Let’s deal with the sackings first, and leave the repairs ‘til later

I see Judith Collins, under pressure about the shambolic setup that is ACC, has chosen a scapegoat. She’s sacked the Chairman.*

That this will do nothing to change the setup that is ACC is immaterial.** Action was called for, and action has been taken. And action is what Collins is all about—or at least the appearance of action.

After all, who cares about actually changing ACC when you can get the same headline for a quick sacking.

* * * * *

* Well, actually, he’s headed for a nice sinecure as chairman of the ANZ Bank. But I’m sure “sacking” will be the spin.

** No more will it change the setup that is ACC than the sacking of IRD Commissioner Graham Holland after the inquiry into the corrupt culture of the IRD changed that organisation. But it looks mighty impressive, doesn’t it.

If you’re going to have an accident, then don’t have it in New Zealand

The recent Herald series highlighting victims of the Accident Compensation Corporation makes as plain as day that if you’re going to have an accident, then don’t whatever you do have it in New Zealand.

These are horror stories. A healthy 15-year old netballer refused treatment on her knee and left to suffer. A 29-year-old builder refused payment for surgery on his back. A 43-year old woman who couldn’t even put on her bra told “we’re not doing shoulders at the moment.” A 24-year-old rugby player who suffered years of shoulder dislocations after his initial refusal, only to be finally told his injury was “degenerative.” A horse-riding 37-year old mother suffering debilitating neck pain after a car accident—pain never felt before—refused treatment because she was told it was “degenerative.” A 36-year-old builder suffering further injuries from his untreated neck injury (untreated because of ACC refusal) was then refused treatment for the further injuries because they were, said the ACC, “not caused by his treatment.” As the man in pain says, “It’s not a treatment injury, it’s a lack-of-treatment injury caused by the 22-month delay in the operation on the other shoulder.”

The daily horror stories being told in the Herald reveal that stories like these are not unusual. They are legion. That this treatment they mete out to good people is their standard method of operation.

That it’s not unusual for victims of accidents to be refused treatment, to suffer lengthy delays causing further injury, to be told that their injury is “degenerative,” to spend more money on lawyers than on treatment—to spend the end of what were productive lives in agony, while the system set up (allegedly) to help folk like this spurns any responsibility for them.

This is the cold-hearted face of government “charity.” Formerly good, productive New Zealanders left to eke out an existence on pain-killers and pity because the system supposed to help them can’t even help itself.

Face it: the whole system is as fraudulent as it is farcical. Retired “doctors” paid a nice fee for a few hours rubber-stamping the refusal of medical care, and  bureaucrats with no more medical knowledge than a Friday-night drunk, between them sit in faceless judgement upon the lives of good people, with no comeback for these inhuman and cost-driven decisions.

This is nothing new. And it is all about cost.

The costs of this scheme have been blowing out for years—blowing out not because the wealth doesn’t exist to treat them, but because the scheme as set up is simply unsustainable.

There’s no saving it or amending it, because the very basis of the scheme makes it the unaffordable, uncontrollable behemoth it is. It’s no more an accident insurance scheme than Nick Smith is an astronaut.

And even those who do have private insurance are refused treatment by their providers because (due to the ACC legislation) they can’t pay for injuries that are the result of accidents. Which leaves us all to pay into and suffer an unsustainable welfare scheme whose very title, “accident compensation,” is a misnomer. It’s not compensation, it’s dereliction.

This, people, is the face of the socialised health system of which this country is so unreasonably and illogically proud. Good people are being pushed around and trodden upon by scum—and that’s precisely the way the “system” was set up to work.

If you’re going to have an accident, then don’t whatever you do have it in New Zealand.

You’ll be entering a whole world of pain you didn’t know even existed.

DOWN TO THE DOCTOR’S: ACC and other bottomless troughs

Libertarianz leader Dr Richard McGrath takes his irreverent weekly look at some of the past week’s headlines.

1. Motorcyclists plot protest rides against big rises in levies - Massive proposed rises in ACC levies will, I predict, provoke an equal and opposite reaction from potential victims.
    Motorcyclists around the country are girding their loins for a battle with the grey ones and their political masters. It’s bad enough that competition in the accident insurance market is outlawed, but premium increases of over 200% are intolerable. Imagine the outcry from our socialists if the private sector upped their charges to this degree. The silence from our coterie of left-wing state-worshipping political commentators is very telling.
    One thing is for sure: the Libertarianz Party will be there to support the motorcycle clubs and organisations that are fighting this usurious, arbitrary and inflationary move to try and save ACC’s bottom line.
    Wake up, guys - ACC cannot be salvaged; public servants cannot manage corporations unless they have a club with which to beat taxpayers when the finances start to look shaky. A lot of New Zealanders had no choice but to use ACC and are now at its mercy as their sole source of income protection and treatment funding following accidental injury.
    If the accident insurance industry was privatised, or even just opened up to competition, these people could have their claims transferred to a private insurer of their choice, with bankrolling of their future costs from asset sales.
    Starting with the sale of the building in which ACC is housed, if it is state-owned.

