ACC and the law of unintended consequences

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, September 9.)

A letter in last week’s Listener magazine offered an interesting slant on the workplace safety debate.

The writer was a New Zealand geologist who had worked in Australia. He had gone there convinced, as most of us probably are, of the virtues of our no-fault accident compensation system.

He thought ACC was clearly superior to the Australian alternative, where people injured in workplace mishaps (or in car accidents, or even as the result of a fall on a slippery supermarket floor) can sue for damages. 

That used to be the way in New Zealand too. Personal injury cases were a profitable area of practice for lawyers until the well dried up with the introduction of the accident compensation scheme in 1974.

Under ACC, the state picked up the tab for all work and non-work injuries, regardless of who (if anyone) was to blame.

At first it seemed a bizarre notion that a burglar who accidentally slashed his arm while breaking into a house should be entitled, courtesy of his law-abiding fellow-citizens, to free medical treatment and weekly earnings while he recovered to steal again.

But we put those misgivings aside because the new regime seemed preferable to one where compensation hinged on being able to prove negligence, which involved hiring a lawyer.

In hindsight, ACC can be seen as the high-water mark of socialism – or, if you like, collectivism – in New Zealand.

Effectively, it was a state takeover of turf previously occupied by lawyers and insurance companies. But more than that, it took fault out of the equation.

It made us all collectively responsible for everyone else’s folly, whether it’s a company with lax safety standards or a snowboarder testing his skills on a slope strewn with rocks.

To put it another way, it absolved people of full personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions. It meant that if we fell over, the state could be counted on to pick us up and kiss us better.

This brings us back to the New Zealand geologist in Australia. He noticed that Australian employers were extremely risk-averse when it came to health and safety – more so, by implication, than bosses here.

As a supervisor, he was required to ensure not only that workers wore all the usual safety equipment, but long-sleeved shirts and long trousers as well, for fear that the boss might be held liable if someone got skin cancer.

Contrast that with a recent New Zealand court case in which a forestry worker wasn’t even wearing a high-vis vest when trees were being felled in the pre-dawn darkness. A workmate didn’t see him, and he was killed by a falling log.

The geologist wrote that he had been incredulous on reading about the infamously slack safety standards at the Pike River coal mine. “Our no-fault ACC system,” he concluded, “seems to mean just that.”

In other words, if I interpreted his letter correctly, no-fault compensation can serve as a licence for employers to disregard their obligations when it comes to workers’ safety.

Did anyone anticipate this at the time ACC was introduced? I don’t know. But it wouldn’t be the first time well-intentioned legislation has led to unintended and sometimes disastrous consequences. History is littered with examples.

The domestic purposes benefit was brought in to help struggling solo parents – an entirely laudable aim. It seems no one imagined that it would incentivise teenagers to have children at the taxpayers’ expense.

The Privacy Act was passed to protect personal information. Now it’s used to justify schools arranging abortions for girls without having to tell their parents.

Bike helmets were made compulsory to prevent cyclists suffering brain injury. Result? Women and teenagers stopped riding bikes because helmets were considered uncool or just too inconvenient.

In the United States, idealistic zealots successfully campaigned in the early 20^th century for Prohibition – an event that gave birth to organised crime as gangsters exploited demand for illicit liquor. It was the best thing that ever happened to the Mafia.

The European Union arose out of a desire to ensure that the countries of Europe would never again go to war with each other, but its architects overlooked underlying economic, political and cultural differences that are now threatening to pull the union apart.

Likewise, when the 1985 Schengen Treaty created passport-free travel between 26 European countries, no one anticipated that Europe would be swamped with refugees from North Africa and the Middle East.

Often these changes are championed by idealists from the political left. Their intentions may be good but their faith in the ability of laws to control human behaviour is often misplaced.

Of course we can’t use fear of unforeseen consequences as an excuse for doing nothing. But if the geologist’s perception is correct, it’s possible that the accident compensation scheme perversely contributed to the culture of workplace complacency highlighted in 2013 by the government’s Independent Taskforce on Workplace Health and Safety.

I’m sure that wasn’t the outcome the ACC’s creators envisaged.

PUTTING THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE

Fran O’Sullivan has an excellent commentary in today’s New Zealand Herald setting out aspects of the ACC fiasco that the rest of the media has largely ignored.

While journalists and the government’s political opponents focus on shortcomings within ACC – and can claim the scalps of former ACC minister Nick Smith and now ACC chair John Judge as well – it’s clear that a huge part of the problem, right from the outset, has been the determination of claimant Bronwyn Pullar and her advocate, former National Party president Michelle Boag, to exploit their political connections to advance Pullar’s case.

