Wong Pansy: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Wong Pansy: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 27 February 2007. Volume:637;Page:7699. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
PANSY WONG (National) 
: 
 In Part 1 we established that the law sets out very clearly that the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) would impose a levy to make sure that the employers’ account and the self-employed work account are fully funded. But the history of the employers’ levy account is that ever since 2003 the surplus in that account which started with $108 million increased. In 2004 it was $300 million in 2005 it went up to $500 million and in 2006 it was $757 million. I think that is a clear demonstration that the ACC has always played a conservative role in terms of the rate at which the levy was set at a point just in case it made a mistake in setting it. That was why my good hard-working intelligent colleague Dr Paul Hutchison asked for transparency and openness by getting an independent person to look at how the ACC set those levies. 
This part Part 2 is about the merging of the two accounts and combining the surpluses—estimated to be about $600 million in the employers’ account and about $60 million in the self-employed work account. Any person who thinks logically about ACC policy would eventually say that ACC will be quite comfortable to have a surplus margin of about 11 percent. But with the merging of these two accounts—one of which carries 63 percent surplus and the other 20 percent surplus—it says it would quite like a combined margin of 53 percent. 
The problem of simply adding those two together and arriving at this average would mean that for the next 2 years those who are self-employed will be penalised. They will have to come up with $100 million extra to bring the 20 percent margin up to 53 percent. Then the employers will also be penalised because they have a margin of 63 percent and the ACC refuses to bring it down to 11 percent. But the irony is stated in the official paper. By the year 2010 it would like to bring down the surplus to 11 percent. It would quite like the surplus sitting at a high amount just in case something happens in between and they might call on this high surplus. 
Firstly I encourage ACC management and officials to be confident of their ability. They have shown in the past 4 years that the surplus amount has kept growing. They should stop holding on to other people’s money and compounding the problem with a surcharge of $100 million for the self-employed for the next 2 years. Self-employed people—for example people in the meat industry—are saying that they will suddenly face a hefty bill in the next 2 years. As a small pool of people they have to front up with an extra $100 million while the ACC has every intention of reducing that surplus margin in about 4 years’ time. 
This legalised stealing simply does not make any sense. That is the practice I describe—legalised stealing of money that was paid in by the employer on behalf of their workers’ earnings or by the self-employed. So I have moved a very simple amendment that states that before the merger the surplus margin of the employer’s account should be adjusted down to 20 percent. The impact of this amendment would be that the self-employed would not be penalised by having to pay a surcharge of $100 million. Then—rightly so—the employers who have contributed on behalf of their workers’ earnings in the past—