Gosche Mark: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and  Compensation Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Gosche Mark: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and  Compensation Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:637;Page:7520] 
Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) 
: 
 It is no wonder the insurance companies that tried to write the policy for the National Party and funded it for its last election are so disappointed. They thought it was bad having Dr Paul Hutchison fronting up for the National Party but now they have to put up with Pansy Wong. She presented us with a most muddled set of nonsenses about the process in the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. The process was actually very simple. It was straightforward and would have taken half the time had it not been for the idiotic questions that came from the two National Party members I have just named— 
David Bennett 
: Aw! 
Hon MARK GOSCHE 
: —not from those who are sitting down the back on the other side. They are much more sensible. 
National has to get over the ideological position that it wants to sell off accident compensation as it tried to do when it was last in power. It opposes this Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill because that is what it wants to do. Why did it have a separate account for self-employed people? It was because the insurance industry did not want them. The National Government was going to allow its mates in the private insurance market to cherry-pick the best part and leave the Government-owned organisation to cover the rest. 
Members opposite are still thinking that way. They still want to privatise what I think is the best accident compensation system in the world—a system that is held up throughout the world for all sorts of reasons because it is fair and even more important to business cheap. It is cheaper than all those schemes National members point to in their examples from Australia and the United States. But that does not matter. Ideology is always going to win over on that side of the House over common sense and good policy—which this bill is. For people who are listening to this debate we are simply saying that for people whose risks are the same—for example unemployed plumbers doing exactly the same work as plumbers who are set up under a company structure—over time as we equalise the premiums their levies will be the same. 
We received very interesting submissions from I think the seafood industry. It was represented by one of its officials who did not—after the National Party asked him numerous times—want to say whether he was opposed to the bill. His life was worth more than that because he was in the unenviable position of having half his members opposed to the bill and the other half in support of it. Why? The reason was that two guys could be standing next to one another on the back of a fishing boat one self-employed and the other working under a company but each would be paying a different rate. They could be doing exactly the same job and carrying exactly the same risks—and the National Party says that that is the way it should be. 
Where is the logic in that? We look forward to some National Party speaker further on in this debate getting up and telling us what the logic is behind that. It is not as though at the moment we are saying to employers who have built up money in their fund that we are going to take it all off them and give it to the self-employed. That is not what the bill says. But Pansy Wong over there would say that we are stealing off people. Well she should actually do her work—that is what she is paid for in this place—and read the bill. She sat in on the submission process and heard it. She questioned the officials and heard their responses. They were very sensible very straightforward and very easy to understand. Some valid questions were raised by submitters such as what their levies would be. So we asked the officials—as a good select committee does—to send out that information and they did so. I congratulate those officials on an excellent job well done and on being able to put forward the information submitters asked for. 
But National Party members still too lazy to do their work have not even read that yet. This country deserves a better Opposition than the one we have here. Why do those members not just leave the place and give their jobs to the insurance companies? Those companies would write their policies fund their campaigns and expect to be delivered accident compensation on a plate except for the bits that do not become very profitable such as provisions for self-employed people. 
Oh no no! Their mates in the insurance industry do not want that. And if Pansy Wong dares to say that this is about stealing then I would like her to come up with some words to describe the behaviour of the National Party in the way it is beholden to private insurance companies whose representatives sat up in the gallery week after week and watched this House debate the privatisation of accident compensation. I remember watching them. They were from that company called HIH Insurance—that really great company the National Party gave accident compensation to. How many billions of dollars did that company lose in Australia when it went under? 
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: And who paid for that? 
Hon MARK GOSCHE 
: Who paid for that? Was it the company’s shareholders? No not on your life! It was the ordinary people of Australia who paid for that massive failure—and the National Party wants to revisit that sort of thing. 
This is a fairly small innocuous sort of bill. It is not hugely earth-shattering but I congratulate the Minister on bringing it before the House. Yet National members are stuck in their old ideological mode. Its members have put on fresh new faces as they do with their new leader and pretend that they have changed but they prove every time they do this sort of thing in the House that they are just the same right-wing old Tories they always were. No—I apologise to those right-wing old Tories—this lot is even worse. Even those right-wing old Tories told us what they thought. They got upfront and said what their real policies were. They did not go running around pretending to have friendly faces when in fact everybody knew they were not friendly. 
But this lot still have their policy to privatise accident compensation just as they want to sell off State houses and all the other things that prop up society in the way we should. We should make sure that people’s risk—whether those people standing on the back of fishing boats are self-employed or people who happen to be employed by the company—is the same that their levy is the same and that they are in an equal situation. I do not think that anybody in his or her right mind could actually argue against that except for those in the National Party.