Some of those connections, notably Smith and ACC deputy chair John McCliskie, whom O’Sullivan says unwisely agreed to intervene on Pullar’s behalf, have exacerbated the affair by getting involved when they should have seen the danger signs – Pullar might as well have had a flashing red light surgically implanted in her skull – and stayed well clear. But their bad judgment shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the fact that Pullar and Boag have used their contacts, inside knowledge and media savvy to pull every string they can in order to extract a settlement on the most advantageous terms.

These women take no prisoners. Pullar clearly has a highly developed sense of entitlement and isn’t content to take her place in the ACC queue along with the hoi-polloi. She and Boag have used a repertoire of sophisticated tactics not available to run-of-the-mill ACC claimants, and while they have presumably operated entirely within the law, I don’t buy the spin that Pullar is the helpless victim that she has been made out to be. O’Sullivan’s piece helps put the whole malodorous affair in perspective.

Meanwhile, the old forces of the Left have seized the moment and are seeking to exploit the ACC crisis by pushing for a complete cleanout of the corporation’s board and a return to a more “client-focused” culture.

Lawyer Hazel Armstrong, an accident compensation specialist who previously served on the ACC board herself and has deep connections with the union movement, urged on Morning Report this morning that a revamped board should include union representatives. Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? Unions have wielded powerful influence over the ACC in the past – the Labour government made Ross Wilson chairman after he resigned as head of the Council of Trade Unions – and would like nothing more than to regain control. But unions represent less than 18 percent of the labour force; why should anyone assume that union officials speak for ACC claimants?

Armstrong talks about rebuilding trust, but I suspect that what the unions and union-friendly accident compensation lawyers really want is a return to the soft, benign ACC culture of the past. It may well be that the ACC is in need of a tune-up, and that some of its staff need reminding that claimants shouldn’t be seen as the enemy. But we shouldn’t forget that when National came to power in 2008, ACC was a financial basket-case. As O’Sullivan reminds us in her article this morning, that has since been remedied.

The Left gripes that under the present ACC regime, the bottom line is all that matters. The problem is that under previous administrations, it sometimes didn’t seem to matter at all.

The ACC scandal: politics at its most opaque

(First published in The Dominion Post, April 10.)

OBSERVING the ACC scandal unfold is like watching a scrum in an All Blacks-Springboks test match. You know there’s something ugly and unsavoury going on there, but you can’t quite see what it is.

It has provided a glimpse of politics at its most murky, messy and Machiavellian. It smells of power struggles, personal vendettas, greed and egos.

The most unsatisfying thing about it, from the public point of view, is that it has largely been played out behind the scenes.

We could sense precious little beyond the obvious fact that a bitter political contest was consuming the time and energy of politicians who should doubtless be doing more important things.

The ACC story led evening news bulletins and provided fuel for countless political columns, but not even the best-informed political commentators seemed able to spell out exactly what it all means.

Information leaks excited the press gallery but did little to enhance public understanding. The leaks were calculated to advance the political and personal agendas of the participants; nothing else.

This left the electors, to whom the politicians are accountable, unable to figure out what’s going on, still less decide who’s right and who’s wrong.

One crucial question remains unanswered. Where does the public interest figure in this imbroglio? On the few facts given to us, it doesn’t seem to count much at all.

The row has, however, brought home one or two facts of modern political life.

The first is the speed at which political scandals can gather momentum, and the unpredictability of their course.

In this case, what started out as a leak exposing apparent privacy lapses at ACC very rapidly escalated into something much bigger and messier. In a very short time the scandal had brought down one of the government’s brightest and hardest-working ministers.

Tony Blair referred to this phenomenon in a speech shortly before he stepped down as British prime minister in 2007. Noting that politicians now grapple with a relentless 24/7 news cycle, he observed that a drama can harden into a crisis within minutes.

The other thing we’ve been reminded of is that savage power struggles and ego clashes are no longer exclusively a male preserve – if they ever were.

* * *

PEOPLE find so many ways to debase the English language that it’s sometimes hard to keep up.

On Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report last week, Waikato district police commander Wim van der Velde was interviewed about a report that criticised police for their handling of a case in which a mentally disturbed woman escaped from hospital care and murdered a neighbour.

In a dire example of the managerialist jargon that has taken root in the public sector, Superintendent van der Velde said of the report: “Learnings came out of it, and from those learnings it seems police could have done some things differently.”

