Robertson Grant: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Robertson Grant: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 26 June 2012. Volume:681;Page:3334. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GRANT ROBERTSON (Deputy Leader—Labour) 
: 
 It is hard to think of a Crown entity or a public organisation or a State-owned enterprise that we are looking into tonight that is in a worse state than the Accident Compensation Corporation and the fault for that lies entirely at the feet of this Government. That is where it lies. An organisation with a proud history has been turned into a shambles inside 3½ years by this Government. The core principles of ACC—prevention treatment and rehabilitation—have been replaced with scandal sleaze stuff-ups and a culture of disentitlement and that is what we are seeing from this Government. From day one it has sought to undermine ACC to ensure that it is not providing the service that New Zealanders would expect of it and to ready it up for the privatisation plans that we know that the Government has. 
It would be easy when looking at ACC to gloss over some of the matters that are not the scandal and are not the sleaze—I will return to those shortly—but what I want to mention now right off the bat is that in the report of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee we see the heart of what this Government is actually doing to ACC. The committee chose to comment on the increase in the number of decisions going to review. There were 5193 decisions that went to review in 2007-08. That increased to 9271 in 2010-11—nearly double. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: That’s a scandal in itself. 
GRANT ROBERTSON 
: It is a scandal in itself. But it gets worse. The increase in decisions overturned at review or on appeal went up from 900 in 2007-08 to a staggering 2288 in 2010-11. That is what is really going on inside ACC. That is what is there. That culture of disentitlement was brought in by the former Minister for ACC Nick Smith actually deliberately targeting a situation whereby people would have their entitlements taken away. More and more decisions were going to review because ACC was working harder and harder to make sure people did not get what they were entitled to. But it is far far worse than that because in fact what we now know is that the Government pays ACC staff bonuses to get people off the books. That is why things are going to review. It is because people who are entitled to expect that ACC would be there for them are being pushed off it as part of an active campaign by this Government. So do not underestimate at any point the desire of this Government to undermine ACC as a public entity because the agenda is very clear. 
There is one good thing—there is only one good thing—from the stuff-ups scandal and sleaze that have bedevilled ACC. It is that the process of opening up the work account to competition is being delayed. That is the one thing that is good. But make no mistake this Government did it last time in the 1990s and it will do it again. It wants to privatise this organisation. This process of deliberately undermining the organisation of ensuring that people do not get what they are entitled to of seeing more cases go to review and more cases overturned on appeal because the basis of the ACC decision was wrong is the culture that National has been developing in ACC. The Minister for ACC talks about a culture change. Well the culture change that she wants is a culture of privatisation. We on this side of the House would like to see a culture change that actually sees ACC get back to its core business of prevention of treatment of rehabilitation and of making sure that it is the organisation that New Zealanders should be proud of. 
But there is absolutely no way New Zealanders can be proud of an organisation whose main contact points in the last few months have been the police the Privacy Commissioner and the Auditor-General. That is what most of the work going on in ACC is about at the moment—trying to manage the scandals and the stuff-ups and the sleaze. It is simply unacceptable to this day that such a large privacy breach could take place in an organisation like ACC and what followed from that was a disgrace. It was a farce actually but it was also a disgrace because this organisation—once proud—found itself mired in a huge breach of privacy Ministers going and a police inquiry at the end of which we saw the chair the chief executive and board members leave. This is a Crown entity in chaos. It is a shambles. It has been poorly managed from day one of this Government by Ministers Nick Smith and Judith Collins. So mired in the scandal and the sleaze are they that they have completely taken their eye off the ball of this organisation.