Politicians are often wont to use piggy back off of tragic family circumstances to labour a point or to have a swipe at one policy or another. Sometimes that backfires spectacularly, but that is to be expected when you go chasing ambulances or in this case hearses.

The Member for Mars, Catherine Delahunty, has been caught a beauty in trying to have a swipe at ACC and WINZ. She recounts the tragic story of a bloke who died then regurgitates the cry-baby story of his “wife”. Except she isn’t his wife and she told lies.

His children then wade into the debate and set upon Delahunty and other panty-waist Greens bemoaning the evil state apparatus.

Essentiially the daughter of the dead guy says his missus, not his still legally wife is a liar and been sucking off the public tit in various ways.

Go read the comments.

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The Herald has an article today about how ACC is targeting high-cost clients.

A new ACC unit has been working to cut costs by targeting long-term clients who claim more than $600 a week.

In the six months since the recover independence unit was formed, 721 people have been dropped from ACC – roughly, twice the number as would normally be expected to leave, The Press reported.

An internal document obtained by the newspaper under the Official Information Act said the unit focused on cases with potential for “quick wins through targeted intervention”.

Sure ACC has a problem with the “tail”, those people are the ones who have been with ACC for a long time. The tail was under control in 1999 but after a few board replacements the focus went off managing the “tail” to basically treating ACC as another arm of WINZ.

It isn’t these people though that are costing ACC. I know for a fact that in 1999-2000 that ACC publicly admitted to about $100 million of fraud. Privately the numbers are truly astounding. The three main accounts contribute 95% of the fraud. The Earners account fraud is admitted privately to The Whale around $100 million, the Employer Account around $80 million and the Provider Account another $100 million. ACC under the current board which were appointed by Labour is not and has not been focused on fraud since 2000. If they, even privately, admit to those levels of fraud then they must be higher and that isn’t even taking into consideration teh expansion of the scheme by Clark’s Labour.

There is far more money to be had in stopping the endemic fraud in ACC than going after teh tail and a whole lot easier to catch if only ACC would look at decent fraud detection tools. If they paid for the software out of savings then it would pay for itself in less than a month. The problem though is that one of the senior managers who put the slipper into their best fraud manager is still there albeit with a few moves sideways. This manager decided to get snaky when a large provider fraud was identified. I have seen this happen in Canberra, in Sydney and a couple of other places I can’t talk about when the software is deployed. The senior manager gets pinged and the project all of a sudden gets spiked or tripped.

Stop bashing the sick and start bashing the criminals.

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Here he goes again.

Brian “Where’s my Theatre” Rudman is calling for…….yes you guessed it…..the council to buy him a theatre.

In a perverse sort of way, I’m glad Auckland City councillors are going ahead with a daft plan to build a $1.65 million giant screen in Aotea Square in time for the Rugby World Cup. It means they won’t be able to cry poor when I suggest that for not much more, they could buy the wonderful old Mercury Theatre, which has just gone on the market.

Hey Brian, here’s a thought, raise the money yourself from all  your chardonnay socialist art loving friends rather than picking the pockets of the ratepayers. It is all very well to love the theatre when someone else is paying but asking them to dip into their own pockets usually meets with cries of poverty.

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As is usual at The Standard they have a post about the evilness/weakness/ineptness/stupidity/baby-eating/child-abusing of John Key.

Today however they reached a new low. Lprent is Lynn Prentice, the guy with a girls name, but that doesn’t excuse this comment in response to a rational comment about ACC and how the left are lying about the privatisation of ACC.

Now put that in context with their caring post about me. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about The Standard and about Lynn Prentice in particular and just how caring and sharing the left really is.

The fact that despite being called out by one of their regular commenters on this disgusting comment Lynn Prentice then went on to justify it shows just how disgusting he and his blog really are.

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Madeleine Flanagan from M&M has a very good post on ACC as it relates to Tort law and how the system is failing people from a peronal and legal perspective. It deserves a wider audience it is very well written. Now before you dismiss Madeleine as some sort of mad christian nutter you really should attend Auckland Bloggers Drinks before making that assessment. I took Cactus with me last time and Cactus told me Madeleine wasn’t at all as she expected and actually enjoyed her company. Now for those who know Cactus that is VERY difficult to achieve. Now onto Madeleine’s very good post.