Two questions arise. Whatever happened to the word “lessons”? And what makes people think pretentious neologisms such as “learnings” carry more weight?

The substitution of silly new words for perfectly good old ones, often by making a noun out of a verb, is one of the odder trends in the abuse of English. Even my Microsoft Word program recognises there’s something not right with “learnings” by putting a red line under it.

It’s often said that English is a dynamic language, constantly acquiring new words and usages. But when new words serve no purpose, and in fact detract from the language’s clarity and precision, they should be shunned.

For perpetrating this latest atrocity, Superintendent van der Velde should be assigned to traffic duties for a month.

* * *

SPEAKING of peculiar linguistic trends, it seems everyone these days is in the business of selling “solutions”.

Real estate agents don’t sell houses anymore; they provide “residential property solutions”. A moving company promises “tailored solutions for every customer”, Mitre 10 offers “Home DIY Solutions” and trucking company Linfox is in the business of “supply chain solutions”. (It’s what we used to call transport, but why make do with one word when you can use three?)

A few months ago, Campbell Live featured an item about a Wanganui nursery ware retailer named Baby Solutions, a name that could just as easily have been adopted by an abortion clinic.

Presumably it’s thought that the word “solutions” suggests something more sophisticated than “services”. Engage a firm called Plumbing and Heating Solutions, for which I hear ads on my local radio station, and you expect the man who turns up to unblock your drains to be wearing an Italian suit – or at the very least, crisp white overalls – rather than an old footy jersey and boxer shorts.

It’s hard to tell where this trend will lead, but it may be only a matter of time before funeral directors start advertising death solutions.

Twitter: an exercise in pointlessness

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, June 7.)

RARELY was anything more appropriately named than the social networking site Twitter, a word that brings to mind a flock of sparrows noisily chattering over a crust of bread.

It’s the perfect moniker for a mode of communication whose defining characteristic is its sheer pointlessness.

Even the creator of Twitter, Californian Jack Dorsey, admits the name sums it all up. “We came across the word ‘twitter’, and it was just perfect,” Dorsey is quoted as saying. “The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information’ and ‘chirps from birds’. And that’s exactly what the product was.”

There. I rest my case.

The “tweets” that Twitter users send to each other are limited to 140 characters, which seems admirably suited to people with the attention span of goldfish. Small wonder that tweets are rarely concerned with anything more profound than what the tweeter has just had for dinner at KFC. The fact that National MP Tau Henare is Parliament’s most active tweeter – in fact is best known for his tweeting – speaks volumes.

What’s mystifying is that some branches of the news media have embraced Twitter with almost evangelical enthusiasm. Tweets from politicians, obscure celebrities and rugby players are excitedly reported, no matter how puerile or banal the content.

Journalists who would never dream of listening to talkback radio, considering it the domain of the ignorant and bigoted, nonetheless delude themselves that they are taking the pulse of the nation by monitoring the aptly named twittersphere.

When TVNZ’s Guyon Espiner on the current affairs show Q+A tells Labour leader Phil Goff that Twitter users are demanding that he spell out policy, you can’t help feeling that the Twitter phenomenon – or at least the media fascination with it – is getting out of hand.

Some Twitter users are mesmerised by its speed. I have read one journalist boasting that he heard about the February 22 Christchurch quake from Twitter while it was still happening. Another marvelled that Twitter had news of the ditching of an airliner in New York’s Hudson River in 2009 30 minutes before news sites were posting it as “breaking news”.

Well, wow. I suppose that counts for something if you’re the sort of person who loves to be one step ahead of the pack, just for the sake of it. But it’s about as silly as a motoring writer arguing that one car is better than another because it takes 0.5 of second less to get to the speed limit.

I mean, so what?

* * *

ECSTATIC reviews for the British television series Downton Abbey merely reveal how starved New Zealand viewers are of half-decent entertainment.

By the standards of the 1970s, the golden era of British TV drama, it’s rather ordinary. The characters are stereotyped and one-dimensional. The script is clichéd and formulaic. The actors are competent, but do little more than go through the motions – no one more so than Maggie Smith, who has played similar roles a dozen times before and could do it in her sleep.

The programme tends to lead viewers by the nose, giving them heavy-handed cues as to how they should respond to the characters and storyline. I suspect this is because the producers realise TV audiences have forgotten how to react to seriously good drama and need to be retrained.

Despite all this, the critical response has been little short of gushing – demonstrating that after years of cheap, banal “reality” shows and sordid American crime programmes, we’ll eagerly embrace anything remotely reminiscent of the quality drama we once took for granted.