2. Rugby TV bid to cost well under $5m - PM – That’s great news, John. You should be able to fund it out of your own pocket and then reclaim it from rugby fans via pay-per-view.
    If these matches are important to enough people, they will fork out money to watch them. People who hate rugby and people with no interest in rugby should not have to subsidise those who do have an interest.
    Why there is even a Minister for the Rugby World Cup is beyond me. But the farcical situation of the taxpayer having to pay two competing broadcasters in a bidding war is proof that we, the people, are the losers in this political game. And always will be, as long as people like John Key and Trevor Mallard think certain sports are so important that people should be forced at gunpoint to pay to have them broadcasted live on TV.
    Can I assume these rugby games are so important that New Zealanders will be sent home from school and from work, and compelled to watch them?

3. Secret ACC plan to charge all victims $100 – This would be a good idea if ACC was a private insurer that one could join voluntarily. It isn’t: it’s a coercive government monopoly. There is no choice about using ACC; the state press-gangs New Zealanders into paying for its accident insurance scheme with veiled but very real threats of asset seizure and/or imprisonment. Any attempt to run ACC along corporate lines is just more coercive bullying.
    In a privately-run insurance company, introduction of a surcharge should result in a commensurate reduction in the cost of premiums. But ACC have just indicated they will be hiking – not reducing - its fees.
    The government should stop pretending it can run a viable insurance company. ACC is broke. Close it down, and let organisations who know what they’re doing compete for custom in a free and open market. 

See y’all next week!
Doc McGrath

It’s the old us-against-them again, Guv

A guest post from the pens of . .

 “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
- H.L. Mencken

The ACC debacle shows again what happens when politics and business mix: something called group-eat-group. Every good government-created crisis needs a scapegoat – and having found this particular crisis this government has set one group up to take the rap.

With the economic crisis it’s executive salaries chosen to take the heat off the real perpetrators. With the ACC crisis, it’s bikers who’ve been set up as targets.

The bikers about to bear the enormous increase in road and rego fees are quite justifiably aggrieved; so are the rest of us…um, but you’d never know it would ya? Aside from the usual New Zealand way of “lay down and take it good and hard” whenever government decides we deserve it, there is a more sinister back issue at work here, the issue being how successfully governments are at setting people against each other. Let me explain what I mean.

First, since the government owns the monopoly shambles known as ACC, it therefore has no interest in providing a quality & affordable product. We can’t just reject their services and go elsewhere is if we don’t like what they’ve offered,  I f we don’t like it, tough!

This being so, it gives the minister in charge at the time near absolute power to raise prices, reduce services, and have you and me foot the bill when the grey-ones of the bureaucracy mess things up – messing things up, on this occasion, the tune of 4 billion dollars. That’s a four with nine noughts after it (a long row of zeroes being a suitable symbol for the thinking involved here).

Now, in the interests of being seen to be fair, the minister will split the tab between everyone; but of course it’s never ‘fair’ is it? When a product and its price is set by government decree rather than a market’s voluntary supply/demand principle, there’s always a gain for one man at the expense of another.  Governments like this. In fact, there’s nothing they like better than the chance to play one group off against another.

So emerging out of this particular mess we see the likes of the bikers getting themselves together to protest the unfairness of the new increased tax. The problem of course is that they are not opposed to government monopoly insurance cover, their grizzle is only that they have to pay what they consider is unfair. But if they had not been the ones so hard hit, and the tax increase had have been put on another group, then you’d not have heard a murmur from them.

Where were they when the truckers’ road user charges were peremptorily whacked up last year?  First they came for the truckers, after which group was set upon group as they successfully picked off one at a time.

I expect they – i.e., the bikers, whose turn it is to get it in the neck – will mount a wee protest which will, as is normal for New Zealanders who work for a living, fizzle away in confusion as they lose hope, and everyone else forgets who really caused the mess and joins in bagging the selfish motorcyclists.

And in the unlikely event that they are successful to any degree, the government will simply shift accede to some of their demands (thus making themselves look like the heroes) and shift the cost to another group, or across all of us.

In a better world, one in which the bikers recognised the common cause and were the beginning of a principle-based protest against state profligacy, incompetence, & malfeasance - an “enough is enough” protest if you will - and we all got in behind them, and we stuck the course with them, then in a world like that the government would perhaps be forced to save itself by doing the right thing: which is winding up this government-created disgrace.

The battle, you see, is not us against each other, it’s us against them. It’s not against what is ‘unfair’ to one group or other, it is all of us against the nanny state! The battle, in other words, is one of principle. 

Let’s get to it.

* * Read Clark & Watkins’s regular blogs at their Sun Live blog * *

ACC: Just shoot it

ACC is not an insurance scheme, it’s a virus. “No Fault” is absurd, and invitation to abuse. If ACC (with $12.8 billion gap between assets and liabilities) is the world’s best no-fault accident insurance scheme, then what would the worst look like?

Fact is, the whole white elephant was never truly sustainable -- it’s just a failed way to prop up the welfare system, the health system and to help massage unemployment figures.

It’s not an insurance scheme, it’s a virus. As Deborah Hill-Cone says, “The theory was that people had actually paid their premiums and so shouldn’t feel they were getting summat for nothing. Dinky idea, but as we now know [as if we didn’t already], the premiums do not cover the cost of the ACC scheme – so claimants are getting something for nothing.  Actually.”

