At the election, National won a mandate for its platform to review the Work Account of ACC, to see whether privatisation might make it better. Of course, we know that they’re not interested in the findings of any fair review, which would show ACC is a worldleading, cheap, efficient system that would be wrecked by privatisation. Lacking the mandate to just go ahead and privatise the thing, giving a bonanza to their insurance industry pals, National/ACT is trying to spin up a crisis around ACC. It spent this week trying to tell us ACC is in trouble, threatening us with higher levies, all to get people annoyed with ACC and soften the ground for privatisation (even though privatisation is in no way, shape, or form an answer to the costs coming from ACC’s reserves being hit by the credit crisis). Conveniently too, this ACC beat-up distracted the media from asking any hard questions of Key’s handling of the Thailand situation or taking a closer look at the tax package National will be ramming through when Parliament sits next week. Here are our favourite posts of the week:
CTU calls for fairer tax cuts
despite the media narrative about National’s ‘moderate’, ‘centrist’ policies the figures show its tax package is actually incredibly regressive. In fact, you could argue it’s been explicitly designed to divert money out of the pockets of working families and into the pockets of the already very wealthy..[more]
Nowhere to Hide
The problem National/ACT is now discovering is that you might be able to win power with endless repetition of this rubbish but, once you’re in power, you have high expectations to meet and no substance with which to fulfil them…[more]
Fiasco
For the sake of the hundreds of Kiwis stranded in Thailand, can’t John just spare us the dithering and let Phil Goff handle the crisis?…[more]
A journal for the ruling class
The Herald acts like it’s a journal for the ruling class, then they wonder why people aren’t buying their newspapers…[more]
Laying the foundations
Let’s not fool ourselves that what we’ve seen from National over the last 24 hours on to the shortfall in the ACC non-earners account hasn’t been carefully managed in a way to lay the foundation for their arguments in favour of privatising the scheme…[more]
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