* * *

ONE OF THE pitfalls of being self-employed is that I have to deal with ACC.

I recently sent them an email asking why I received not one but two invoices every year. The reply appeared to be written by someone with English as a second language. It clearly hadn’t been proofread and was nigh incomprehensible.

To give you an example, ACC’s email began (and I reproduce it exactly as it was sent): “We you select coverplus extra you receive two invoices.” (CoverPlus Extra is the policy I’m covered under.) Further on, it referred to levies that are “not aloud [sic] to be charged on a nominated amount”.

What’s especially galling is that I have no option but to deal with ACC. I am not allowed to find an alternative provider that ensures its communications make sense and might even arrange things so that everything is covered by one invoice.

Fortunately this will change next year, assuming National is re-elected and proceeds with its plan to open accident compensation to competition. As ACC Minister Nick Smith says, ACC needs the constant pressure of choice to keep it on its toes – an argument applicable to all monopolies.

National could hardly be described as fearless champions of free enterprise but in this instance, at least, it’s moving in the right direction.

God protect us from pretend prophets

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, April 13).

WHEN we think of conceit and arrogance, we normally associate it with overt displays of superiority: the swaggering walk, the braying voice, the overweening air of self-assurance.

Yet there is another type of conceit and arrogance that dresses down, cladding itself in the garb of modesty and humility. It can appear self-effacing and even holy, but it is no less vain.

It was this sort of disguised hubris that we saw on display in the trial of the so-called Waihopai Three. Anyone observing the defendants’ scruffy clothing, their unworldly manner and their air of righteous sincerity could have concluded these were humble men of Christ, driven by the purest of motives. The jury obviously did.

I don’t dispute the sincerity of the three men who vandalised the Waihopai satellite dish, but I do question the popular perception that they are simple men of faith, untainted by pride or vanity.

On the contrary, I believe they exhibit a deeply unattractive type of conceit: namely, the unshakeable moral conviction of zealots.

Their beliefs trump anyone else’s. If their fellow New Zealanders objected strongly enough to the Waihopai satellite dish, it would be a political issue. They don’t, and it isn’t. Yet the Waihopai Three decided their moral convictions entitled them to act on our behalf, and to hell with the repair bill that the taxpayer will now have to pick up.

Even Helen Clark, hardly a right-wing warmonger, condemned the attack on Waihopai in 2008 as a senseless act of criminal vandalism.

The inflated self-regard of the Waihopai Three emerged in full view last week when Solicitor General David Collins QC suggested the Crown might sue them for damages. One of the three, Adrian Leason, scoffed at the government for being “sore losers or cry babies” and virtually taunted it to have a go.

A damages case would only promote their cause, he said; and besides, the three had only $1000 between them (a statement now open to doubt after revelations that Leason and co-defendant Sam Land have property assets valued at half a million dollars).

The third Waihopai vandal, Dominican friar Peter Murnane, seemed serenely confident that public opinion would force the government to back off. We shall see.

Murnane, incidentally, was one of the priests who gave sanctuary to the oily queue-jumper Ahmed Zaoui. He represents a highly politicised branch of the Catholic clergy that rarely hesitates to let reason get in the way of emotional fervour.

The motivation of the Waihopai vandals is as much political as religious. Their rhetoric is that of the neo-Marxist left which pursues its agenda under the banner of peace and justice.

They claim to have acted on behalf of the women and children killed by the US war machine in Iraq, but theirs is a highly selective morality. They condemn the killing of innocent Iraqis by American forces, most of which is unintentional, but they say nothing about the rampant and wholly deliberate murder of innocent people – mostly of their own kind – by Islamic fanatics seeking to extinguish democracy and impose their own repressive dogma.

If it ever occurred to the Waihopai Three that the eavesdropping network operated by the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand might be preventing more wholesale slaughter by these murderous fundamentalists, they probably pushed the thought from their minds. It doesn’t fit their warped worldview.

Muslim terrorists probably regard these woolly-headed, pretend prophets in much the same way as Lenin viewed the “useful idiots” in the West who supported the murderous Soviet state.

* * *

AM I ALONE in objecting to the melodramatic use of the word “survivors” to describe anyone who has been sexually abused or spent time in a psychiatric institution?

“Survivors” are people who have lived through truly life-threatening experiences. I wouldn’t make light of the awful experiences many victims of sexual and psychiatric abuse have suffered, but the integrity of the language is worth protecting.

Their lives were generally not at risk. To describe them as survivors devalues the word and detracts from the ordeals of true survivors – those who lived through Nazi concentration camps, for example, or were plucked from the sea after the Wahine sank.