It’s not viable, it’s not an insurance scheme -- it’s just another failed welfare state experiment and, like all failed welfare state experiments, it can’t be repaired, it needs to be taken out and shot.  Richard McGrath says it better than I could:

    “In the wake of catastrophic multi-billion dollar losses, ACC should be put into liquidation, and the accident insurance market privatised,” said Libertarianz leader Richard McGrath.
    “Proposed rises in the ACC levy of 50% or more are outrageous. The National Party said before the last election they would give New Zealanders tax relief. But self-employed people now face a 1.5% increase in taxation on their income, thanks to ACC’s ability to coerce people into buying their insurance at whatever price ACC sets - a privilege not granted to private insurers.”
    Richard McGrath said his party advocates the dissolution of ACC to allow New Zealanders to choose their own accident insurance provider. “Competition in this market will weed out the incompetent players such as ACC, and remove political influence on insurance providers.”
    “The National Party obviously has no qualms about raising taxes, despite their rhetoric during the last election campaign.”

NOT PJ: Too Big Not To Fail

Bernard Darnton wrote this piece about ACC several days ago, assuming that Key’s latest changes wouldn’t do much to fix anything. No editing was required.

ACC is widely admired overseas, we’re told by its cheerleaders. Every other country in the world has been too awed by the scheme’s brilliance to copy it.

When Libertarianz puts together its alternative budget each year the plan’s always the same: slap everything on Trade Me. Last time, when we tried to work out what the “Buy Now” price for ACC would be, we ran into a problem. One dollar reserve was a massive over-valuation.

We’re not talking about a Kiwirail-sized problem here; at least the track has some scrap value. ACC is more of a breach-of-the-Companies-Act trading-while-insolvent type of problem. If a company in the real world had finances like ACC’s the liquidators would be brought in. Anyone mad enough to bid on our auction would have immediately been marched in front of a judge.

As well as failing the insolvency test, ACC’s hypothetical (and presumably insane) private owners would be in trouble for their other business practices. Invoicing you for services you didn’t ask for – pro forma invoicing – is a breach of the Fair Trading Act. If an insurance company sends you a pro forma invoice, you should ask for proof that the deal was agreed to. “No proof, no payment” is the advice from the Ministry of Consumer Affairs’ “Scamwatch” website.

As for ACC’s demands that we buy insurance for things that have already happened, Consumer Affairs has no advice – presumably because no private sector criminal has ever thought he could get away with such a scheme.

Of course, ACC isn’t an insurance company; it’s yet another welfare agency. If it was an insurance company it would offer me a lower premium if I took on a larger excess. I might get a no claims discount. It could offer me exclusions for things I didn’t want to insure – for example, “self-harm.” I’m pretty sure I don’t need to insure against deliberately slicing myself with a razor. First, I’m not an idiot teenager. Second, if I’m desperate for attention I just knock together a scantly researched and inflammatory blog post.

Over the last few years, ACC has morphed into the Accident, Bad Luck, Stupidity, and Feeling Sad Compensation Corporation. Add to that the booming free physiotherapy lark. Bolt onto that some doctors’ insistence that insect bites and other “accidents” are responsible for every ailment from Aagenaes syndrome to Zuska’s disease (thanks Wikipedia). Onto all that shovel a colossal heap of malingerers for whom ACC is another hiding place from the unemployment stats, and it’s no wonder that the scheme is in a twenty billion dollar hole.

Levies may need to be raised by up to 50 percent, warned ACC chairman John Judge. Without the hikes ACC would become even more bankrupt. That’s really, really bankrupt.

So this week the Prime Minister announced that his government would be rearranging the wheelchairs on the Titanic. True to form, the government’s aim hasn’t been to get the scheme under control, let alone replace it with something that works. The aim has been to keep levy increases to “politically acceptable levels” – in Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s memorable words: plucking the goose to obtain the largest amount of feathers with the least amount if hissing.

Start hissing; you’re about to get plucked.

* * Bernard Darnton is not PJ O’Rourke. * *
* * Read Bernard Darnton’s NOT PJ column every Thursday here at NOT PC * *

Thought for the day:

From Home Paddock:

    “We keep being told the Accident Compensation Corporation is the world’s best no-fault accident insurance scheme.
    “If a scheme which has a $12.8 billion gap between its net assets and claim liabilities is the best, what would the worst be like?”

Fair question.  Good thought. No answer, is there. And on a related note, from Liberty Scott:

    Privatisation. If Gordon can do it, why can't John?

ACC not nicked, not yet

Struggling ACC minister Nick Smith explained to Radio NZ this morning that opening the Workers Account of ACC up to competition is “not a priority.”

So I have to ask Mr Smith as respectfully as I can, “Why the hell not, you moron?”

After all, the whole of ACC is in a shambles – and not just the Workers Account, which is only one third of the whole creaking, shambolic, law-unto-itself bureaucracy – so why the hell wouldn’t you make it possible for private business to save other businesses money by taking themselves and their business away from this morass?

And after all, opening up the whole of ACC to competition – and not just the Workers Account – was a key manifesto commitment of your party. So why the hell wouldn’t you do what you said you were going to do, why not open up the never-listen, never-tell, never-ever-respond bureaucracy, especially when the shambles you’ve discovered since the election should make it even more necessary to stop money going down the bureaucratic black hole of this accident-waiting-to-happen.

And finally, since Labour and its lackies are accusing National of preparing ACC for privatisation, rather than just for being opened up to competition - doing it so successfully that everyone all but believes it - then why the hell wouldn’t you just do that anyway? Why the hell wouldn’t you remove the monopoly, remove the ridiculous “no-fault” law that props up this bogus industry and keeps a failed monopoly in place, and then get what you can for an organisation that is nothing but a drain on every business and every person in the country.

