Williams Poto: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6816. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): ACC was set up as a no-fault no-blame system. It is a system that is the envy of the world in that we are able to ensure that should we have an accident that means that we are incapacitated and we are unable to continue to earn an income or a living we actually have the ability not only to have treatment but to be rehabilitated back into work.But ACC also has another function and that is around education and supporting the prevention of accidents into the future. I think that that is part of the argument that has not been highlighted today because we have concentrated on the notion that ACC will continue to balloon out of all proportion collecting funds. Actually ACC has a really significant role in supporting good and safe practices particularly at work; good safe practices in terms of our sport and our leisure; and sometimes good safe practices in saving us from ourselves. There is a role in ACC to support that.We have spoken a lot about the oversubscription to some accounts through the levies and we cannot deny that that has happened—140 percent of some accounts oversubscribed. That means that employers have been charged—and employers have spoken to me about this about the cost of ACC in my own electorate when I have been doing visits to businesses. The cost of ACC to business can sometimes become quite prohibitive so why is it that we continue with a system that promotes this oversubscription to some of these accounts that actually damages the ability of businesses to perform as well as they can? We do have to look at covering the costs of future liabilities going into the future but do we have a mechanism that actually adequately monitors these future liabilities given the face of increased technological advances that mean that we could potentially be safer—say for example around the use of airbags in cars? Technology has a big role to play in this as much as education does as I have said.But it does speak to having an overall look at the general health and well-being of our community and that must include the health and safety practices of our businesses. We have had a shocking few years I must say. We have had also legislation come to this House that could have improved the health and safety of workers had the plans gone through as we had expected. But what has happened is that classification and categories of risk have gotten in the way of identifying where we can make adequate and good advances in health and safety practices for our workplaces. That goes hand in hand with what happens around ACC and what happens with the levies that we are going to charge into the future. I am concerned about the risk classification and the categorisation that has spilt over into this legislation as my colleague Ms Moroney spoke of before where in respect of classifications of vehicles for example the data that was collected in Australia has been forced into a New Zealand context and actually has made a mockery of safety classifications. We have seen that happen in our health and safety legislation and we are seeing it again in this piece of legislation around ACC.I just want to say that we should all be striving to reduce the level of accidents and increase the safety in all of our activities and thereby we can in the future hopefully reduce levies to employers and as a cost for business to the country. Thank you.