Told you so: Right pushes ACC privatisation

Marty G
15 years ago
Categories: ACC, national/act government, privatisation
Tags: colin espiner

Last Thursday, Colin Espiner was mocking all of us who said that National and other rightwing groups were trying to create a sense of crisis around ACC to soften us up for privatisation:

“That somehow this is all just a VRWC* to derail the ACC, lower public confidence in it, and then sell it to the highest (or any) bidder just doesn’t ring true for me.

Now, I’m no highly-paid big-city political editor and maybe we should have all deferred to Colin’s manifest wisdom but even I could see this coming a mile away:

‘ACC may open to competition’

It turns out National is in secret talks with ACT about opening the Work Account of ACC to private competition.

National isn’t commenting about these secret talks but you can bet National’s big funders, the Insurance Council (remember this?), are involved. After all the Nats have been keeping the private insurers abreast of their secret plans to introduce part charges and cut compensation both measures that will undermine ACC and punish the poor the most.

You can bet that rightwing groups like the Business Roundtable are also letting Smith know that they think privatisation would be just swell.

Now, without wanting Colin to accuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, I can see National springing privatisation on us at the last minute. It is in their election policy after all.

[* means ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’, it’s a term used largely by right-wing bloggers to ridicule the idea that groups on the right work together to advance their political aims.]