Compulsory Third Party Insurance Regulation Bill

Committee Stage

In committee.

Clause 1.

The Hon. R.L. BROKENSHIRE: I rise on clause 1 to speak briefly to this bill. I just want to say that we should not even really be discussing clause 1, the reason being that we have a situation where we now have a government that promised it would not privatise anything at all actually privatising by stealth the Motor Accident Commission. As a result of that, within four years we will start to see massive increases in CTP. The evidence is clearly there when we look at what happened in states such as New South Wales. Why a traditional Labor government would ever want to privatise something like the MAC is beyond me.

The reality is, according to the government, that they are going ahead and privatising the MAC, irrespective of whether or not people agree with it, because they know best and they know more than the parliament. They did not have the intestinal fortitude to actually bring a bill in or bring any debate forward so that the parliament could actually debate the benefits of CTP being privatised or being held in the hands of government, as has been the case throughout successive Liberal and Labor governments.

Of course, we know that the money from the privatisation of the Motor Accident Commission is not even going to go towards paying off the massive debt that this state has. The truth of the matter is that it is going into recurrent—they say it is going to go into roads, but what they are doing is taking the money from DPTI that it had allocated through Treasury from general revenue for roads and they are going to use the MAC money for that.

The parliament and my colleagues know that I moved for one of our standing committees to investigate the issues around the privatisation of the MAC. That work is now occurring, and I thank those colleagues who are doing that on behalf of the Legislative Council.

The Treasurer said to me that he would need to have a regulator. In fact, he asked me whether or not I would commit to a regulator. In summary, I said to him that Family First would support a regulator. The reason for that is that we have a situation where, because of this privatisation by stealth, there will need to be some sort of regulation: an independent regulator put in at some point in the future to ensure that we do not end up with an absolute disaster and an absolute mess on our hands. However, there are stepped processes before we would need to get to that, and I know that one of our colleagues, the Hon. Rob Lucas, has moved that a committee have a warts and all look at what is really proposed, what the policies, procedures, regulations and legislation would really need to involve to set up a proper independent regulator, if that were the way an absolute majority of members of the upper and lower houses decided.

At this point in time I do not see that there is any urgency about this legislation. I see some very good sense in what the Hon. Rob Lucas has put forward, the reason being that we have been kept in the dark, the MAC board were kept in the dark, and some of the MAC executive were actually forced to sign a commercial in-confidence agreement so that there could be sneaky deals done between Treasury and government on what occurred with the privatisation of MAC.

On behalf of the people of this state we need to ensure, at least, that the parliament is now robust and vigorous when it comes to assessing the overall issues regarding a regulator. With that, at this point in time we actually support what the Hon. Rob Lucas is saying, and that is to get a committee to have a look at this before proceeding further with this legislation.

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS: For reasons I outlined when I last spoke on this bill, I move:

That progress be reported.

Progress reported; committee to sit again.