Belich CamillaCAMILLA BELICH (Labour): Thank you Madam Speaker. That was an incredibly short contribution from that last speaker Carl Bates and I—Carl Bates: Short sweet and effective. CAMILLA BELICH: Well was it effective? I don't know. I'm not sure if people looking over the Hansard in later years will have that same reflection Mr Bates but I am happy to elucidate for the benefit of those future readers in more detail about the Accident Compensation (Interest on Instalment Plans) Amendment Bill.This is as people have said a relatively uncontroversial bill. The reason for that is there is general consensus that the procedures that ACC have been conducting in relation to interest appear to be reasonable and fair. However that doesn't mean that there aren't important issues raised by the effect of this bill and the way that this bill is brought into law which will be very soon because this bill comes into force the day after Royal assent. So there isn't a long period of time before this is actually the law of the land.Now because of the change in Government this is something that was looked at by the previous Labour Government and raised when—originally it went through this procedure when we were under Budget urgency. It was picked up I think through an audit process in relation to questioning the authority for the charging of interest. So it's regretful that it's taken 20 years of this practice for that to be raised and put before the House. I think we can all agree that it's something that should have been looked at earlier on—and I can't recall exactly who was in Government 20 years ago but that's beside the point. Governments from both sides of the House have presided over this practice and the whole House has an interest in making sure that there is clarity moving forward.However there are some concerns that were raised which were briefly touched upon I think by the Minister for ACC in the committee stage. But because this bill does introduce retrospective legislation and does effectively cut off a possible legal remedy—and that is very openly discussed not only in the regulatory impact statement but in fact in the explanatory note of the bill—there are concerns around the use of urgency for that process and the fact we didn't have a select committee process. I want to ask the Government parties to reflect on whether this was an appropriate thing to put through urgency. They may have justified at the time through the urgency motion—and I can't recall if this point was specifically made—that the reason for introducing this bill was in fact to circumvent any legal challenges by putting it through urgency and not having a select committee process and so people who were charged interest weren't alerted to the fact that they could perhaps sue ACC for the interest that they were wrongly charged. I'm not aware if that has occurred; I haven't heard that that's the case. But obviously because the urgency process wasn't completed we're now in a situation where it is some weeks after the original urgency motion was put and this hasn't been concluded.I think it's for the whole House to reflect on whether in those particular types of instances where the Government cannot be assured that urgency is particularly necessary for a bill or that it in fact would be passed urgency should be afforded to this type of bill. If they do consider it is necessary then why was it not put further up the Order Paper? I mean I think these are genuine questions for the Government. It won't affect the overall bipartisan—in terms of National and Labour—support for this bill and the Government parties' support for this bill but I think it is a fair thing to reflect on.We did suggest some things to make the retrospectivity of this bill less severe. That was suggested in the committee of the whole House. It was removing some of those words that would have said that the practice was always lawful which is a bit of a truism when you have parliamentary supremacy. If Parliament says something was always lawful because of parliamentary supremacy it is always lawful. Does that mean that it is a true fact looking backwards? I question whether there could have been better wording in that part of the bill and I did ask the Minister about that and he didn't respond. So I'm disappointed about that.I agree that ACC is a taonga. There has been bipartisan support for ACC moving forward and I would hope—and I ask both parties in the House—that when there are issues around the function of such an important thing in ACC it is important to try and have as bipartisan an approach as possible. So I will commend this bill to the House but I think in the future there are lessons to be learnt from this process.