At least, that’s what you might do if you weren’t a struggling minister with a big-government fetish and a meddler's sense of power lust. Changing the board members is just shuffling deck chairs on a sinking disaster. The lifeline NZ business needs is to have this dying leviathan taken outside and shot.

Time for you for once to have some courage.

No Fault, No Care, No Responsibility

Government welfare is almost an oxymoron, yet it’s the basis on which the whole edifice of big government is based: the ability of big government to extract payment from one group to give to another.

We’ve all seen the many well-documented problems with the welfare state created.

New Zealand’s welfare system is further corrupted by the disaster that is the Accident Compensation Corporation, a sinecure for a special breed of bureaucrat for whom a billion dollar blowout is nothing to worry about, the organisation at whose birth government in their wisdom removed the legal power to obtain payment from those who might be responsible for your injury.

As Liberty Scott points out, the ACC is a monopoly without accountability.  Injured in a burglary? No problem: here’s a cheque.  Injured while escaping from prison? No problem, here’s a cheque. But what happens if you get poor service from ACC? Well if you are a claimant you can appeal to the District Court…  And good luck with that.  What happens if your levies go up?  Tough luck.  What happens if, say, you’re maimed by medical misadventure, and ACC declines to recognise your claim?  Tough luck.

The ethos of ACC is no fault, no care, no responsibility.  And in Liberty Scott’s calculations, that means Public Health Care + ACC = No Accountability. 

Which means if you lose an eye through incompetence, have cancer spread fatally because of delays or oversights, or have an incapacitating stroke because of delays in treating your first minor stroke (to quote some examples of government health blunders) then that’s just your tough luck – and if ACC decides to throw out your claim as well, then you’re on your own.

Like I said the other day, there’s now’t so cold as government charity, despite charity being the justification for the whole edifice of the welfare state.

Take the case of John Whittaker, pictured right with his 19-year-old daughter Alix; incapacitated by a bungled treatment of his diabetes, and now utterly incapable of looking after himself.  He’s recently been told by ACC that the home help he now needs will be pulled on April 3rd. (Short stories here at Stuff, and at Close Up.) 

Both ACC and WINZ have done assessments since those stories were run that conclude John is in desperate need of the care he has been receiving . . . but neither of them will take responsibility.  ACC won’t take responsibility any more because he has other health problems outside the ACC claim – and presumably ACC’s cost blowouts are starting to make them withdraw their payments. And WINZ won’t take responsibility because he doesn’t fit their criteria: bizarrely, their own payments to him put him over the income threshold for receiving home help.

Lots of finger-pointing, but no accountability.  No fault, no care, no responsibility. So much for the welfare state we’re in.

Luckily he has daughter Alix to fight and care for him—a daughter who will be abandoning her studies and leaving her work at the campus of design school NatColl on April 3rd to look after him if nothing else can be done.  Alix reckons they could manage with just $8824.23 to keep paying the home help themselves, and keep her in work and fighting bureaucracy. 

Fortunately too, Westpac bank have set up a Donation Appeal Account to help raise that sum. The account will be closed down within a month, says Alix, if the target of $8824.23 is reached, and any excess money will go to Diabetes New Zealand.

Feel free to help.

It’s more than the system you pay for is able to do.

NB: I’m told the account so far has just over $1700, and there is also a Facebook group which is doing nicely:  http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=73211386153&ref=ts

Account details are : John Whittaker - Home Care Account 
                          03-0255-0322001-00

Collapsing ACC [updated]

Looks like the failed “all care and no responsibility” ACC scheme is collapsing—the Herald reports “the National Government is planning ‘significant changes,’ saying “soaring costs and deteriorating performance show the present scheme is not working”—while anecdotal reports suggest the ACC bureaucrats themselves are trying to shore up their collapsing system by short-changing claimants and throwing patients off their lists. 

If private insurers were to dump people maimed by medical misadventure, to name one story that’s come my way, there’d be an outcry.  But because it’s a government department this sort of outrage just gets a group hug.

There’s nothing so cold as government charity.

Opening ACC up to competition is urgently needed.  Privatising the damn thing is essential.  But getting rid of the pathetic “all care and no responsibility” arrangement should be a fundamental change.

UPDATE: A friend suggests that if ACC really wants to save money, they could begin by pulling all their goddamn stupid ads of the television!!  We’re not going to die if some dopey bastard stops popping up every five minutes telling us not to go outside without a raincoat, on the roof without a ladder – in fact, we’re less likely to want to go out and kill someone out of sheer bloody frustration!

Urgency! Urgency! Urgency! [update 2]

Wow! Isn’t this new National/ACT/Maori/Peter Dunne-Nothin Government hitting the ground running.  John Key has flown around the world in a plane.  He’s spoken to world leaders.  New ministers have got their heads down and their sleeves rolled up – they’ve been diving into their portfolios to get down to business.  And in its first out-of-the-blue “crisis,” new Foreign Minister Murray McCully took action to get those poor helpless travellers out of Thailand (well, you know, he would have taken action if we had an air force.) 

And now, parliament starts sitting again today!  Under urgency!

Shit, this a government that has things to do.  Things to do urgently.  They have an an action plan.  They’ve promised a first-hundred days of action that started back on November 19.  (Or today, depending on who you listen to.)

