In The Unionist this week: National releases their ACC policy, and more on the comments from ANZ National on the public service.

National releases ACC policy

“National’s desire to reward the Australian insurance industry with access to New Zealand worker compensation has clouded their policy release on ACC, which flies in the face of available evidence on the scheme,” CTU president Helen Kelly said on Wednesday, [1] following the release of National's ACC policy.

“National appear to have ignored the detailed report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, which noted the firm’s “moderately strong view that a government monopoly is the best observable mechanism for implementing the ACC employers account.”

“Kiwi workers pay much less for ACC.  In Australia, workers pay on average $2 in every $100 towards their worker compensation scheme, but in New Zealand under ACC it is 78 cents per $100.  And New Zealand workers are back on the job earning a full wage quicker than Australian workers."

“There is already plenty of evidence that says ACC is one of the best schemes in the world. National will ignore this and remove the right of workers to continue to access this brilliant scheme,” Helen Kelly said.

Yesterday the CTU released a critique of National's policy [2], which is now the lead story in Scoop Media's feature page on the ACC announcement [3].

“Mr Key appears nervous about coming out and saying National will privatise ACC but that’s clearly what will happen if National is elected,” said the Public Service Association's Richard Wagstaff [4].  "I can understand Mr Key’s nervousness because his policy will mean workers and employers will pay more for accident compensation and get less for their money."

"Where large employers contract out their ACC management already we see buck-passing and risk shifting. Members’ dissatisfaction is much greater with the private managers than the publicly owned Accident Compensation Corporation,” said Laila Harre from the National Distribution Union [5]. The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union said [6] that 83 words was not a policy and National's attempt was an insult to working New Zealanders.

ACC and employment lawyer Hazel Armstrong said [7] that one of the benefits of ACC was that it did not have the same onus to make a profit and did not have a loyalty to a particular employer. “Under National’s plan to grant access to private insurance companies to manage work injury claims, the insurers concern will lie with what will be of benefit to their client, the employer, not the injured employee. Private insurance companies exist to make profit and they will keep costs down for their clients,” she said.

Earlier in the month it was revealed [8] that Australian insurers were being advised by brokers to get ready for a multi-billion dollar windfall when National privatises ACC.  At the time, Don Rennie, the convenor of the NZ Law Society on ACC, told TVNZ that the insurance industry was not set up to handle long-term claims or to handle rehabilitation.

"It's been tried once before, in 1999, when the ACC was privatised in relation to work-related claims...in the time that [ACC was privatised] there was a great amount of competition between insurance companies to buy business," he said.  "We saw what happened in Australia when the same sort of thing happened.  In the early 1980s, there were two insurance companies...which were competing heavily for worker’s compensation premiums.  They cut their premiums and they got into competition with each other until eventually they both went broke, and left the Victorian state government to pick up the pieces.”

MORE INFO: Click here for the CTU's ACC Election 2008 page [9].

Further criticism of ANZ National's report on the public service

Last week The Unionist reported [10] on the CTU's comment that ANZ National should stick to banking, in response to their paper criticising public spending on public services.

This week, in an opinion piece in the Dominion Post and NZ Herald newspapers, PSA National Secretary Richard Wagstaff also takes ANZ National to task, saying that as we debate the kind of public services we want, we need to ensure the debate is based on fact, not fiction.  He writes:

"...the report divided government spending into "productive" and "non-productive" categories. Among productive spending were education, law and order and transport.  But what about the Government's biggest expenditures, health and benefits? ANZ simply excluded them, noting 'We exclude health as, to be honest, we were unsure where to classify it.'

That defies all logic. Most employers would agree that having healthy, alive workers contributes to a productive New Zealand. And health happens to be the place that spending has increased the most but it, along with almost $7 billion in superannuation, is excluded entirely from the report.

That's absurd. But indicative of the type of ideological gymnastics Mr Bagrie has performed in order to say that productive spending is going down.

Some of the things deemed unproductive, like departmental spending, are as equally absurd. This would include programmes like KiwiSaver.  Even the ANZ, Mr Bagrie's employer, doesn't agree with this. It finds KiwiSaver productive enough to offer ANZ customers several KiwiSaver schemes.

Then there's the Department of Conservation. According to the report, it's also "non-productive".  But where would New Zealand's tourism industry be if DoC staff weren't protecting our natural and historic heritage? Of the 2.2 million overseas tourists who visited between March 2006 and March 2007, 668,400 - 30 per cent - visited a National Park maintained by DoC staff.

You can read Richard Wagstaff's comments in full here [11].

Meanwhile ANZ National's outsourcing proposal was confirmed this week.  Read about it in the NZ Herald here [12], or for the full response from the union for bank workers, finsec, click here [13].

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