Hipkins Chris: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Hipkins Chris: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:670;Page:16537] 
CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 How quickly those members opposite forget about the people who put them into Government. How quickly they forget about the hard-working New Zealanders who pay their taxes who are doing it tough and whom the Government now talks about as if they are simply numbers. They forget about the personal lives that lie behind those numbers. When Bill English comes down to the House and talks about the increase in unemployment he talks about the numbers but he forgets the people who are behind those numbers. He forgets the people their families their mortgages or rents their supermarket shopping bills and their power bills. He forgets the people who are doing it tough. 
This Government has already forgotten about those people. It has forgotten about them because Government members are interested in only one thing: they are interested in rewarding people who are like themselves—that is people with money. They are interested in the people who backed them. That is where this Government has been focusing its efforts. It has focused its tax cuts on the people on the highest incomes while the people on the lowest incomes and other ordinary hard-working New Zealanders—middle New Zealand—get clobbered with an increase in GST that more than cancelled out the tax cuts they received under the National Government. Those people get clobbered. The people in the middle and the people at the bottom of the heap get clobbered by this Government—by the “Paris Hilton” economics espoused by people like Wayne Mapp. They get absolutely clobbered by the National Government while the people on the highest incomes get rewarded. 
That is the first message that this Government is sending through the Prime Minister’s statement this year. It does not care about the people at the bottom. It does not care about the people in the middle. It cares only for the people at the top. Bill English inherited an economy in very good shape and he set about running it into the ground. New Zealand had record low debt when Bill English became the Minister of Finance. What did he say? He said this is the rainy day we have been saving for. The previous Labour Government saved. It paid down debt. What has this Government done? It has given out tax cuts to the people who needed support the least and now it is borrowing—what is it—$300 million a week to pay for the tax cuts for those at the top of the heap. This Government inherited a record low unemployment rate which was either the first or second-lowest unemployment rate in the developed world. That is what National had when it became the Government but what has it done? Well it has turned that round. It has turned that round well and truly. This National Government wanted to catch up with Australia. Well it has caught up with Australia in respect of the unemployment rate; we now have a much higher unemployment rate than do the Australians. 
So what is the Government’s solution to the problems of the New Zealand economy and to the fact that we are borrowing $300 million a week? It is to sell some stuff: “Let’s sell some stuff! We’ll sell the SOEs.” The Government will sell the energy State-owned enterprises it will privatise accident compensation and it will privatise prisons. It says “Let’s sell things.” because that is what people do. When they cannot afford to pay the mortgage they sell the house. But they can sell the house only once and then where do they live once they have sold the house? That is not a solution to our economic woes and our financial difficulties. We should not sell stuff because it can be sold only once. What will the Government do? What will Bill English do once he has sold those assets that first time? Actually Bill English will not need to worry about it because he will be long gone by the time that eventuality rolls around. 
This Government is clobbering the people at the bottom and it is clobbering the people in the middle. John Key said in his speech that a society could be judged by how it treats the most vulnerable. Well let us judge this Government on that. Let us judge this Government on that sentiment expressed in John Key’s speech. Children are pretty vulnerable; what has the Government done for children? It has cut funding out of early childhood education and as a result kids will either not participate in early childhood education or have a lower quality of early childhood education or their parents will have to pay more for that education. Those are the only three outcomes from the Government’s funding cuts to early childhood education—pay more get less or simply have a lower quality. Those are the things that will come out of the cuts to early childhood education. 
The Government has cut home-help time for elderly people. They are vulnerable so what has the Government done for them? It has cut their home-help hours. It has cut support to some of the most vulnerable people. Victims of sexual abuse have had their cover under ACC eroded away under this National Government. It has cut the training incentive allowance for people who are trying to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get themselves back into the workforce. This is a Government with no plan but what it is very good at doing is spin and nothing illustrates its spin more than what it has been doing in accident compensation. It is very clear that from the day this Government came into office it had an agenda to privatise our accident compensation scheme and it has set about trying to destroy the credibility of that scheme in order to justify more cuts and privatisation. 
When people come from overseas they look at our ACC and our Pharmac and they say that they wish they had schemes like that. Those schemes take lawyers and big pharmaceutical drug money out of the health system which means that health dollars actually get spent on health care. But this Government wants to erode that and to do away with that. How is it doing that? First of all it is attacking ACC’s credibility. Government members have talked up a crisis. They have manufactured a crisis. ACC does not have a financial crisis. In fact it is on track to have a $2 billion surplus this year so there is no crisis despite what the Government is trying to do. But what is it doing? It hiked up accident compensation levies so that people would get annoyed with ACC. The Government did not need to hike up the levies but it has done that anyway. 
Then the Government cut ACC entitlements. It cut entitlements so that 90 percent of sexual abuse victims have been denied cover for counselling—90 percent of sexual abuse victims have been denied cover through ACC for counselling. Government members have nothing to say about that because they know that if we judge them on the sentiment that John Key expressed—about judging a society by how it treats the most vulnerable—there are not many more people more vulnerable in society than someone who has been the victim of sexual abuse. Yet 90 percent of them under this Government cannot access counselling; 90 percent of them have been turned down for counselling because of this Government’s cuts in ACC. 
So why is the Government doing all this? It is doing all this because it wants to privatise ACC and because it wants to open up accident compensation to competition. Why does it want to do that? Well we can look at Merrill Lynch. Is Merrill Lynch connected to the Government in any way? I cannot think of any. I think that Merrill Lynch may have some passing connection to the Government. Merrill Lynch let the cat out of the bag when it said that the privatisation of ACC under a National Government would result in $200 million a year of windfall profits for the private insurance industry—$200 million a year of money would be transferred from hard-working taxpaying levy-paying New Zealanders to the coffers of private insurance companies. That is why the Government wants to privatise ACC. That is why it wants to do it. It wants to increase the profits of private insurance companies. It wants to do that by opening up ACC to privatisation which will result not in money going into health care or into injury prevention and rehabilitation but in money going into the bottom line—the profits—of private insurance companies. What will the private insurance companies do? Of course they will erode cover and erode entitlements. 
Any New Zealanders who have made claims to an insurance company whether it is for a burglary or a car accident will know that those insurance companies will screw them down for every possible dollar they can but that is what every New Zealander now faces under a privatised accident compensation scheme when they have an accident. So when people are at their most vulnerable they will be on the phone to a private insurance company that will try to screw them out of every possible dollar it can. I think that that is not good enough and Labour members think that that is not good enough which is the reason why we will oppose tooth and nail the National Government’s plan to privatise ACC. 
We have a good accident compensation scheme despite what the Government is trying to do in order to ruin its credibility. Why do we know that? PricewaterhouseCoopers was given a brief to go anywhere in the world and find the Government a scheme that was better and cheaper. Do members know how many they could find? Not one! PricewaterhouseCoopers could not find a single scheme anywhere else in the world that was cheaper more efficient or provided better cover than ACC— 
Hon Dr Wayne Mapp 
: I can tell them one—the scheme we had in 1999. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: Rubbish! That is not right; I will tell members about the scheme in 1999 which was partially privatised. What happened to one of the insurance companies that was offering cover under that scheme—HIH? It went broke and the Australian Government had to bail it out for $500 million worth of Australian taxpayer dollars. It bailed out one of the schemes that was delivering cover under National’s privatised accident compensation scheme. That is what we can expect: the Government will privatise the profit and socialise the losses. That is what the Government will want to do to ACC but it will have a fight on its hands because Labour is opposed to the privatisation of ACC and we will not have a bar of it.