Boyack RachelRACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson): Thank you Madam Speaker. As Labour's ACC spokesperson it is a pleasure to take a call on the Accident Compensation (Interest on Instalment Plans) Amendment Bill. This is a technical bill that amends the Accident Compensation Act to formalise the charging of debit interest charges to businesses who pay their ACC levies through a payment plan.ACC is a taonga. Just recently we celebrated 50 years of ACC in New Zealand and from time to time we will bring technical amendments to the House which in my view should be supported by all parties when that opportunity arises. Labour will be supporting this bill tonight. A lot of the work towards this bill was undertaken under our former ACC Minister and my colleague Peeni Henare and so we are pleased to see this legislation introduced tonight and to see these changes made to ACC.As the Minister has pointed out and I will just cover off some of these points in my contribution this particular practice has occurred at ACC since 2004. So for the last 20 years ACC has offered levy instalment plans to businesses. As part of that practice they have charged debit interest and what the bill will do tonight is ensure that that is included in legislation so that there is clarity in legislation about ACC's right to do this.The bill will retrospectively validate ACC's past practice of charging debit interest and it will provide an explicit legal authority for the ACC to continue to charge debit interest. There are many reasons why businesses will seek to take up an option of paying off their levies in instalments. For many businesses it will be a matter of cashflow and not being able to be upfront with the payment when it is due. Currently these businesses including the self-employed can spread their payments over three six or 10 months. In order to ensure fairness to ACC and to other businesses who pay all of their levy upfront ACC does charge a small debit interest payment. The power for ACC to accept the payment of a levy is covered for under the Accident Compensation Act in section 234. However the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) have identified that there was a risk that ACC may have been acting outside its legislative scope. So one of the reasons why this bill needs to be introduced is to ensure there is that legislative clarity going forward.I do note that MBIE and ACC have differing views about whether ACC has been acting outside its legislative scope and I will foreshadow that we will have questions for the Minister around the process that has been undertaken during the committee of the whole House so that we can be assured that all of the legislative interrogation has incurred through that process. The advice from MBIE is to amend the Act in order to provide that needed clarity. I will just note the two parts of the Act that work together which according to MBIE lead to that lack of clarity. The first as I already mentioned is section 234 which states that ACC may charge a reasonable fee to recover its costs of collecting any levy by instalments. Alongside this in section 333(1)(b)(i) the Act states that the matters in respect of which fees or charges payable under this Act including any administrative fee payable and respective levies paid in instalments. And what the regulatory impact statement states is that reading these two clauses together MBIE does not consider that it is reasonable to recover the cost of collecting through a debit interest fee. So what this bill will do when it becomes an Act is it will retrospectively allow for this to occur.In an interim phase there will be rates set in this legislation until regulations are made and so going forward the debit interest payments will be undertaken through secondary legislation—so through regulations. Until that time under this legislation ACC will continue to use the percentage payment that has been used in practice—that will be in the law that we pass—and that will apply only to the 10-month instalment period which is 2.73 percent. It will not apply to those businesses who use a three-month or six-month instalment period.So as I stated this is a technical bill. Labour will be supporting this bill and we look forward to further debate and to seeking further questions from the Minister during the committee of the whole House.