You can see, though, why lobbyists for people seeking compensation for abuse have adopted the word. “Survivors” is an emotive term that makes their claims sound more pressing.

* * *

THE LEFT keeps moaning that wages in New Zealand are too low, which is perfectly correct. They complain that the government hasn’t delivered the promised higher-wage economy – again, all true.

But just let anyone suggest that something meaningful be done to free up the economy, increase productivity and stimulate income growth – such as reducing taxes and government spending – and who’s the first to howl in protest? Why, it’s the Left.

Unionist Matt McCarten recently grizzled that an increase in ACC levies would negate the 25 cents an hour rise in the minimum wage. Yet if anyone proposes dismantling the ACC behemoth, the unions are the first to rise up on their hind legs.

Until the Left can reconcile these contradictions, it’s stuck with a credibility problem.

Labour and ACC

THE OUTCRY from Labour in Parliament this week when the government made modest adjustments to ACC was predictable. But what was National expected to do, when the cost of ACC claims has ballooned by 57 percent over the past four years?

Part of the problem with ACC is that left-wing politicians have been unable to resist using it in their quixotic quest to right all the wrongs inflicted by a cruel world, even if it meant going far beyond the original remit of the scheme.

The rot set in during the 1980s when a Labour government extended ACC to cover claims for sexual abuse – unverified claims at that. Since then the scheme has been further extended, again under Labour, to compensate the families of suicide victims. But as ACC Minister Nick Smith asked last year, since when was suicide an accident? (Or sex abuse, come to that.)

ACC represents the high-water mark of a welfare system that has steadily expanded without regard for the ability of an under-performing economy to pay for it. Labour has only itself to blame now the day of reckoning has arrived.

Gary Glitter and the Morris Marina weren't good ideas either

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, November 11.)

Let me take you back to 1974.

New Zealanders were driving Holden Kingswoods, Morris Marinas and Hillman Hunters. Police cars were painted battleship grey.

An ailing Norman Kirk was prime minister and Sir Denis Blundell was Governor-General. The president of the Federation of Labour, Tom Skinner, was one of the most powerful men in the country.

Popular TV shows included Happen Inn and Upstairs, Downstairs. Philip Sherry and Bill Toft were reading the news and viewers were enjoying the novelty of colour, introduced just in time for the Christchurch Commonwealth Games. Television transmissions ended before midnight and there was no advertising on Sundays.

Flares, platform shoes, glitter and Afro hairstyles were all the rage. John Hanlon was topping the charts with Lovely Lady and Blazing Saddles was showing at the movies, along with The Towering Inferno.

Men still did most of their drinking in smoky public bars before staggering home to the missus. They drank Lion Brown and DB Draught because there was little else available.

McDonald’s hadn’t yet arrived in New Zealand and licensed restaurants were expensive places you went to for special events such as 21st birthday celebrations or wedding anniversaries.

Andy Leslie was captain of the All Blacks and rugby’s image was still untarnished by the 1976 Olympic Games boycott and the 1981 Springbok tour.

Feminism was in its infancy. The domestic purposes benefit had just been introduced and abortion was illegal.

CDs and DVDs hadn’t been invented and the internet, if anyone had thought of it, would have seemed the stuff of wild science fiction.

New Zealand had a highly protected economy that had been largely dependent on trade with Britain. We had not yet felt the full impact of the 1973 oil price shocks and the chronic inflation that was to follow, or the pain from Britain’s decision to abandon us by joining the European Economic Community.

It was the last year in which we enjoyed the same per capita income as Australians. New Zealand farmers, encouraged by generous taxpayer subsidies, had 56 million sheep compared with 34 million now. Milk – also generously subsidised – was four cents a pint.

It would be another 10 years before the government of David Lange, forced to take drastic action because of New Zealand’s dire economic predicament, pushed through a radical programme of deregulation that transformed the country.

You get the picture? New Zealand in 1974 was a very different place than it is now. It was, quite literally, a lifetime ago.

It was in this context that the accident compensation scheme, or ACC as it became known, was introduced. The concept of a universal, no-fault accident compensation scheme was a world first, and New Zealanders were proud of it. But the world moves on.

What’s intriguing about ACC is that because it seemed a good idea in 1974, many people insist it must still be a good idea now.

Flared trousers, Gary Glitter, Morris Marinas, import restrictions and lousy beer didn’t seem bad ideas in 1974 either, but no one is clamouring to reinstate them. So what’s so precious about ACC that it must be frozen in time, presumably as a permanent reminder of a warm, fuzzy era when a paternalistic state bandaged our knees and kissed us better?

