<Back

ACC Levies - Leadership is What We Need


The announcement of the new ACC levies on October 14, was an unexpected slap in the mouth for all motorcyclists. The imposition of increases up to virtually 300% was beyond the imagination of even the most cynical of us.

The question is what are we to do about it? Well the first thing is not to panic. We can't afford go off half cock into poorly organised mass rallies, which could turn ugly and lose us what public support we might have.

Our need is for strong, intelligent and cool-headed leadership, the ability to put together a well-thought out and effective lobby group - such as the AA once was, for at the moment the AA and in particular its chief executive, Mike Noon, is no friend of ours and hasn't been for a very long time. He has been putting motorcyclists down on and off for some years now. As a motorcyclist if I were an AA member I would be resigning my membership and asking for his resignation.
We need our own forceful and aggressive, politically motivated organisation that will look after the interests of motorcycling within government circles. This means knowing how, and where to apply pressure. It also means having a powerful well-supported organisation behind them.

The problem is we need this leadership NOW! Let us hope that adversity will bring out a person or group that can step up to the podium and take charge. Because I have little faith in the existing biking groups to be able to come up to the mark. Any volunteers?

Not just us as motorcyclists, but the whole of the New Zealand public have been fitted up by this government. On October 14, ACC issued a press release announcing these changes. But here is the best bit, they are open to public submissions until November 10!! Not much time to gather our forces in opposition, less that a month in fact. What sort of democracy is this? We are dealing with some of the most unscrupulous people that have governed in this country, since the “Mother of all Budgets” in the days of Ruth Richardson.

We must, however make the effort. Here are a couple of suggestions that you might like to contact your MP about plus whatever else you might think of to support our cause.

A person owning any bike over 125cc may well put off buying or updating their safety gear in order to pay the new ACC levy. How many serious injuries will that cause?

Once again a person owning a bigger bike may well only be able to afford to register it for a very short period during the summer. Which means the roads will be full of riders that only ride for a few weeks a year. How many crashes will that precipitate.

Finally I suggest, look up your local MP in the phone book. Find out when he or she is in their electoral office and get together a few riders (and I stress a few riders, people are easily intimidated by a lot of bikes) it is an excuse to call the cops and that does nothing for our cause. A lot of small groups with an intelligent well-presented case will be far more effective than large group of loud and aggressive bikers.



Finally if we have a simple and straight forward look at ACC, it can be seen that, it is in fact in pretty good shape, it does not need to be interfered with by this increasingly right wing government.

The situation is as follows; ACC has a debt which goes into the future, making payouts to people who have long term injury problems, this is a natural consequence of the way the things work and it can look a very scary sum.

However if you think of it like a family with a mortgage of $300,000 and annual income of $50,000, it looks bad if they had to pay it off, in say three years. Which is how the government is looking at ACC. However if the family is well managed and it pays the required amount off the mortgage each year and still has enough to live on and perhaps even save a little, then all is well.

This is exactly the position ACC is in, it can pay what is required of it each year and it still has cash left over to offset against future increases in debt.

Therefore ACC is not in a financial ‘pickle’ as Nick Smith puts it. In fact it is doing quite well. The problem is that as far as the National Party and it's right wing supporters are concerned ACC has the inescapable stink of socialism about it, so they have to try and make it operate like a commercial insurance company which it is not!



GREYBEARD