“Action Plan!”  “First Hundred Days of Action!”  “Urgency!” Sheesh, it almost leaves a feller breathless, don’t it?

  When you hear the words “action plan” and “first hundred days” you surely know you’re listening to spin.  At least, you would if you weren’t a press gallery buffoon like John Boy Armstrong.  What’s in this “27-point action plan” that requires so much urgency and comes accompanied with so much bluster? 

Anything about getting government off the necks of producers when it’s never been more urgent to do so?  Anything about slashing the fat from bloated government departments (hell, even slashing whole goddamn departments) so the dead weight of their unproductive carcasses can be taken off producers’ shoulders?  Anything at all about ceasing to pay no-hopers to breed, which would stop in its tracks the headlines of no-hopers killing those they’ve been paid to produce?

Of course not.  For the most part, they’re neither urgently necessary nor at all productive – just a politically-fuelled mixture of banal and batshit crazy that the sycophantic commentariat are lapping up like a little boy laps up his mother’s warm milk and oaties.  Let’s look at this “action plan” and see whether either urgency is justified, or “action” is a fair description (my comments are in italics).

On the economy :
• The introduction and passage of National's tax package into law before Christmas, with tax cuts beginning on 1 April 2009. 
    Derisory tax cuts that will be fully wiped out by hikes in ACC levies, and without any concomitant cuts in spending: which means taxpayers will have an extra borrowing bill to suck up, and producers will have to compete in the capital markets for the same credit as this government.
• Updating and publishing the economic and fiscal forecasts to gauge the true state of the government's books and determine the on-going effects of the international economic crisis.
    They’re going to urgently publish some more forecasts?  Gee.  Can’t wait.
• Appointing a Minister of Infrastructure and begin implementing National's infrastructure plan.
    They’re going to spend $7 billion more of your money.  While cutting taxes.  Which means they’re going to borrow money to bid up the prices of contractors and building materials at the very time these need to contract from their inflated heights in order to assist real recovery. Only to a politician (or to an economist in thrall to politicians) can this make sense. Another spending binge, just like the last spending binge – and we get to pick up the tab. Again.
• The introduction of an RMA reform bill to reduce the costs, delays, and uncertainties in the Act.
    Window dressing.  It’s just a few revisions to exempt the government from the RMA so it can get on with its multi-billon dollar ThingBig 2.0 public works programme, and a few others to allow “companies to win the right to take private land.”  Nothing to see here, nothing at all.
• The introduction and passage of National's transitional relief package into law to offer extra assistance to Kiwis who are worst hit by redundancy.
    More spending.  More welfare.  No change.
• Calling in public service chief executives and instruct them to undertake a line-by-line review of their department's spending.
    And this will save how much?

It’s pathetic isn’t it.  In the face of the world’s biggest economic calamity for decades, that was National’s “urgent” economic plan to address it: basically the same menu they had a year ago with extra spending to go.   More spending, more welfare, and some tax cuts that aren’t worth a damn.   Nothing to see here at all.  So what about the next seven points on the “action plan,” those promised to “fix” Laura N’Order:

• On Law and Order, that nice Mr Key says National will:
  • Introduce legislation to remove the right of the worst repeat violent offenders to be released on parole. 
      One point that’s worth a damn.
  • Introduce legislation to clamp down on criminal gangs and their drug trade.
      Populist tosh that, to the extent that it’s successful, should help to raise profits for the criminals who remain in the drug trade – and make lessening freedom of association for the rest of us all the easier whenever the government wants to.
  • Introduce legislation to toughen the bail laws to make it harder for criminals awaiting trial to get bail.
      Another point that’s worth a damn iff at the same time court waiting times are brought down so people whom the courts must still consider innocent don’t have to rot in jail while they wait for their docket to come up.
  • Introduce legislation to tackle increasing violent youth crime by bolstering the Youth Court with a range of new interventions and sentences.
      John Key's 'Plan Blue' is for the state to either coddle kids or shackle them -- or have them sent to boot camp.  None of which, I submit, requires urgency or will seriously address increasing violent youth crime.  But it will attract headlines, which is all this exercise is really about, eh.
  • Introduce legislation to require DNA testing for every person arrested for an imprisonable offence.
     This is abuse.  It’s as simple as that. Remember that an arrest is not a conviction.  An arrest used to mean you were still presumed to be innocent, remember?  Not any more.  As from now you will retain (for the moment) the right not to give evidence against yourself, but even before being convicted you will lose your right not to give the state bits of your body.  The National Party has had the presumption of innocence doctrine in its sights for some time. Such a long-held cornerstone of liberty against state power should not be overturned so easily, or at all.
  • Introduce legislation to give police the power to issue on-the-spot protection orders to help them protect victims of domestic violence.
      Window dressing that will empower unproven accusations to have the force of law.
  • Introduce legislation to compensate victims by levying criminals and putting the money into a Victims’ Compensation Scheme.
     More window dressing.  The amount proposed, just $50 per crime, will cost more to collect than it will ever amount to.  The principle with victim restitution should be that criminals should never be able to gain a value from their crimes, and should to the fullest extent possible be forced to make restitution for their crimes to their victim(s).  This is not even a first step towards establishing that principle.