The comparison with flares, beer and crappy British cars might seem frivolous, but you can see what I’m getting at. Nothing is permanent in a turbulent, dynamic world, and what seemed entirely appropriate and even visionary in 1974 may be hopelessly inefficient and anachronistic in 2009.

In 1974 we felt economically secure and we placed our trust in mummy state. That was even truer in 1967, when the Woodhouse Commission first proposed ACC.

At that time we enjoyed one of the world’s highest standards of living and probably felt we could afford a gold-plated accident compensation scheme that was, essentially, the biggest extension of the welfare state since the 1930s.

Not only have economic circumstances changed radically since then, but politicians have bought electoral support by weighing ACC down with ever greater responsibilities, usually in response to the special pleadings of aggrieved groups which exist in numbers unimagined 35 years ago.

On top of that, ACC exhibits all the usual symptoms of cumbersome bureaucracies that face no competition and therefore little pressure to perform. These symptoms include perversely paying long-term compensation to freeloaders and malingerers while simultaneously fighting tooth and nail to deny compensation to deserving cases, of which almost every New Zealander knows at least one example.

Yet whenever anyone dares to suggest the scheme should be modified or (horror!) exposed to competition, the opinions of Sir Owen Woodhouse, the architect of the scheme, are trotted out as if he remains the Oracle.

Sir Owen naturally feels proud of his baby, but with respect, he’s now 93, and though he’s still clearly as sharp as a tack, he should accept that New Zealand is a different country from the one in which he embarked on his ambitious social experiment.

ACC’s five principles – which included “community responsibility” for accidents, comprehensive entitlement regardless of what caused the accident, and compensation at 80 per cent of previous earnings – were in tune with the collectivist mood of the time. But they haven’t aged well in a society which has learned to its cost that many people will happily take something for nothing, and which has grown intolerant of people who expect others to pay for their own failure to behave safely or responsibly.

Sir Owen and his many supporters talk about these “principles” as if they are sacrosanct, but very few things are sacrosanct and institutions such as ACC should certainly not be regarded as permanently cast in stone. A radical overhaul of the entire accident compensation regime is long overdue.

When the ACC first morphed into a welfare agency

(First published in the Curmudgeon column, The Dominion Post, March 17.)

MUCH has been said about the blowout in ACC spending that resulted when the Labour government extended coverage to include medical misadventure, work-related stress and free physiotherapy. But anyone seeking to identify the point when the ACC strayed from being an insurer to a welfare agency should go back to the 1980s, when it began subsidising the sexual abuse counselling industry.

In 1988, the ACC accepted 221 claims for sexual abuse – or, more precisely, mental illness arising from alleged abuse – at a cost of $1.9 million. By 2004, claims were running at an average of 5000 a year and annual costs had risen to more than $27 million.

One claimant got more than $150,000 in backdated compensation and several were being paid more than $60,000 a year in weekly compensation payments based on their earnings before their “injury” was diagnosed.

No doubt many claims were legitimate – but 5000 a year? And was compensation for alleged sexual abuse ever envisaged by the architects of the scheme?

No corroboration of the alleged abuse was required other than a supporting statement from an ACC-registered counsellor. There was no requirement that the supposed victim lay a complaint with the police, still less obtain a conviction. The alleged abuser didn’t even have to be identified.

In many cases the alleged abuse was far in the past, raising suspicions about “recovered memory” syndrome.

This was a tidy little racket that benefited both the claimants and the burgeoning counselling industry, which pocketed generous fees from the ACC for two-hour assessment sessions which invariably resulted in the counsellor confirming that sexual abuse had taken place. Acceptance of a claim usually led to further counselling sessions, thus ensuring a steady income stream for the therapists.

“Counselling” was a rubber-stamp process similar to the charade women go through when seeking a state-funded abortion.

The Bolger government curbed the worst excesses of the scheme in 1992 by stopping lump-sum payouts, but otherwise the rort continued. I remember questioning the then ACC Minister Bill Birch about the potential for bogus claims and being fobbed off with bland non-replies. He didn’t want to rock the boat.

One of the few politicians with the guts to speak out was ACT MP Heather Roy, who in 2004 compared sexual abuse payouts with Lotto prizes. By then Labour had reinstated lump-sum compensation, which predictably led to a quadrupling of costs.

At the same time the ACC funded a $600,000 study of the mental effects of sexual abuse – a nice gravy train for Labour-voting academics – and spent $200,000 bailing out an Auckland counselling service that was about to fall over. Whoever said New Zealand governments had given up subsidising industries?

