Watts SimonSIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. I'm pleased to rise on the Accident Compensation (Access Reporting and Other Matters) Amendment Bill first reading. National will be opposing this bill and I'm going to articulate in the time that I have the reasons why. It's quite simple really—the first two parts of this legislation are legislating for something that doesn't require legislation. The Minister has forgotten—and I appreciate it was a while ago but from 1982 until 2006 ACC already published this information Minister but it didn't need to be in legislation. They just did it because it was the right thing to do. So I'm not sure why the Minister has failed to do what the role of a Minister should be which is to get the department to do the right thing and that is to publish in-depth information around the cause of injuries in the year so that there is transparency around that. Because this bill is about access—this bill is about access and there is no evidence that people are getting injured but are not getting referred to ACC. No evidence for that—there is no evidence.Jan Logie: Yes there is.SIMON WATTS: I'm hearing across the hallway somebody said Yes there is." Where is that coming from? Down the back. Listen to that: "Yes there is." There is no evidence.You don't need this legislation in regards to implementing these changes. And in particular it does not need to be legally required to look into aspects around Māori access into the scheme. There's been no evidence produced by the Government to show that Māori or in fact any other population group struggles to access ACC nor have they shown how ACC even would be able to find that data in the first place. Actually if you look at Māori men they're probably one of the highest users of ACC per capita given their work in higher-risk industries. So the goal surely should be focusing on those people that are getting injured in this country and dealing with the issues in trying to prevent their injury. Surely that should be the focus: to stop people that are getting injured getting injured; not by wondering why other people aren't getting injured and trying to you know do some data collection around that. This bill is focused in the wrong place.I was asking questions to the Minister as she was providing a legislative statement around the changes to eligibility for the minimum rate of weekly compensation. She didn't answer my questions that I asked because in this there is no articulation around how many people this aspect of this change would affect. This is around the eligibility of the minimum rate of weekly compensation: someone who would need to be working full time yet earn below the minimum wage. How many people are in that bucket and how many are affected? That has not even been thought through. This is not a new scenario but this shows another example. The Government have not done the basics in terms of research around it; not even researched or even considered how many people this change will affect and therefore the implications and the fiscal implications of that on our country. So as I said if we had the evidence to do something like this then National potentially would be considering a different position. But National will not be supporting this legislation. It's absolute nonsense and we do not commend this bill to the House."