Norman Russel William: Ministerial Statements — Accident Compensation—Ministerial Inquiry into Disclosure of Funding Shortfall in ACC Non-earners’ Account 
Norman Russel William: Ministerial Statements — Accident Compensation—Ministerial Inquiry into Disclosure of Funding Shortfall in ACC Non-earners’ Account 
[Volume:652;Page:1544] 
Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I stand to respond to the  
Ministerial Inquiry into Disclosure of Funding Shortfall in ACC Non-earners’ Account 
 report. The first thing I will say is that I hope the Government is not thinking about using the results of this important inquiry as a reason to contemplate the privatisation of the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC). ACC is an incredibly efficient and incredibly successful institution. This report is a very important report and I congratulate the Government on having it done. I think it was the right thing to do but this report is no reason to move towards privatising ACC. ACC is an incredibly successful institution and it is incredibly important to New Zealand workers and New Zealanders in general. 
One of the key things I take out of this report is the uncertainty around the election date and the role that that has played in some of the mistakes that were clearly made over this issue. It strikes me that it is ridiculous that we do not know when the election is to be held. We should have a fixed election date. In terms of having open government in terms of making the Public Finance Act work properly—which is one of the issues here as the Public Finance Act has not been working properly—and in terms of getting the accounts right in relation to the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update it would be enormously helpful for the bureaucracy to know when the election was going to be held. It would make it much simpler if there was a fixed election date. It would make it much easier to operate an open transparent and honest government if all officialdom and all of the political parties knew exactly what day the election was to be held on. 
It astonishes me that we have gone as far as this in our democratic history and we still do not have a fixed election date. I tell the Government that one of the great things it could do with this report in order to make it simpler for the bureaucracy to meet the rules of the Public Finance Act and in order to give an accurate Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update would be to have a fixed election date. 
There is another aspect of this matter that demonstrates one of the weaknesses in our system and that is the system of secret Cabinet meetings. We still have in our society secret Cabinet meetings where these decisions are being made as was the case with some of the earlier decisions that feature in this report. Cabinet meets in secret. Nobody knows what goes on in a Cabinet meeting. Some Cabinet documents become public afterwards but no minutes are published from Cabinet meetings. We as citizens do not know what Cabinet is up to. Some of the information gets published but a lot of it gets held on to. 
Why do we not implement a much more transparent and upfront system for telling the public of New Zealand what goes on inside Cabinet meetings? If people knew what was going on inside Cabinet meetings it would be much easier to take account of and keep a watch on the issues that have been revealed in this report. If we know when the election date is so that officials have a clear date to work towards in the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update and if we know exactly what is going on inside Cabinet then it is much easier for citizens to keep the Government accountable in the run-up to an election when there is the greatest pressure on the Government to hide the sorts of big holes in the accounts that have been exposed here. It seems to me that if we were to adopt even just those two simple measures it would help enormously. 
There is I believe exposed in this report a whole reason why we need an open government agenda in New Zealand and why we need to have government in our country that is much more transparent so that it is much easier for people to know in the lead-up to an election what is actually happening in the Government books. As this report demonstrates very clearly it is possible to hide hundreds of millions of dollars. Whether that has been done with intent or whether it was all because of the officials will be up to the interpreters of the report to decide but taxpayers and voters were not aware of a shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars because they did not have sufficiently strong open government provisions. 
The Greens once again say that this report is a call to open up government to make government much more transparent to have a fixed election date and to open up Cabinet so that people know much more about what goes on inside Cabinet. It would help enormously if people knew the true state of the Government books in the run-up to an election. That would help the Public Finance Act work in the way it is supposed to work in order to provide the kind of information that voters need on voting day.