Brownlee Gerry: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Brownlee Gerry: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 19 June 2003. Volume:609;Page:6435. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (NZ National—Ilam) 
: 
 Perhaps the Government thought that by sending George Hawkins to the Chamber to speak for the Minister for ACC the House and those who listen to it occasionally would become so bored so stupefied and so close to sleep that we would not notice what this bill is really all about. This bill shows clearly what a deceitful and incompetent Government this country currently has. Dressed up under the title of the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill we have a tax bill. It is another tax bill from the Labour Government. Do members remember the big promise that there would be no more taxes? Well what a joke those people have made of that! What a disgrace it is that we should have a tax bill with a name like that put on it. 
All that this bill does is to empower the Minister year after year to reach into the pockets of New Zealanders and to take out as much as he or she likes to add to the cost of petrol. What price will we be paying for petrol by the end of the year? We already know that the 4c per litre we all contribute to Auckland’s roads will not come off. We now know today that another 5.5c per litre is to be added to the cost of petrol to cover accident compensation and we hear that very shortly another 10c per litre will go on to cover regional roads. But apparently there are no new taxes! 
The fact that this bill is a deceit can perhaps best be seen when New Zealanders realise that there is no way for them to know whether the costs of this motor vehicle account are reasonable. There is no competition for that type of insurance in New Zealand. There is one delivery agency which does not have to monitor its costs and tell New Zealanders whether it is doing a good job—whether it can do its job a bit more cheaply for them or whether it is managing its costs. The Accident Compensation Corporation can simply go to the Minister and say it has had a bad year and needs a few more bob. It can ask the Minister to stick a hand a bit deeper into the pockets of motorists—stick the petrol levy up a bit higher—and to give it a bit more money to play with. 
 Mr Hawkins said there was no real change because this levy was always included in the vehicle-licensing fees. He went on to say that increasing those licensing fees might have an adverse social impact. I tell Mr Hawkins that during the time of the previous National Government licensing fees regularly used to go down. In one particular year they were as low as—I think—$141 because the Accident Compensation Corporation was under some pressure as privatisation was looming to get its costs under control. The question now is whether if the corporation does make improvements like that the cost will go down. 
John Key 
: No not a chance. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: No it will not. Because the levy will be included in the price of petrol after a time everyone will become conditioned to it. The Government is relying on the fact that people may not notice the levy. 
Here we have a very very sneaky move by the Government to simply load the same cost on to the same people by taking it off the licensing fee and putting it on to the price of petrol raising that considerably. One pays a price for deceit at the end of the day and this Government’s day of reckoning is not far away. When we start to look at the huge list of additional taxes the Government has imposed on this country in the last couple of years we see it becomes a little frightening. Not only do we have this 5c per litre or 14 percent increase in the petrol price being inflicted on New Zealanders today but we have also recently had the alcohol tax the tobacco tax the Accident Compensation Corporation’s employer and self-employed levies massively increasing trust income for final tax payments for minors going from 19 percent to 33 percent—unless one is Maori when one gets a special deal—and fringe benefit tax increasing from 49 percent to 64 percent. We all know that the number of New Zealanders now earning in excess of $60000 means that almost 20 percent of the full-time workforce now pays tax at a much higher rate than previously. 
John Carter 
: How much? Twenty percent? 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: Twenty percent of the workforce—one in five workers with a full-time job in this country—pays tax at a rate of 39c in the dollar. So where is the value in the “credit card”? Where is the honesty in the “credit card”? It does not exist. 
As I said at the outset this bill is about deceit and incompetence. Where does the incompetence come in? First I suggest it is incompetent for any Government to allow an agency to go completely unchecked when it comes to the costs it inflicts on the people it is empowered to levy. The Accident Compensation Corporation should be run as a business. It is a business. It is an insurer and anyone who thinks it is anything else needs to reconsider the whole issue. At the end of the day a premium is charged one way or another and a fixed benefit is delivered. It is an incompetent Government that does not try to reduce that cost for New Zealand but simply comes to the House and demands legislation that allows it to continue as I said before to put its hand deep into the pockets of New Zealanders and to take their hard-earned dollars off them. 
Then the second part of this bill amends the legislation passed in 2002 by restricting the way that appeals against Accident Compensation Corporation decisions can progress to the courts. There are a number of issues around that. Some aspects of the proposal may be sensible except that in New Zealand if we have an accident the body that deals with us is the same body that we go to if we are unhappy with the treatment we are receiving. We can go to the corporation and say we are unhappy with the treatment it has been giving us and we want it to be reviewed. But if we do not like the findings of the review we have to go back to the same organisation again and tell it we want to appeal that review. Now it would seem that if we are still not happy and want to progress to a court we can only do so if that organisation says it is OK. That seems to me to be somewhat Stalinist in its approach. That is the sort of country that Helen Clark’s Government is rapidly driving us towards. 
Where is the choice for New Zealanders in a bill like this? And how can the Government so openly deceive people into paying a higher level of tax in the name of injury prevention rehabilitation and compensation? Governments fall on that sort of thing. It has a cumulative effect. The “credit card” was put into the letterboxes of all New Zealanders before the 1999 election; it stated there would be no new taxes—other than for the 5 percent who earned over $60000. Mr Hawkins smirks over there on the Government benches because he knows that 4 years later 20 percent of the full-time workforce now pays that tax. One in five full-time workers now pays tax at the 39c in the dollar rate. We do not mind incomes growing. We are all for that; it is a great idea. But would we not have a great deal more investment in this economy if those hard workers who manage to get their incomes to maybe $61000 $62000 or $63000 were able to keep the few lousy dollars in extra tax that the Government takes off them? Would we not have greater investment in this country if those people were able to hold those dollars themselves? 
This bill indicates that the only solution this Government has to any problem is to tax people—just to tax them. We have seen that with the appalling electricity tax—$200 million a year on that one. This tax is worth $154 million. We have seen the Minister tell us today that if one owns sheep cattle horses or any other animals that happen to be somewhat flatulent then one will pay a tax on that as well. He has conceded it is a tax. A Government that has no answer to any problem other than to stick its head up and say it will tax people is a Government that is dying on its feet.