Wong Pansy: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and  Compensation Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Wong Pansy: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and  Compensation Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:637;Page:7518] 
PANSY WONG (National) 
: 
 National will continue to oppose the Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill because it legalises stealing from the employers’ account. The only reason that the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee did not bother to make any amendments was because National—and other rational parties—realised that there was no goodwill and no open-mindedness from the Labour Government side about even considering any changes. So we will simply oppose this bill. 
Let us look at this position. As at June 2006 the employers’ account which is to merge with the self-employed work account was standing with a very healthy margin of 77 percent above estimated claims liability while the self-employed work account’s margin was 16 percent. This bill simply indicates that the combined merged account would maintain a margin of 53 percent and equalise the amount. Let me illustrate this. It is for example as if I have $10 in my pocket and the Minister Ruth Dyson happens to have $40 in her pocket. I come along and say what a good idea it would be to pool together our two sums of money and spread it equally. I want to know how many people in this House would believe that the Minister would hand over $15 to me so that we could both end up with $25. None. That is what I expected. All rational intelligent members of Parliament know that. No two people would be willing to simply pool together their money for no good reason. Yet the Labour Government is passing this legislation to force employers who have collected levies due to the number of their employees and their earnings to pay those levies over to the merged account. 
If the Minister is actually reasonable and says there is good reason to merge the two accounts because business structure should not dictate the risk then why not at the minimum allow the employers’ account to start off in the same position as the self-employed work account margin? The funding policy of the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) is that within 5 years it would refund the excess margin in those accounts to the people who pay the levy or collect extra levies if there is an insufficient amount in the account—and we are only 1 year off that place. ACC also indicated that by 2009-2010 the levy margin should be only 10 percent. Even if we are generous and let the employers’ account margin drop to the same position as the self-employed account margin it would mean that employers would be entitled to a refund of over $600 million. 
The Minister stood there and pretended that the Labour Government is generous. She said we should let them have $100 million—but it would be not even in one single year but over 2 years. Even the Inland Revenue Department—the department that helps people—recognises that the use of money attracts interest. If taxpayers had overpaid their tax then even the Inland Revenue Department would pay them some interest for the use of money. 
ACC explained why the employers’ account is in such a healthy position. It is partly because of the additional premium collected. The other reason is that ACC says it makes good investments. Good on them! But members should think about which principles those premiums were paid under. ACC is a statutory monopoly insurer. 
So for this very very basic reason National will say that no legislation—and I am challenging parties that support this bill—should be passed in this Parliament that will legalise stealing from the employers’ account because that money is collected into a monopoly organisation and employers should be entitled to their refund. I urge the other parties to think about that. Let us put aside whether the employers’ account and the self-employed work account should be merged. There is no excuse for legalising stealing. I will be introducing an amendment during the Committee stage to state that as a minimum parties that are responsible should say that if the employers’ account ends up with overpayments then they should be entitled to those refunds. 
I also want to touch on the issue of the process. The Minister said that ACC had written to all those people who made submissions so there should be no excuse for people not understanding what is happening. Well no submission was open to the public. Because of the truncated period of submission only certain organisations were invited to make submissions. We also know that the original bill in 2001 promised full consultation in setting the levy. I invite the next speaker from the Government benches to explain the meaning of “full consultation”. Does it mean that ACC will publicise some figures on its website? What is the process of verification of the premium that was set by ACC? 
So National has a lot of problems with legalising the stealing of money from the employers’ account which should be properly refunded to those employers. We have a lot of problems with the process. All the submitters—even the ones who were invited to make submissions—have problems with the short time period. National also had problems with the very clear body language of the Labour Party members in the select committee which indicated that they are not open-minded about any suggestions. 
The last point I want to touch on is that this is meant to be an insurance policy. The insurance premium is based on risk and reward for good behaviour. Yet the Minister mentioned that the objective of an insurance policy is levy stabilisation. If levy stabilisation is the key objective then this should not be treated as an insurance-based policy for work injury. The Government should not even pretend it understands what is meant by insurance that takes risk into account. 
The other thing that really worries us is the Government once again urging the so-called industry to reach over and help each other to achieve a good outcome. National would consider at this stage that there is no way we can reach over and help Labour in terms of managing its members. For example Mr Field’s present predicament I hope is not something that all members of Parliament can reach over and share the blame for. This is a socialising insurance premium policy that takes into account the risk of the type of industry but does not take into account how individual self-employed people or business owners can behave in order to reduce their premiums.