So some good, some bad and a whole  lot of window dressing.  And nothing really that could justify the phrase “action plan.”  So what about the third component: education. Will they fix what’s being taught to young New Zealanders that means one-in-five leaves schools functionally illiterate and innumerate (just as they were when National was last in power)?  That has left some 800,000 NZ workers unable even to transfer printed information to an order form?  Will they begin to wean young NZers off the cradle-to-grave welfare expectations they imbibe in Nanny’s indoctrination centres?  Will they work towards taking power away from the Ministry and the teacher unions? Will they hell.  We’re looking at more testing, even more paperwork, and ever more bossyboots governance of successful educators by those who are provably unsuccessful.

In education, Nation will (“under urgency”!:
• Amend the Education Act 1989 so the Minister of Education can set agreed National Standards in literacy and numeracy.
   Like King Canute commanding the tides, National intends to command literacy and numeracy to rise without any plan to abandon the teaching methods that have so demonstrably caused the problem.
• Publish requirements for primary and intermediate schools to report to parents in plain English about how their child is doing compared to the set National Standards, and compared to other children their age.
   More paperwork for teachers over-burdened by the stuff.
• Begin work on allocating the additional $500 million capital investment in schools in preparation for our first Budget to start future-proofing our schools.
    More window dressing.  As Phil Rennie demonstrated, the Clark Government blew an extra $3.1 billion on education, a 26% real increase, with exactly nothing at all to show for it, showing convincingly that if throwing money at the factory schools could fix the problems of the factory schools, that would have already happened.  Clearly, National has learned nothing from the news.
• Introduce a "voluntary bonding" scheme which offers student loan debt write-offs to graduate teachers who agree to work in hard-to-staff communities or subjects.
    The payoff for National’s student election bribe.  Forcing the impecunious to pay for the education of those who will one day be wealthy.
• Amend the Education Act 1989 to increase the current fines for parents of truant children from $150 and $400 for first time and repeat offenders respectively, and allow the Ministry of Education to take prosecutions.
    Frankly, I’d be giving parents whose children don’t attend the factory schools a medal, not a fine.

So nothing there worth a damn either.  How about the next “sector”?  I bet you’re just champing at the bit to find out, aren’t you?  What “changes” will we see here that requires so much urgency.  Will we see a change to the attitude that places ideology above patient care?  To the  die-while-you-wait health system that perpetuates this attitude?  To a cut in the number of bureaucratic parasites that infest the government’s creaking hospital “system”?  Of course not.

In health, National will:
• Instruct the Ministry of Health and DHBs to halt the growth in health bureaucracy.
    Clearly the story of King Canute is required reading for National’s ministers.  “Instructing” bureaucrats to stop doing what bureaucrats without setting up a mechanism to do that  is like passing laws to stop the tides flooding the land without building flood walls to do the job.  Which means this is more window dressing.
• Open the books on the true state of hospital waiting lists and the crisis in services.
    The old political ploy: Point the finger for failure at the last government so you can buy time for your own stuff-ups to take hold.
• Fast-track funding for 24-hour Plunketline.
    Keeping their promise on populist vote-buying – hardly a matter requiring urgency.
• Instruct that a full 12-month course of Herceptin be publicly available.
    Keeping another promise on populist vote-buying.
• Begin implementing National's Tackling Waiting Lists plan.
   Another plan without detail that, like Tony Ryall’s command to emergency rooms, shows the effect of studying King Canute is having a resounding effect on National’s policy writers.  Look to see the same sort of command-and-fudge approach to waiting lists that the Clark Government used.
• Establish a "voluntary bonding scheme" offering student loan debt write-off to graduate doctors, nurses, and midwives agreeing to work in hard-to-staff communities or specialties.
    As above, this is the necessary payoff for National’s student election bribe.  Forcing the impecunious to pay for the education of those who will one day be wealthy – the result of abject timidity to remove the price controls that have made communities and specialities hard to staff.

John Key said at the release of this “action plan,” "Our commitment to move immediately to tackle the issues that matter demonstrates our determination to build a brighter future for all New Zealanders."

I invite you to consider how many of these 27 points genuinely tackle the issues that matter, whether there is really any need to move urgently on any of them (beyond the urgent need to look like “action men”), and what this shows about any genuine determination about “building a brighter future” for anyone but themselves and their cabinet colleagues.

The truth is that given the scale of the world's economic problems very few of those "points" could really be called "action" in the full meaning of that word, and those that appear so are either window dressing at best, or at worst they make Cullen’s tax-and-spend proclivities look conservative – at least he was up front about making you pay through the nose, instead of extracting the readies by stealth.

We are about to see two weeks of “urgency” – two weeks of much sound and fury that will signify nothing at all beyond the sound and the fury, and end in nothing much more than we had before.

Plus ca change.

UPDATE 1: The odour of capitulation in the National caucus must be all-enveloping.  Annie Fox points out that following the stabbing and killing of a Christchurch taxi driver former entrepreneur Stephen Joyce has now joined the ranks of the knee-jerk Nanny populists :

    "Transport Minister Steven Joyce will review the use of distress buttons, video cameras and safety screens to separate drivers and passengers."
    Does the government have rules on the use of buttons, cameras and screens? If they do have these rules then the only thing Joyce needs to do is get rid of them.
    But let's presume that they rules don't exist - why is the government wasting time and resources on this matter - surely it is the responsibility of the taxi driver what security he would like. Just like they decide if they are going to have a Navman or CD player or air freshener.