There is not point in repeating what most bloggers of my political persuasion have already opined, I’ll just throw down a few thoughts from my own perspective as an ACC client.

My first point is that ACC is not welfare. It is an Accident Compensation Scheme. Accident compensation is about restoring a victim of an accident that was not their fault to as close as possible the state they were in pre-accident. Tort law is the area of law that, in the absence of state interference, covers injury caused by people’s negligence – what we call “accidents” here in New Zealand. Tort law says that you must take your victim as you find them; restoration, assessment of harm, is not to be based on the average person but on that person, the victim.

The whole idea behind ACC was to stop lawyers enriching themselves and impoverishing their clients by pursuing cases of fault for accidents and the avoidance of fault. Madeleine is quite right when she says that the focus should be on the person who suffered the “accident”.

My next point that I’d like you to keep in mind as you read this is that I think that ACC should be private and fault based. This is my ideal. My ideal is not reality as in New Zealand, accident compensation is state run. While it remains state funded, while the option to sue my injurer remains unavailable to me by statute, it must function as a just and fair accident compensation scheme, run in line with tort jurisprudence.

Right there is the answer to all the problems that besets ACC. It needs to turn from a no fault system to a fault system even if that fault lies with ones own stupidity. As it is now ACC is merely another welfare department doing a sub-optimal job for the taxpayers and for the people the system was set up to help in the first place.

Madeleine then goes on to outline exactly how appalling the ACC scheme has become. I know how she feels because i am going through exactly the same type of malarky except in my case it IS with a private insurer who is going to become very famous if they continue down the path they have chosen.

She finishes;

If you think I am starting to sound like a bludger who wants to get picky whilst resting on the taxpayer I remind you that ACC is not welfare, it is compensation, it is supposed to restore me to my pre-accident life because, due to no fault of my own, I was a victim of someone else’s negligence.  This policy will fall well short of that goal. If I am made to go waitressing our family will have to take a $30,000+ drop in pay and I’ll be stuck with a mind-numbing, dead-end job. Why? because I lawfully stopped at a traffic light and the state has set up the law so that the person who injured me was allowed to just walk away, I cannot sue and we are all penalised so hard via taxation that only the wealthy can afford to pay twice and get private accident insurance? How is that just?

I am not saying that I don’t think I should have to go back to work, when/if I am recovered and able to unless I have a job every bit as excellent as the job I had before the accident (that is probably unrealistic as I had it very good) but it is reasonable to want something close surely? To want something at least in the ball-park pay wise and with a future attached it it? Is that asking too much given that several years of pain-hell will have passed before I ever/if I ever get to that point?

If ACC cannot provide good support and restore people to something at least resembling the victim of an accident’s pre-injury life then it needs to be axed and handed over to the private sector. It cannot, see above, so axe it now.

To those of you insisting it remain state owned and protesting raises in levies ask yourself, how would you cope if you  were injured and were in my situation? Your career cut-off, your income slashed, the treatment options that were working now just out of reach and your future bleak? Is it worth the socialist-joy of knowing that “we own it”?

A better question, if you had to pay for accident compensation and you had the money to do so would you choose a company who gave the cover as outlined above or would shop around?

Go and read her story and then tell me that ACC is best. i of course await with baited breathe the immediate posting of the defence of ACC by the usual trolls who won’t go and read Madeleine’s story.

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Matthew Hooton in NBR (I bloody had to traipse up to the Howick Stationers again) makes the case based on an Australian precedent that Michael Cullen and Maryan Street should be in the slammer doing hard time for their deliberate malfeasance over ACC.

In 2001, Australian insurance giant HIH collapsed with debts of around A$5 billion, caused by gross mismanagement, including charging too little for premiums and failing to put enough aside for claims.

The Australian authorities took the matter seriously, including Prime Minister John Howard, who established a royal commission.  The company’s principals were jailed for offences including knowingly disseminating false information, filing false financial statements, being intentionally dishonest and failing to discharge their duties in good faith and in the best interests of the company.

The Australian authorities’ rigor might help explain why the Australian financial system is perhaps the only one in the world to be almost entirely untouched by the global financial crisis.

Exactly, I was living in Australia at the time of this collpase and was also involved with helping ASIC with some software that nailed these pricks. The other thing that Australian has is the ACCC as well that has largely prevented the collapse of financial institutions like the collpases we have seen here.

