Hipkins Chris: Urgent Debates Declined — Skycity Convention Centre—Inquiry into Expressions of Interest Process; Urgent Debates — Accident Compensation Corporation—Resignations 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hipkins Chris: Urgent Debates Declined — Skycity Convention Centre—Inquiry into Expressions of Interest Process; Urgent Debates — Accident Compensation Corporation—Resignations 
[Sitting date: 13 June 2012. Volume:680;Page:2916. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 Let us be very clear about what is happening here. This is the unravelling of a very tangled web of deceit that Nick Smith spun when he became the Minister for ACC. This all flows in one direction and that is back in the direction of Dr Nick Smith. He is the architect of the total shambles that ACC has become. What did he do? Well the first thing he did was manufacture a crisis in ACC. He manufactured a crisis in ACC so that he could massively hike up the levies and overcharge New Zealanders by millions and millions of dollars in their ACC levies and cut their entitlement. He cut their entitlement to cover under ACC and that was all Nick Smith’s work. That was all Nick Smith’s work.  
Kevin Hague talked earlier on about the culture of disentitlement in ACC now and that all flows back to Nick Smith. It all flows back to Nick Smith. He was the one who brought legislation to the House to remove people’s entitlements and to cut back entitlements for some of the most vulnerable people: people who had been sexually abused and people who had suffered work-related hearing loss. These are the sorts of people who were attacked by Nick Smith because of the tangled web of deceit that he wove when he was the Minister for ACC.  
Judith Collins inherited that mess and made it worse. And we had Judith Collins come to the House today and have the audacity—the audacity—to challenge the Labour Party to play the ball and not the man and then she went straight into doing exactly that. She basically then went on to attack Ruth Dyson and dedicated a lot of her speech to attacking members of the Labour Party rather than focusing on the substance of the issue. These are serious issues and I think the Minister should take them a little bit more seriously than she has done.  
I was interested to learn just a few moments ago that this afternoon the website of iPredict—the predictive market—crashed. It reported that one of the reasons it crashed was all the insider trading on the future of ACC and the scandal within ACC. I understand that in addition to that—this is where it gets really interesting—there has been a run on shares in John Key’s leadership because people now know that he is on the way out because he is not going to stick around when the going starts to get tough. In fact the insiders in the National Party know it so much that they crashed the website. They were dumping all their shares in John Key; they could not get rid of them fast enough. They could not get rid of them fast enough and they crashed the whole website and they were so keen to buy up shares in the demise of the people involved in this ACC saga. I tell you what they were not buying though. They were not buying shares in Nick Smith becoming a Minister again because all of this flows back to Nick Smith.  
Nick Smith was the guy who thought that it was OK for him as a Minister for ACC—as a Minister for ACC—to write a letter on ministerial letterhead endorsing the claim of an individual ACC claimant who by the way also happens to be a close associate and a member of the National Party. Nick Smith thought that was an OK thing to do. What is more John Key thought that was an OK thing for him to do as well and continued to defend him. What did John Key say at the time? I think we will go back and find this quote because it is a goody. John Key said: “If you are going to sack Ministers for what I think he would accept as an error of judgment but not a terribly significant one you’d be sacking a lot of ministers.” Gosh he has got a lot of faith in his own Cabinet; he seems to think that if they were going to sack Ministers for errors of judgment there would not be many Ministers left in John Key’s Cabinet. But actually given the evidence of the last few weeks he was probably right in that particular regard.  
All of this—all of this—flows back to Nick Smith. This is the mess that Nick Smith created with the manufactured crisis and with his total lack of judgment in handling the ACC portfolio. He was more interested in how he could carve up ACC and carve it off to the private sector to the Aussie insurance companies than he was in ensuring that New Zealanders get the cover that they are entitled to under ACC. Nick Smith did not care about that; he cared about the profits of the Australian insurance companies. He cared about supporting his mates rather than the people who do not have friends in high places. This all goes back to Nick Smith. This is his mess he has the responsibility and he should never be a Minister again.