Lees-Galloway IainHon IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Minister for ACC): Thank you very much Mr Assistant Speaker. Well first of all I want to thank the member Melissa Lee for bringing this bill to the House. I want to congratulate her on getting her bill drawn from the ballot—some members do have to wait a very long time before they get a bill drawn from the ballot and it is a thrill to be able to introduce legislation to the House and to have it debated in the House—and I want to thank Melissa Lee for the conversations that we have had and the opportunity for the Government to consider our position on this legislation. In considering it what we had to do was consider the principles of the accident compensation system and also the principles of the New Zealand superannuation system and decide whether we felt this legislation was consistent with those principles.What the bill seeks to do is to allow people who do not qualify for New Zealand superannuation to be able to receive weekly compensation from ACC that other people over the age of 65 would not be entitled to until such time as they qualify for New Zealand superannuation which could be up to 10 years. I think it's important the House understands exactly how this works. When a person is injured and they are over the age of 65 they are entitled to one year of weekly compensation alongside their New Zealand superannuation. The second year is an election so they need to choose between their New Zealand superannuation or the weekly compensation. So people aged 65 and over can get two years of weekly compensation and the reason that is limited is not as the member stated that they receive New Zealand superannuation. The reason it is limited is that there has to be a point at which we determine people have come to the end of their working life and are no longer eligible for weekly compensation because weekly compensation is a replacement for lost wages. And so in the accident compensation scheme we use 65 the age at which people become eligible for universal superannuation as a proxy for the end of a normal working life.We know that people do work beyond 65 but we need to have a point. We need to have a rational point to stop the payment of weekly compensation. I want to make that clear: it's not because people receive superannuation that they become ineligible for weekly compensation or in fact they have an up to two-year limit on weekly compensation; it is simply the fact that in the accident compensation system we need to have a rational point where we determine that people have come to the end of their working life and the age of 65 because it is the point at which people become eligible for superannuation is used as a proxy for that end of working life.That's one side of it. We then need to look at the other side which is New Zealand superannuation. And yes we do say in New Zealand that people need to have lived and worked in New Zealand for at least 10 years from the age of 20 onwards and at least five of those years have to be after the age of 50 before they become eligible for New Zealand superannuation. That is because New Zealand superannuation is something that we all contribute to through our taxes and we expect people to make a contribution through their taxes here in New Zealand. If people are working overseas they're likely to be paying into superannuation schemes overseas. If they have not well actually we do have an expectation that when people migrate to New Zealand that they come with the resources necessary to be able to support themselves.I would actually refer the House to the fact that the previous Government actually temporarily closed the parent category for family visas because of concerns about older people migrating to New Zealand—the parents of people who had already migrated to New Zealand—where the children had made a commitment to sponsor those parents to support them to ensure that they have the resources necessary to meet their living costs to meet their health costs etc. and there was a suggestion that sometimes the children of those elderly migrants were not providing that support and the New Zealand welfare system had to step in and provide that support.So acknowledging that that was inappropriate—that people should come to New Zealand without resources to be able to support themselves in their old age—the previous Government temporarily closed that category so that we could actually review the evidence and the facts and see whether that was the case whether the immigration system needed to respond to that and whether any changes or obligations needed to be placed upon those older migrants to make sure that they're able to support themselves.So it's true that for some older migrants New Zealand superannuation is not available to them. There is an expectation in our system that they come to New Zealand able to support themselves. Now if they work in New Zealand and they get injured just like every other person working in New Zealand they are eligible to up to two years of weekly compensation if they are over the age of 65. We make no distinction between whether someone has been in New Zealand all of their life or if they have recently come to New Zealand; ACC is available to everybody and there is no distinction in the way we treat people who are aged 65 years or older.Effectively what this bill does is it asks the ACC scheme to offer an opportunity for people to get superannuation when they otherwise would not qualify for it and that is not the role of the ACC scheme. If we want to have a debate about whether people who have lived in New Zealand for less than 10 years should be entitled to New Zealand superannuation that is a debate we should have but we should not ask the Accident Compensation Corporation to fund that superannuation if we were to determine that that is something that we wanted to do.I think if you take a principled approach to this if you look at how the ACC scheme works if you look at how the New Zealand superannuation scheme works if you look at what our expectations are around recent migrants then the only conclusion that the House can come to is to oppose this bill. Now it's not to say that the member's heart is not the right place. She is looking out for people who could very well find themselves in a situation where they don't have the resources to take care of themselves. But actually we need to make sure that our immigration system does not allow people to get themselves into that situation which is exactly what the previous Government did in closing down the parent category.Whilst I acknowledge that the member is trying to do a good thing and is trying to support a small group of people who may have got themselves into a less than ideal situation—Melissa Lee: Returning New Zealanders.Hon IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: —this is not—well returning New Zealanders as well. It's fair that the member asks that I refer to returning New Zealanders. The same applies. We expect that if people have been working overseas they've either been saving or contributing to a super scheme while they're overseas and they're able to bring that back with them to New Zealand and they're able to support themselves in New Zealand. Again I go back to the principle of the New Zealand superannuation system which is that we contribute to it through our taxes through our working life and we have an expectation on people who have not made that contribution to spend at least 10 years in New Zealand before they become eligible so exactly the same principle applies to the returning New Zealander as it does to the new migrant.If you take that principled approach if you look at it with clear eyes through that lens then there is only one view that the House can take and that is to oppose this bill.