Logie Jan: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLogie Jan: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 02 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4214. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JAN LOGIE (Green):Indeed that is a hard act to follow but I will do my best. I rise to take a call in this first reading of the Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill. The Green Party is supporting this bill. It is a short and straightforward bill. Its objectives are to improve the framework for determining how the ACC’s levied accounts are funded so that it is clearer more transparent has a longer-term focus and supports more stable levies which all sounds great.The current legislation requires that the residual claims levy which is the additional levy that is charged towards the full funding of the ACC be collected until 2019. However it appears quite likely that some if not all of the ACC accounts will be fully funded before then. The provision contained in this bill to adjust that date seems quite sensible in that it will ensure that there will not be an over-collection of that residual claims levy resulting in the fixed date in the current legislation.We are of course willing to support these measures because they do make tiny improvements to what we believe sadly is a corrupted system but they are improvements nevertheless. We are deeply disappointed however if not at all surprised that the Government is only tinkering with a system that is so regularly and systematically failing to deliver on its original intent for New Zealanders. This bill tutus with the completely unnecessary and corrupting fully funded ACC system which has seen a multibillion-dollar surplus while everyday New Zealanders are denied compensation denied access to the support they need and as a result in some cases lose almost everything they have and almost everything that they have managed to acquire over a lifetime of working because of that lack of compensation available to them and their inability to keep up with their costs.The Green Party believes a private insurance model is inappropriate for the ACC. We are certainly not alone in this. The fact that the ACC worked very well on a pay-as-you-go basis for over 20 years would I believe tend to support our view of that as a workable system. We do not support the false crisis that was created by this Government as a way of saying that it needed to have all the money there on the books to be able to pay out for any imagined potential liability. We absolutely believe that the ACC needs to cover its costs and have enough in reserves to be able to cope with any unexpected spikes. That has done us well for decades. We did not need this fully funded system. This fully funded system which allowed the Government to increase levies which it is now reducing partially and to reduce services—prevention compensation and rehabilitation—makes future privatisation and competition more viable. We think that is a dangerous thing.The Green Party in Government would listen to the experiences of New Zealanders who have been denied appropriate care because of these changes. We would reassert and restore the social contract envisioned in the five Woodhouse principles that the ACC was founded upon: community responsibility comprehensive entitlements complete rehabilitation real compensation and administrative efficiency. This Government has privileged administrative efficiency almost to the point of exclusion of all other principles. The stories of people with injuries tell us of the harm of that approach. But we will support this bill.