Moroney Sue: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 22 September 2015. Volume:709;Page:6839. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour): At this point in the debate I want to focus my contribution on clause 1 the title of the bill which is as we have mentioned before in the debate the Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill 2015. I think we have alluded a number of times already to the fact that the Labour Party absolutely agrees with the title of the bill. We wanted a bill that would do exactly that. But unfortunately the course of this debate and some of the votes that have been taken particularly in Part 1 show that the Government is not really prepared to be transparent and we would say that the opportunity to get true financial responsibility into this bill was lost when the Government voted against the amendment that would have delivered exactly that.How can the Government argue that it is financially responsible to allow a situation in which ACC levies can be collected for purposes other than accidents and injuries? If Government members believed that to be the case they would have voted for my amendment. My amendment did simply that. It made sure that in the ACC levy-setting process only matters to do with accident compensation could be regarded and considered. Yet the Government has failed to support that initiative. That tells me that the financial responsibility and transparency that is set out in the title of this bill has not truly been there as this bill has passed through the Committee stage.I want to ask the members opposite to tell us how they believe it was financially responsible for the Government to use the current provision for the public interest to be taken into regard when setting ACC levies—how it was financially responsible to use that provision in the legislation—to allow more than $350 million to be collected in ACC levies that was not needed? It was demonstrably not needed in 2013 when the then Minister for ACC Judith Collins ignored the recommendation of ACC and set levies at a higher level becausein her words the Government wanted to get to surplus. That was transparency. Judith Collins was proclaiming loud and clear—and was probably proclaiming quite proudly—that she as the former Minister for ACC was using the ACC levy-setting process for purposes other than accidents and injuries other than treating accidents and injuries other than preventing them because those are the right purposes.The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to do again what I have done previously. This is a very narrow bill. It is prospective not retrospective. The history has been well covered in the first and second readings and as a result of that this is very narrow now and the member in getting historical is outside the requirements.SUE MORONEY: Thank you Mr Chair for that direction. The point that I will come back to is that the Government and the Minister have missed an opportunity to truly make good on the title of this bill—the Accident Compensation (Financial Responsibility and Transparency) Amendment Bill—because if they had really wanted to stay true to the title of the bill then they would have supported that amendment. After all what it did was seek to clarify ACC levies when they are being set through the new provisions that this bill brings in—that is the Minister setting out a funding policy direction before ACC even gets to think about it. This is the process that ACC needs to go through in its consultation process with regard to setting levies. This is the way that the Government gets to determine what the levies are at the end of that process and it would have been financially responsible to make sure that levies could be used only for the intended purpose.I think that the members opposite—the ones on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee actually—expressed to us that that is what they believed the use of the public interest process was for. It was for making sure that if there were a disaster—and we have had them: the earthquakes and the Pike River mine disaster—there would be the ability for that to be covered.