Absolutely right.  As she says, it didn’t take long for Joyce to become just another politician.

UPDATE 2:  Bob Jones has a brilliant idea for the National Party to keep the Maori Party on side and help solve the economic crisis:

- free breakfast in bed for Maoris - also solve looming unemployment problem with breakfast makers and deliverers. Maori Party now in bag for sure.

Cut your coat according to your tattered cloth

MEMO to Phil Goff:  This is not “a healthy set of books.”

A decade of projected government deficits.
Unemployment and welfare payments set to rise as recession hits.
Tax receipts set to fall as recession bites further.
News yesterday that there’s a 2.5 billion dollar hole in ACC accounts.
And news just out today that the government’s surplus has now plunged by five billion dollars, from a $1.5 surplus to a $3.5 billion deficit.

So at what point does the new government say “We can’t afford the status quo.” At what point does it point out that government spending at the levels it is now is unaffordable.  That it must be cut, and cut seriously.  I’m not talking “razor gangs” here.  I’m not just talking about “trimming the fat.” I’m talking slash and burn gangs.  I’m talking about cutting the fat and muscle and bone – and even ripping out several of those unnecessary organs that have gone necrotic, and are making the rest of us anaemic. 

Cutting spending beyond the bone is urgently necessary – even more urgently necessary now that we know how bad are these books.  In parlous economic times, a government going into debt should not even be an option: there are only three ways a government can raise money to meet exploding deficits, either by taxing more, by borrowing even more, or by printing money.  All of these is destructive.  All of them take money out of the pockets of the productive (on whom we’re relying for a genuine recovery).  None of them should be seriously considered by any responsible government.

So how about a MEMO to Bill English, explaining that any government that had any sort of aspiration to responsibility should now be looking at their accounts saying, “Where do we cut? 

That this lot are not and will not be doing that tells you all you need to know about how responsible they are.

All care, no responsibility -- and no privatisation

You'll have heard it reported that National have finally announced a policy that distinguishes the from Labour: if elected, they'll be privatising that bloated bureaucracy ACC.

Sadly, those reports are wholly incorrect. 'Privatise' means "to sell off; to denationalise; to transfer to private ownership."

Unfortunately, National hasn't pledged to privatise ACC at all ... all they've said is that they're willing to open it to competition.

And they haven't even promised to do that; all that they've promised to do is investigate the possibility of opening up ACC to competition ... and this investigation will apparently take three years.

So the reports of a spine are premature.  They're timid even in their timidity.

The latest policy is still replete with timidity.  There's no sign that what is effectively a payroll tax on all employers would be removed -- a payroll tax that is essentially a top-up to the welfare system.  There's no sign that the socialised 'all care, no responsibility' situation would be completely removed.  There's no sign that the compulsion element of workplace insurance would be removed.  There's no sign that victims of incompetence would be able to hold those responsible for their injuries accountable -- incompetence would still be socialised. 

Sure, removing ACC's monopoly over workplace insurance would see premiums plummet, just as they did in the late nineties when the ACC's monopoly was last removed -- and as premiums plummeted so too did the number of workplace accidents, just as rehabilitation and 'customer care' improved markedly. 

Safe employers would no longer need to subsidise the unsafe to the extent they do now, but compulsion is not going to be removed, employers will still be subsidising sporting injuries and the like, and being able to sue those responsible for your injuries will still be illegal.

As long as the ethic of 'no responsibility' and the element of compulsion remains, then even if competition were removed we'd still be the only place in the world with a system that socialises incompetence.

NB: It's worth reminding yourself that the only place in the world that has compulsory 'no fault' insurance is New Zealand.  That's no accident.  No one else wants it.

The shriller opponents of so-called 'no fault insurance' being removed, which it isn't, point to places like the US where the ability to sue those responsible for injuring you has led to outrageous payouts and the enrichment of that class of lawyers known as ambulance chasers.

But as David Littel points out in The Objective Standard, the outrageous payouts and the rewards for ambulance chasing -- the serious problems with the US system -- are not a problem of too much freedom but too little.  American law has become so poisoned by the destructive doctrine of "vicarious liability" and the use of law to achieve social ends instead of corrective justice, that American tort law can now only be described as a weapon of injustice. 

And in any case, it's not what's proposed for New Zealand.

UPDATE:   Says Liberty Scott:

[When] John Key says National will "investigate" opening the ACC Work Account to competition, you have to wonder why it is so insecure about a policy that it implemented, whilst a minority government, in 1999. A policy Labour gleefully repealed, with legislations overriding commercially negotiated contracts and effectively banning the private sector from providing ACC services that it had offered. Why isn't it even mentioning the ACC Motor Vehicle Account, which at the time was in the "investigate opening to competition mode"? I mean seriously, why is providing competition to a government monopoly something that so frightens John Key?

He's right, you know.

Why *does* ACC feel the need to spend 5 million of their stolen money on TV advertising?

From David Farrar:

Heather Roy usefully points out that the monopoly ACC is spending $5.1 million just to make people feel good about having ACC. That's a disgraceful waste of money. Advertising promoting safety or accident reduction is valid and laudable, but this self promotion is an insult to those who have to pay the levies to fund it.

A friend who pays some fairly serious money to help fund those levies does feel insulted. They sent me this short missive:

Anybody come up with any suggestions why ACC feel the need to spend 5 million of their stolen money on TV advertising? Do they want us to go out and get more injuries so we can make more claims. I'd much rather they lowered my rates instead.