Interestingly enough, an Auckland survey of women being counselled for sexual abuse found that 30 per cent had undergone 100 or more ACC-funded sessions of therapy. Despite that, many expressed disappointment that they were not getting enough.

This confirms that in a grievance-obsessed culture, there can never be enough nannying.

* * *

WELL, well, well. Some greedy dairy farmers, having invested millions converting sheep and beef properties into industrial-scale dairy farms, have been caught out now that Fonterra has reduced milk payouts from last year’s giddy $7.90 per kilogram to a sobering $5.10.

They should have seen this coming. Agricultural commodity prices have always been cyclical and it was inevitable that what went up would come down again. But some of the new dairy millionaires were blinded by the dollar signs flashing in their eyes.

There has been collateral damage too. Farmers who grow maize and other fodder crops for the booming dairy industry are now in trouble because financially hard-pressed cow cockies either can’t afford, or don’t need, supplementary feed.

Unfortunately we will all pay the ultimate price for the mad rush into dairying. The aesthetic and environmental damage done by indiscriminate farm conversions, often in areas unsuited to big dairy herds, will not easily be undone.

* * *

MEMO to Patricia Reade, deputy chief executive of Work and Income:

Beneficiaries are not “clients”, as you referred to them in a recent letter to the editor. A client is someone who pays for professional services. Perhaps you haven’t noticed that the state – that means the taxpayer – pays beneficiaries, not vice-versa.

Some dictionaries, bowing to political correctness, now permit the word “client” to apply to someone using the services of a social worker, but I don’t buy it. The fact that dictionaries have recorded a change in usage doesn’t automatically make the new usage valid.

No one concerned for the precision of the English language should be misled into thinking “clients’ have magically metamorphosed into people who get paid, rather than those who do the paying.

That a word should be so completely turned on its head is a demonstration of what happens when we allow the language to be politicised. George Orwell, bless him, was wise to this 60 years ago.

A phone call from the ACC

A senior man from the ACC phoned me a few days ago. He had read my gripes about accident compensation (see below) and wanted a chat.

Refreshingly, he didn’t phone to harangue me or point out where I was wrong. Quite the contrary. He said I had raised some valid points and he understood my frustration.

He told me that while surveys showed big employers were generally satisfied with their dealings with the ACC, the organisation acknowledged that it needed to engage more with small businesses and self-employed people like me. To that end, he said, the ACC was now making a special attempt to improve its relationship with these sectors through intermediaries such as banks and accountants. (I’m paraphrasing him here, but I think I’m accurately conveying the gist of what he said.)

I told him it was hardly surprising that big businesses had fewer complaints about the ACC. After all, they generally employ HR departments and other specialist staff to deal with issues like accident compensation. But it’s a very different story for the panel beater, farmer or florist who employs two or three people, or for the self-employed mug like me.

For the estimated 600,000 small business operators who make up most of the private sector, ACC is just another headache on top of all the other administrative distractions that eat into their time and vacuum money out of their bank accounts. Any effort to make it more user-friendly has to be welcomed, but why has it taken so long?

The man from the ACC (not a PR flunky, incidentally) also expressed sympathy for the predicament of clients like me who had to pay two substantial invoices in the space of one month – and just before Christmas – because of delays in creating new work classifications. He explained this by saying there were a lot of changes to be worked through.

I remain unconvinced. What's more, I have a sneaking suspicion that the ACC’s peculiar classifications, which are apparently aligned with an Australian model, are an example of the bureaucratic mind creating a clumsy system then demanding that users conform with it, rather than first establishing the users’ needs then devising a system that suits them.

As for the rising cost of accident compensation levies, the ACC man recited the standard line about having to deal with an increasing number of injuries as well as higher treatment costs. Whether this justifies my levy nearly doubling as a proportion of my liable earnings between 2005 and 2009, I couldn’t say.

Of course he wasn’t in a position to comment on my most fundamental objection to ACC, which is that it’s a monopoly. Therefore I have no choice about being a client and the ACC has no competitors putting pressure on it to function more efficiently or to be more responsive to its clients’ needs.

Still, I appreciated the call.

My hassles with ACC

(Published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, January 7.)

For the past six years I have made my living as a freelance journalist. For reasons that escape me, the ACC seems to have had great difficulty getting its head around this simple fact.

There must be hundreds of others like me – self-employed journalists working from home – yet the state workplace insurer is apparently incapable of finding an appropriate classification for us. It apparently hasn’t occurred to ACC to classify us as freelance journalists. Too simple, perhaps.

