Newman Muriel: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Newman Muriel: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:607;Page:5060] 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (ACT NZ) 
: 
 On behalf of the ACT party I rise to strongly oppose the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill. This is a bill that has been brought forward by a Labour Government that promised no new taxes. Apart from the people who earned over $60000 there were to be no new taxes. I ask the Government members sitting opposite what on earth they think this bill is. It is a bill to increase taxes. It is a bill to gain something like $155 million from hard-working New Zealand families. It is a tax-grab bill. Members opposite should slink in their seats because they are going against their election promise and increasing taxes in this bill that we are now debating. 
The bill increases petrol taxes from 2.3c a litre to 5.08c a litre. This is the third time petrol taxes have been increased since Labour has been the Government. In this case it is a 120 percent increase. If we look at the figures New Zealanders use almost 3000 million litres of petrol a year. If we multiply that by 5.08c we end up with a very large amount of money that the Labour Government is stealing off hard-working families. But we should not be surprised because since Labour has been in power it has increased the tax take from $34 billion in 1999 to $43 billion in the year 2003. That is a $9 billion increase mostly because of the stealth taxes it has introduced. 
Labour members said there would be no new income tax increases but what they have done is increase levies charges and taxes in a whole range of different areas. For example we know that fringe benefit tax has gone up and that tobacco tax went up. Petrol tax which is what we are talking about today has already been put up a number of times as have diesel and road-user charges. If we look at things such as the cost of birth death and marriage certificates they have all gone up as have driving licence fees. There is a litany of different types of fees and charges that this Labour Government has put on. 
If we look at accident compensation levies we find Labour has increased the levies for the self-employed by 40 percent. The wage earners levy was increased by 10 percent. Motorbike levies increased by 57 percent and car ownership levies increased by 14 percent. Even over the last couple of weeks we have had new levies and taxes on car dealers. We now have new levies and charges on school exam fees for goodness’ sake. Across every level of New Zealand society this Labour Government has increased charges. 
 When we think about a tax-grab bill from the Accident Compensation Corporation we have to ask how come we can possibly have that. The only reason that that could be done is that the Accident Compensation Corporation is a monopoly. The previous speaker pointed that out loud and clear. The Labour Government nationalised accident compensation. We actually had a competitive model operating and operating extremely well. That was one of the really good things that the National Government did. Labour came into power and immediately changed it. It scrapped it and meanwhile there were so many employers in New Zealand who had found their accident compensation levies had gone down for the first time ever. This Government came in and what did it do? It imposes additional costs on to the business sector of New Zealand that earns us the wealth and creates a rising standard of living if only it is given a chance. 
We now have the Accident Compensation Corporation as a monopoly. It is bureaucratic inefficient and costly. It is just a monster in New Zealand. It urgently needs to be reformed but this Government is doing it in the wrong direction. 
Employers universally oppose accident compensation being run by the Government. In spite of all of the assurances by Labour they know that it is a service they get and costs they have to provide do not even match anywhere near what the private sector can do. That growing cost burden on New Zealand’s small businesses will add to the cost that ordinary New Zealand consumers have to pay. It will also make them less able to withstand a downturn in the economy. 
A while ago an article in the  
New Zealand Herald 
 estimated that the costs of small business had increased by over $25000 per year for a medium-size small business. As that was done several months ago I suspect that that figure is nearer to $30000 a year in additional compliance costs since Labour has been in power. That is a shocking indictment on the Labour Government. It is putting a huge deadweight cost on the small businesses that are trying to produce the wealth the jobs and trying to keep this country going. All Labour can do is to think of all these new charges and new red tape and dump it on the backs of small businesses. 
That is disgraceful. This Labour Government came into power trying to pretend that it was pro-business. This bill lets us see the Labour Government’s colours. This is an anti-business Labour Government. All it wants to do is to nationalise as much as it can and if it cannot nationalise it then it will regulate it to death. Over the last 3 years in this House we have seen legislation that does just that. 
The justification for the bill is meant to be all about injury prevention. If we look at the statistics on the rate of serious injury and death from motor vehicle accidents we find that it has actually decreased by 30 percent over the last decade. That is in spite of the number of cars increasing by 30 percent over the last decade. New Zealand is developing an excellent track record in preventing motor vehicle injuries and deaths and the Government knows that. It has a Minister of Police who given any opportunity will stand up in the House and tell us what an excellent job the traffic police are doing. We have a process through Transfund and Transit New Zealand where dangerous roads are being fixed where the engineering which is a major cause of accidents in this country is quietly being improved over time. We should start to see the death rate and the injury rate on New Zealand roads reducing even further. 
What is the Government’s response to this? Its response is simply to increase accident compensation levies pretending that it is trying to keep up with the demand. It is just hollow words. This is simply a way to try to gain a whole lot of money to put into a fund—something like the Cullen fund—that will be worth over $2 billion by the time the Government has finished building it. The Government is trying to do it very quickly over a period of 4 or 5 years—trying to get this $2 billion into this fund so that it can pay for future accidents. However the Government is actually asking today’s motorists not only to pay for the long-term claimants of yesterday last year 10 years ago today’s claimants and tomorrow’s payments but also to pay for the claimants in 10 or 20 years’ time. 
How fair is that to burden this generation of motorists with the costs to come in 20 or 30 years’ time? It is an absolutely stupid idea. We would only get a Government monopoly even thinking about doing something like that. In fact if it were not a monopoly it would be trying to keep the cost down provide an excellent service be efficient and it would try to make the motorists and all the other people who pay accident compensation which is virtually every working New Zealander feel they were getting really good value for money. 
We should expect this sort of bill because this is a socialist Government. Labour has a track record of trying to take money off the workers of New Zealand to give to those who have not earned it. That is the socialist philosophy. We understand that the average working family in New Zealand is now $1400 a year worse off in real terms than when Labour took office. What has the Government done with that money? It has put it into funding privilege for the groups that it likes. It has put it into buying the votes of beneficiaries superannuitants and so on. It has not put it into the pockets of hard-working New Zealanders who actually earned it.