Williamson Maurice: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliamson Maurice: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 17 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6812. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga): What a great delight it is to speak at this time in the afternoon when my adorable drive-time audience in Auckland will be getting into their cars—Hon Simon Bridges: Adorable? Oh.Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: Adoring actually—not adorable; they are adorable as well—and I thought I may try to take these speaking opportunities to do a bit of a traffic forecast.I am going to be quite brief on this because I think that the specifics of the bill have been covered but I want to bring it down to what I think is a really good thing to do in a little sort of analogy that your general public can understand. When an accident occurs it has both a time frame and so on for the injury to have a cost to it and a magnitude—sort of an “x” axis and a “y” axis.The accident can be quite small. You could hurt a finger go to the doctor and 2 weeks later it is all gone the cost was 20 or 30 bucks and it lasted a week. Or the accident could be quite horrific and the costs could go on for year after year after year. In fact in many cases some of the big costs may be in 15 or 20 years after the actual accident has occurred. So what the Government has said is that we have got to try to find a way of setting levies so that when an accident does occur be it small medium or big we have got funding now to cover the costs to fully fund the cost of all that treatment and revenue and so on for those years out in the future.What if I asked an ordinary family: “How would you cope if you had to put some money into an account—a dedicated account—for your children’s education?”. You could have four or five kids and you have put money in but suddenly a big hit comes because the daughter is off to play netball in England and you did not budget for it. Well in the case of the ACC it cannot just go and raid another account like the health account or whatever—the family would be stuck and could not do it.So ACC has got to try to almost have the wisdom of Solomon to work out what it predicts will be the level of accidents what it believes the severity of them will be what it thinks the long time period for the cost of each individual accident will be and then add them up with this ginormous sort of estimates spreadsheet and say: “Here’s where we’ll set the levies this year to try to fund the cost of those accidents.” It is not fair to ask a future generation to pay for this and I agree with that. We should be using today’s levy payers who are covered by it to be funding the cost of those accidents that they have.This bill is to try to get a better regime. It will never be perfect. There will always be a case where you have either slightly overestimated or underestimated because it is just like the Earthquake Commission having to try to estimate the number of earthquakes that are going to happen—it cannot do it. There may never be another one or there may be a couple of massive ones but it has got to try to make some sort of estimated guess on that.This bill I think puts the ACC on a really sound footing gives the public a really good view about the transparency of the settings and gives some consultation process. I think the Minister for ACC is to be absolutely congratulated and that is my 3 minutes.