Moroney Sue: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5169. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour):It is great to get an opportunity to focus on the labour market estimates part of this debate. In particular I want to talk about—because I do not think the National Government will want to talk about it—the shambles that the ACC motor vehicle levy system that it introduced through this estimates procedure has been. It has been like watching a slow-motion car wreck because every other day there is a new problem that arises from what should have been a good-news story for the Government. It should have been a good-news story from the Government but Government members will not even ask themselves patsy questions about it at question time because it has turned out to be such a shambles for them.Why has it been a shambles? It has been a shambles because the Minister for ACC has made a fundamental error in changing the model. If the Minister had not done that what she told the select committee was that every person with a motor vehicle that was petrol-driven would have got their ACC levies for their motor vehicle registration reduced to $104 a year. So everyone would have got that reduction. If it had been a non-petrol vehicle everyone would have got a reduction to $186 per annum.But what happened instead? Actually more than a million people have ended up paying more than they needed to in ACC levies for their motor vehicle registration because of decisions that that Minister made—a decision to go to a model that is not only unfair and confusing but it turns out it has been expensive to administer and has made plenty of mistakes already. This is a system that came into being on just 1 July this year and already that Minister has had to backtrack and reclassify the vehicle registrations and the levies for 24 models and counting. I say “and counting” because in the first week alone the Minister had to backtrack on 18 classifications—18 models. That is not just 18 individual vehicles; that is 18 models of cars that had to be reclassified. A couple of days later that number had increased to 22 models and as of today it is sitting at 24 models that have had to be reclassified. That is utter chaos.But the worst thing about this is that it is simply a shift of the costs. It shifts the costs for motor vehicle registration from those who have the resources to buy the latest greatest car on to those who do not have the income resources to buy the latest flashest motor vehicle. How does it do that? Well it actually gives $41 million in savings to people at the top who can afford the better cars and it shifts $41 million on to those who can least afford it. Who are those people? They are the young—our children who are buying their first car. It is the elderly—people on fixed incomes who as they come up to their retirement ages buy the car that will last them through their retirement. They are the people who are going to be pinged by this and are paying more than they should—not because ACC made a mistake; not because the ACC system is in trouble but because that Minister made a fundamental mistake. She bought the argument that somehow if people could save a few dollars every year on their motor vehicle registration suddenly that was going to give them the thousands of dollars that they would need to upgrade their car to the latest greatest model. Well Minister that is just a folly and everyone in New Zealand knows it.So we have ended up in the situation where this should have been a good-news story for all New Zealanders and for the Government. It should have been that everyone got a reduction in their levy. For most of us it would be $104 that the levy would have been reduced to. But instead we have got this complete chaos going on with a system that is fundamentally flawed. I can guarantee the Committee that this is not the end of this story. Every day that goes by more and more vehicles are going to be reassessed. And then there is the sleight of hand—