Twyford Phil: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4215. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū):Can I just start off my 5-minute contribution by remembering Sir Owen Woodhouse the architect of accident compensation—a great New Zealander who died this time last year at the age of 97. Sir Owen was the driving force really the intellectual architect behind what I believe is one of those institutions in New Zealand that we should be immensely proud of. I believe that it is one of those things like high quality universal public education and like our public health system that allows everybody to get a decent start in life. It is there to pick you up after an accident after an injury and to ensure that you can get on with your life and get back on your feet and it spares people the huge expense and the lottery of private litigation that is the alternative in so many other countries around the world. For those reasons I think ACC is incredibly important. It is a bedrock part of Labour’s belief in the fair society and in the basic equality that we accord to all individuals living in this society.That is why the debates over ACC get so heated in this House. On this side of the House we stand for that equality we stand for active Government and we stand for all those things that Kiwis can do together to make this society work better. On that side of the House they have over the years systematically undermined and privatised ACC. They do not believe in it because they are fundamentally uncomfortable with social provision. The hallmark of this National Government’s management of ACC is two things: the rorting of the ACC levies in order to prop up the surplus that never ever arrives and secondly it instituted from the day it was elected a culture of disentitlement. Any electorate MPs in this House will know that one person after another has come to electorate offices—that is if they are the kind of MPs who actually have an open door to people in the community who have problems—saying that they have had the door slammed in their face by ACC. The reason is that under this Government everything is a degenerative disorder—including ethics. That is the culture of disentitlement that this Government has introduced into ACC.I want to make two points in my contribution. The first is that this is basically an example and an exercise in political butt-covering. It is a public relations exercise and as with so much of what this Government does the purpose of this bill is simply to convey the impression of the things that it talks about in the title of the bill—about financial responsibility about transparency—but nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to this Government’s management of accident compensation. The second point I want to make is that this bill as Andrew Little said will not stop National’s interference with and manipulation and rorting of ACC and the ACC levy-setting process. So as I said this bill is basically about giving the appearance of propriety and of creating an impression of stability.As previous speakers—my colleagues Sue Moroney and Andrew Little—have pointed out all of the things that this bill talks about can be achieved under the legislation. It is all there. They do not need this bill. The members opposite have not once yet cited something that this bill enables them to do that the legislation otherwise would not do. The Government already has to take account of levy stability as a key criterion—full funding. It has got to forecast levies to ensure that levies meet all the requirements under the Act. The second thing I wanted to say is really to quote Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll’s book in which Alice says: “I give myself very good advice but I very seldom follow it.” This bit of legislation is a classic example of that. The bill talks about transparency and yet the deceit of this Government in Nick Smith’s manufactured crisis in 2009 is a classic example—in fact it is a classic example of almost everything that Nick Smith does—and in the cynicism of the way Bill English has rorted the levies to prop up his Government accounts for the last 7 years. National members do not need to give themselves this advice. They just need to change their ways.