Good point.

Clark: "Bucket's of cash ... "

"Buckets of cash" ... "covert donations" ... "cash for policy" ...

Those squalid accusations above were all thrown across The House by the PM yesterday in an effort to divert attention from their own misappropriation of public money. They are all complaints she says she has against National's own "corruption." Let's have a quick look at each of them shall we?:

• "Buckets of cash...": Yes, National did have buckets of cash, and all of it (bar $10,000 they've already paid back) was given voluntarily by donors. A concept Clark's Labour has trouble understanding, so I'll just repeat the word: Voluntarily. Labour too received some voluntary donations, mainly from unions, but the issue here is that $800,000 of involuntarily appropriated taxpayer money was misappropriated by Labour to steal the last election.
  
  Both parties had buckets of cash at the last electiion. National's buckets were filled with their own money. Labour's however were filled to the brim with yours, taken against your will, and used without legal authority.
  
  
• "Covert donations...": Asked to defend that charge this morning on TV's Breakfast News, Labour strategist Pete 'I Admit Nothing' Hodgson "had a letter" sent by the Exclusive Brethren to the Electoral Commission asking for guidance on how to spend $1.2 million so as not to cause any problem with National's spending cap. Quite what he hoped to show with this, apart from showing how an organisation should go about ensuring they don't break the law, it was hard to really know. It was certainly no evidence of "covert" anything, except Hodgson's "covert" use once again of the Brethren bogie, a 'strategy' you would think a decent strategist would already have realised hasn't worked.
  
  
• And what about the charge against National of "cash for policy"? Insurance companies donated to National because re-privatising the ACC was a chief National Party platform, just as it had been for years. Was there any evidence the policy changed because of the donations? No. Was it "covert"? No. So is there a problem? No.
  
  So as a charge against the National Party this one has no more resonance than the charge that Labour took money from the unions to scrap the Employment Contracts Act (although on reflection that charge might actually have more legs...)

Three charges out of three that are just plain bollocks.

I say all this not to defend the National Party -- for whom I hold no brief whatsoever, and very little love (as most of my posts on the Nats will show) -- but to point out the measure of desperation of this Labour Party. This is the best they can do to defend their blatant misappopriation of taxpayers' money to steal the last election. They've been caught with their hands in the till up to their elbows, and they hope that if they make up tales about their opponents it might all just go away. It won't. It's nothing more than misdirection, and that it is so poorly done and so shallow is an indication of how bereft they are of any defence against the charge of corruption.

Spin is in; lies are all; anything at all to divert attention from their own corrupt practices. Eighty-one percent of NZers know they're lying, know they're corrupt ... and to those charges Labour just has no substantive answer.

As litigant and Libertarianz leader Bernard Darnton says on his blog, "When Helen Clark called the election she said that it was 'going to be about leadership and credibility and values.' And it’s definitely turned out turned out that way, hasn’t it?"

There is one further charge which Labour's Darnton Darnton V Clark needs to surmount -- the 'test case' being brought by Libertarianz leader Darnton Darnton to show that there are still constitutional limits on the Government -- and that is this: the claim that the money misappropriated for the Pledge Card was not "election spending" since the Pledge Card was not part of Labour's election campaign. Once again, what Labour are relying on here is a public too ignorant to follow what's being said.

Despite the best efforts of the state's miseducation system over the years, even this electorate is not that ignorant.

On that score and as I noted yesterday, G-Man has posted a snippet from a tape he has in which Helen Clark tells a Wellington audience that the Pledge Card is the "centre-piece" of their election campaign. And this morning the boys at new libertarian blog 'Pacific Empire' note that even Brian Edwards's hagiography of Queen Helen is happy to explain in plain English how crucial the Pledge Card is and has been in delivering Labour's "election promises." How successful? As Edwards explains, "Helen believes that the card was a considerable success." A "considerable success."

As Darnton said yesterday, "Thanks, Helen. If you could just explain all that to the judge we should be able to wrap this up pretty quickly."

*** Oh, and by the way, as Helen Clark thinks the phrase "Pay It Back" is just another bumper sticker slogan, a Darnton supporter has been good enough to turn it into one. (Well done, Duncan.) You can get yours at his online store. "The target market for this product," says Darnton, "is 81% of the voting population."

LINKS: A smoking gun - Darnton V Clark
Eh? - G-Man Inc.
Pledge card most important part of Labour's campaign: Brian Edwards - Pacific Empire
Bumper sticker - Cafe Press store

RELATED: Politics-NZ, Politics-Labour, Politics-National, Darnton V Clark

A word from your taxpaid sponsor

A correspondent just sent this to me, and it seemed the best thing to do with it is to post it here. I agree with every word:

I'd like to vent my spleen over something heard on the news this morning only I'm not sure which direction to vent.

The fire in Dunedin apparently destroyed the offices of some people organising the "NZ Masters Games" (whatever that is). The bit that's got me going is that the sponsors of said games is "ACC Think Safe".

What the hell is an organisation that gets its money by compulsion (read theft) doing giving it away in sponsorship to anything.

Maybe if they didn't sponsor things or pay for endless ads on TV they could drop the rates to the poor bloody people paying it.

It's enough to make you vote LIBERTARIANZ.

Consider me half vented.

I'm delighted to have been a conduit for such a vent. Bravo!