Seymour David: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSeymour David: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6814. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): It is a great pleasure to rise on behalf of the ACT Party in support of this bill. I think one way that part of this bill might be characterised is that it is the fiscal responsibility legislation for ACC that is long overdue. There was a time when Governments would enter the Beehive and discover what the books really said all too late. As Muldoon said to Lange on election night: “Ha! I’ve got a surprise for you in the morning.”The Fiscal Responsibility Act changed that because it required the books to be open and transparent and it allowed voters in full knowledge of the facts to hold the Government to account. For that alone I commend the Minister—perhaps a young Ruth Richardson—for this fiscal responsibility legislation for ACC.But there is another aspect to this bill that is a boon to younger generations of New Zealanders. It was very interesting to listen to Kevin Hague’s contribution which I have to say I thought was in many ways a very sound contribution right up until he arrived at his conclusions. He argued that a normal insurance company—that is a private enterprise insurance company—would make sure that it fully funded its future liabilities because it might not have the same set of premium payers next year or the year after as it had this year. Therefore it has to fund its future liabilities this year. It is true of ACC as well because there are differences in the size and the activity and behaviour of different generations. There are people who enter and exit the workforce and there are people who enter and exit New Zealand—as New Zealand First knows sometimes people with funny-sounding names come here—so it is not true to say that we have exactly the same set of levy payers from one year to the next. So it is correct that in any given year the future liabilities generated by the activities of the levy payers that year should be fully future funded just as a private firm would do.The most significant part of this bill is what it brings forward in terms of fairness between generations. As the much larger baby-boomer workforce retires those of us who are a bit younger and who will be paying ACC levies for some time yet will be relieved of our smaller workforce having to pay this particular aspect of the social contract for that much larger workforce that did a lot more dangerous stuff back then.So this is a very positive move not only for fiscal transparency but for intergenerational fairness. However I think we have heard particularly in the contribution from the Labour members an eerie warning that the politics will always be with ACC. So long as the people who contest the power to sit on these benches ultimately hold the purse strings of ACC it is inevitable that in spite of the very able Minister’s bill to try to introduce fairness and transparency to ACC different Governments of the day pursuing different prerogatives in different fiscal conditions will try to use ACC to either top up the surplus as Labour accuses the current Government of doing or to perhaps give people a discount on their ACC levies as the current Government accuses Labour of having done.The lesson is that so long as ACC remains an entity and a creature of the State the politics will always be with it. Inevitably political meddling will mean that people get a little bit less sometimes and a little bit more other times and the only people who really win are the politicians.Sue Moroney: Oh not the privatisation? There it goes. So predictable David.DAVID SEYMOUR: The answer Sue Moroney gives that it would all be better if good people like me were running it quite frankly does not pass muster.So I commend this bill to the House. I commend the honourable Minister for ACC who has done some very good public policy work in introducing what is a fiscal responsibility bill for ACC and for striking a blow for generational fairness in this very large account. None the less it would be much better to sell it all and have a private enterprise system. Thank you.