The similarities between ACC and HIH are astounding.

This week, New Zealand’s biggest insurer, ACC, reported a NZ$4.8 billion loss on top of a NZ$2.4 billion loss the previous year.

Major factors were charging too little for premiums and paying out too much in claims.  It contributed materially to the Crown’s deficit reaching an unprecedented and disastrous $10.5 billion in the year to June 2009.

Like HIH, ACC’s crisis was knowingly hidden from the public.  The Treasury’s Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Update, signed by then finance minister Michael Cullen, did not disclose it, a failure subsequently found by an independent inquiry to have breached the Public Finance Act.

Even worse were the public statements of then-ACC minister Maryan Street.

On June 26, 2008, ACC was apparently strong enough for Ms Street to announce that 400,000 casual and seasonal workers would get improved cover.

On September 11, she had enough confidence in the company’s finances to announce a re-elected Labour government would cut the motor vehicle levy from $254 to $203.

Three weeks later, and just five weeks before the election, Ms Street was at it again, announcing an expansion of ACC entitlements to people over 65.

The most charitable interpretation is that the former university academic might suffer from some advanced form of oniomania that makes her believe that, despite ballooning liabilities and a global financial crisis, it was possible to keep buying new services from ACC, while cutting its revenue, and expect it to remain viable.  Alternatively, perhaps she was just telling lies in the heat of a close election campaign.

Union boss and Labour insider Ross Wilson, then ACC’s chairman, was also complicit.

Why are they not awaiting trial no? Oh that’s right, maryan is off on a jaunt with deputy leader Phil Goff and Michael Cullen got given a job to fuck off out of parliament. This is why, I have been calling, seemingly upon deaf ears about the formation of an Independent Commission against Corruption. if this wasn’t collusion at a minimum then it was corruption to deceive in an election year.

Perhaps we even need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, without the reconciliation.

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<gritted teeth>It gives me me great pleasure to announce that Nick Smith is this weeks Gotcha! and Whale Oil Beef Hooked Politician of the Week</gritted teeth>

Everyone knows I think Nick Smith is a plonker and a liability but this week he finally said out loud what everyone including myself has been thinking.

“If my doctor told me that I was terminally ill and I had 30 days to live, with the ACC rules the way they are, I’d be finding myself a train to throw myself under on the 29th day because my family would be treated so much more generously,” he said.

This is refreshing honesty shown by a politician and as my example showed yesterday he is dead right. In fact the younger your family the earlier you should throw yourself under a train to maximise your “entitlements”

I don’t see why Nick Smith should have to apologise for telling the truth, he should instead be commended and so <gritted teeth> it is with the greatest of pleasure that he receives this award</gritted teeth>.

As a prize might I suggest he helps himself to some taxpayer funded air travel and go open a coal mine or watch some native timber being felled or something useful rather than implementing an ETS. Well done Nick Smith.

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This is a true story, it is about a mate who sadly was killed just one month ago. Only the names have been changed.

My mate Steve was killed last month in a freak accident. His head was crushed in an accident on an industrial property. Luckily another good friend of mine had counseled Steve when he had children to take out life insurance. The insurance company was a great help to his family and now his house mortgage is paid off and his wife and family receive a payout from the insurance company as well. She is doing well considering the tragic circumstances of his death.

Now this is where it gets real interesting. As the family were coming to grips with Steve’s detah and after having their financial worries taken care of by some sensible advice to take out an insurance policy when Steve had a child, they got an added bonus. They didn’t seek out this added bonus. ACC actually sought them out.

You see ACC is now paying 80% of Steve’s earnings from last year to his daughter until the day she turns 18. She is not even 2 years old now. I don’t know the exact figures but my mate who originally advised Steve to take out his insurance in the first place says that even just sticking the money in the bank and allowing for annual adjustments for inflation Steve’s daughter stands to have an account just short of a million dollars on the day she turns 18. All paid for by you and me via ACC.

Steve wife’s expectation was that she was adequately taken care off by the sensible precautions of her now deceased husband. To now have the added bonus, and there is no other description for it that fits, is almost like winning Lotto when your husband has tragically lost his life.

If this isn’t a story about how screwed ACC is then I don’t know what is?

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