During my first few years in self-employment ACC gave me the puzzling classification “Other periodical publishing (excluding printing)”. This didn’t describe what I did – I’m a journalist, not a publisher – but it was evidently the closest the ACC could get.

The ACC seemed to recognise something was wrong with its system because twice its representatives contacted me about my classification and we had long conversations in which I carefully explained what I do.

Eventually it reclassified me under “creative arts”. So I am now a creative writer, which to me suggests a writer of fiction (no sarcastic jokes please). This is only marginally less misleading than the previous description.

ACC apparently spent so much time wrestling with this classification issue that my ACC invoice for the 2007-2008 year didn’t arrive until October 2008. I duly paid it, only to get another invoice – for the 2008-2009 year – less than one month later.

When I queried the fact that I had to pay two annual levies within one month, totalling nearly $3200 (and just before Christmas, when many people’s finances are under pressure), it was explained that the 2007-08 invoice was delayed because ACC didn’t have an accurate description of my business activities.

Well, hello? I’ve been doing exactly the same work for six years and have been on their files all that time. Twice I have explained to ACC staff what I do, but still they dither about how to classify me. And now I’ve been penalised for the failings of the ACC’s pathetic classification system by having to pay two hefty invoices within one month.

But that’s only half of it. Go back a couple of paragraphs.

That figure, $3200, is not a misprint. My ACC levy for 2007-2008 was $1451. For 2008-2009 it was $1737.

Now let me explain something. Freelance journalism is not a hazardous occupation. I don’t work with explosives or dangerous animals. I don’t spend weeks dodging ice floes in the Southern Ocean on a deepwater fishing trawler, I don’t shimmy up trees carrying a chainsaw and I don’t go down into a mine where there are noxious gases and rockfalls.

My office is in my house. I walk to work each day – it’s about 10 metres – and I don’t get strafed by hostile aircraft on the way. The worst that could happen to me is that I might get showered with broken glass hurling my computer out the window, as I am frequently tempted to do.

In six years, I haven’t experienced anything remotely resembling a workplace accident. Yet my ACC bill for the current year is $1737. I can only conclude I’m subsidising burglars who break their legs falling from drainpipes and drug dealers who suffer third-degree burns when their P labs blow up, none of whom pay any ACC levy at all.

In the past three years my levy has risen by 90 percent. When I queried this, the ACC replied that my levy was based on my increased earnings. Now, setting aside arguments about the fairness of having to pay more just because you earn more (after all, I would be no more likely to have a workplace accident earning $500,000 a year than I would earning $50,000), we’re still left with a problem – namely, that my levy increased by 90 percent during a period when my income increased by 42 percent.

I paid this outrageous bill because when push came to shove, I had little option. I am dealing with a big, brutal, armour-plated monopoly. And here’s the most fundamental objection of all.

I can’t say to ACC: “Bugger you, I’m taking my business elsewhere”. Like everyone else, I am forced to deal with an organisation that is not transparent, is not accountable to its hapless customers and has no competition.

That last factor is the most important of all. In a market economy, your ultimate protection against inept service or unreasonable fees is to withdraw your custom. But with ACC, that choice is denied us. The state compels us to do business with it whether we want to or not.

That monopoly status not only traps us, the customers, but also removes the most important incentive for an organisation to improve its performance. Where is the pressure to function more efficiently when the ACC knows its business is guaranteed by compulsion? Why should it treat its customers as precious when it knows the state forbids anyone else from offering them a better deal?

For a few years under National in the 1990s, accident compensation was opened to competition. I wasn’t self-employed then so can’t say how much better, if at all, the private sector catered for people like me. But as a general rule, competition forces businesses to sharpen their act. It can hardly do otherwise.

Labour reinstated the ACC monopoly because it’s an article of faith in Labour’s ideology, despite all evidence to the contrary, that governments do things more fairly and efficiently. I would like to report that National, supposedly the party of free enterprise, is firmly committed to de-regulating the sector again so that people like me have a choice. But no; National’s pre-election ACC policy merely said the party supported the “principle” of competition and choice.

John Key said competition in the 1990s had been healthy for ACC and had resulted in substantially lower levies (oh really?), but he couldn’t bring himself to promise that competition would be reinstated.

Since then it’s emerged that ACC levies will have to increase substantially this year to cover a previously undisclosed deficit of several billion dollars, which seems to confirm that this state monopoly, like most others, has been ineptly managed.

I would have thought this greatly strengthened the case for workplace insurance to be re-opened to competition, but I’m not exactly holding my breath.