action—you know ACC takes the risk. It may be that someone takes a case it may be that they're successful it may be that they're not successful. That's legal risk. I mean that happens all the time in business it happens in Government it's not surprising in and of itself. That risk by this legislation is being taken away. But there's also downsides to that as well and the downside is kind of what I'm bringing up. Rachel Boyack has set out the policy reasons why it is a good idea to address this but it's not a perfect situation. I'm sure the Minister feels the same way. It's not why he wanted to be the Minister for ACC I'm sure to bring these types of bills to the House tidying up a somewhat messy situation.So in the regulatory impact statement we do have the acknowledgement that this particular approach would attract some public scrutiny around ACC's past charging of instalment plans on debit interest and this may lower public confidence in ACC. Now obviously none of us in the House want that. We want ACC to have a lot of have public confidence we want ACC to have good practices and I think this is a bit of a lesson for them to make sure that all of the procedures that they are going through in relation to charging are legitimate and are within the law. And I suppose the fact that this has been picked up at this stage prior to a legal challenge indicates that they do have some way of looking at their practices in order to identify that and obviously bring that to the Ministers.So just in the last few seconds I did just want to suggest to the Minister I will be asking a few questions at the committee of the whole House stage just to make sure that the scrutiny occurs.