Fitzsimons Jeanette: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:607;Page:5056] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 The Green Party will be supporting this bill to the select committee because there are some very important principles in it that we strongly support. We hope that we will make some improvements at the select committee to take the bill further in some directions where it has started in a small way but not gone far enough. The first important principle we support is that there should be better long-term care and rehabilitation of accident victims. Because the National Party kept cutting levies right throughout the 1990s and not funding the tail we have ended up with a lot of people—many of whom I have helped through my constituency office in the Coromandel—who are having their accident compensation payments chopped off when they still need them because the money is not there. Peter Brown is right on that count but why does he then oppose raising the money to fix it? We support raising the money to fix it and I will get to that in a minute. 
We also support the strong principle that people should pay roughly in proportion to the contribution they make to the risk. Obviously that cannot be taken to a fanatical degree but it is undoubtedly true that the person who uses his or her car once a week to trundle down to the local shops does not contribute to the risk of accidents as much as the person who drives tens of thousands of kilometres every year at high speed on motorways. 
At the moment those two types of driver pay the same amount. The people who hardly use their vehicles who use buses walk or cycle and use their cars only when they have to pay the same levy as the people who take their cars everywhere. So we strongly support shifting from the registration cost of the vehicle and on to the fuel cost which much more closely mimics the actual use of the vehicle. 
The trouble with this is that all the Government has done at this stage is put the increase on to the fuel rather than have that shift. We believe that if the Government could show people that it had reduced their registration cost by $141 then they could have accepted 15c a litre on petrol instead. That would have been a fairer way to do it and we will continue to argue for that. Putting the cost entirely on registration is a barrier to vehicle ownership and that is unfair. It is also a barrier to safety because people do not register their vehicles due to the very high cost. Also putting all the cost on to registration rather than on fuel makes it easier for people to evade paying their accident compensation levy at all. They can avoid it by illegally driving unregistered vehicles. One simply cannot avoid a levy on fuel. People either buy fuel or they do not. So we are disappointed that we have taken only a small step in that direction. 
However we agree with Peter Brown that it is unfair that this applies to petrol and not to diesel. We believe that diesel users should contribute in the same way. They should contribute according to the kilometres they drive rather than by way of the registration cost of their vehicle. Whether that is done by a levy on diesel which is possible with a rebate system or whether it is done by a levy on road-user charges which is also possible—and which is how they pay for roads—is fine by us but it should be done in that way rather than done on the registration cost. 
At the moment of course we have a strong incentive for people who do high mileage to buy diesel SUVs which are a huge risk to other vehicles in a crash although safer for their drivers. They are much more dangerous for anybody they run into. People are much more likely to be killed if they are hit by an SUV than if they are hit by a light car. So SUV owners are externalising all the costs of their safety on to other people and there is an incentive to use those vehicles rather than petrol cars because people get their accident compensation cheaper if they drive very high mileages by going to diesel rather than to petrol. 
I am disappointed that National Party members do not support funding long-term care and rehabilitation of accident victims because clearly we are not going to get that unless we fund it and they are opposed to what they call a new tax. We do not call this a new tax. We call this paying one’s way. We are disappointed that they do not support full funding of transport injuries from the transport system. They seem to support some kind of cross-subsidy from the general taxpayer to road crash victims. We do not support that and in fact calling this a new tax is really just scoring a cheap political point. It is a statutory requirement that the system be self-funding and if we want decent long-term care and rehabilitation then we have to fund it and it has to be funded by transport users. 
Peter Brown and United Future both say that the money should come from the current petrol excise. Let us have a look at that proposition. The current excise is only on petrol. If we want the increase in accident compensation funding to come from that then diesel users are not going to be contributing a cent because diesel users do not contribute anything to the consolidated account. That is one of the great inequities at the moment. All the excise that goes into the consolidated account comes from petrol users. None of it comes from diesel users. But I have great difficulty with the idea that fuel and motoring is not something we can tax for general revenue. Virtually every developed country in the world taxes fuel and motoring for general revenue. 
Nobody argues in this House that all tax on tobacco ought to go into building cigarette factories. Nobody here argues that all tax on alcohol ought to go into booze barns. But somehow people argue that all tax on motoring ought to go into roads. If we look at the land transport pricing study published in the late 1990s we will find that the costs that motorists cause to the rest of the economy—costs that are picked up by the taxpayer—are far more than the $700 million a year that goes into the consolidated account from the petrol levy. So the Greens have no difficulty with some money going into the consolidated account from a fuel levy but it ought to be equal across the board across petrol and diesel. 
In fact if we want to snaffle that money for accident compensation or something else or if we want to put it all into roads then members have to say which hospitals in the country they are going to close and which schools they are going to reduce funding for—because that money is being used now. It is being used for the general expenditure of the Government and if members are going to take it from there they have to argue what they are not going to do instead. 
We heard Larry Baldock talk about money being siphoned off from the regions as though there were some great sink into which this accident compensation levy is poured and as though the regions never see it again. Where does the levy money go? It goes back to accident victims and to treatment systems and where are they located? They are located in the regions. So in fact the money that is “siphoned off” from fuel tax in the regions goes back into the regions in rehabilitating people who can then play a part in the workforce and contribute to the economy of the regions. It goes back to the people who work in the treatment and rehabilitation systems in the regions and that provides economic development in the regions. 
Roads and motoring are not the only things that boost the economy. All the other services such as health services and care and rehabilitation also boost the economy and it is a completely shallow argument to say that this money is being siphoned off somewhere never to appear again and never to play any useful role in the economy. 
So I am disappointed at the shallowness of the debate that has taken place today. The Green Party wants to see a much more concerted move of all of the costs that are loaded up-front on owning a vehicle on to the cost of running it so that it is cheaper to own a vehicle and more expensive to run it. That will be a good incentive in that people will use their cars more wisely but they will have access to cars. People will not be shut out from transport because they cannot afford the registration fee and people will not be driving unregistered cars. We want to see it shifted to diesel on the same basis so that diesel users at least contribute their share to the Accident Compensation Corporation to the economy and to the consolidated account. It also gets rid of the distortion that at the moment is promoting diesel as a cheaper alternative to petrol when it is not and is promoting all the emissions that go with diesel. 
Peter Brown 
: What about gas? 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS 
: What about gas indeed! If it still existed would it not be nice? I still drive on CNG whenever I can but that is another issue. As I say we will support this bill to the select committee. We will see whether we can get some improvements on it when we get there