I don’t think so.

Nick Smith has announced he will be implementing a new experience rating scheme under ACC  saying that this will bring down our high rates of workplace deaths and injuries. He’d better be sure of that, because hardly anyone else is.

The evidence suggesting that experience rating sends a signal to employers and incentivises safer behaviour is tenuous and unproven at best. Most researchers have been cautious about crediting experience rating for lowering overall actual injury rates. Experience rating can provide an incentive for injury under-reporting and employers are more likely to dispute whether personal injuries are work-related and therefore, contribute to its claims record.

Experience rating is a concept from private insurance where the events to be insured against and the potential size of the losses must be measurable and defined clearly. But workplace health and safety can be complex and responsibility hard to apportion. An experience rating approach assumes that costs can be sheeted home to those who are responsible for them and there is no cross-subsidisation, yet our ACC scheme is based on the principle of ‘community responsibility’, where cross-subsidisation can and does occur because :

• one person’s job often depends on another person’s job making responsibility hard to allocate.
• an injury that occurs in one environment (eg work) might be aggravated or caused by an injury that occurs in another environment (eg sport).
• in many cases neither the employer nor the worker can influence the outcome.

Nick’s racing ahead with this, along with his secret “Stocktake” on privatising the work account, even although his officials told him that it would take two years to design an experience rating scheme, and before that more research should be done.

I’m already getting an increased number of ACC cases through my Northcote office due to the changes the government’s made to ACC. I reckon there’s a lot more to come.

As predicted by Labour, it looks like the government is getting ready to privatise areas of ACC.

An interim report from the ACC stocktake working group has said that opening up parts of ACC’s business to competition is workable. Minister Nick Smith was given the report a few days ago, but he’s keeping quiet so far.

National made a deal with ACT that in exchange for support for their last miserly ACC bill, passed recently, the government would open ACC to competition.

Anyone who experienced the disaster the last time ACC was opened up to private insurance companies will be steeling themselves up for a repeat of the terrible experiences of workers, health professionals and even employers.

The only people who benefited from National’s last foray into the privatisation of ACC were Australian financial institutions and the lawyers called in to fight legal battles. One of the major workplace insurance providers, HIH, later collapsed owing $1 billion.

Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric the government will use. What they call “opening up of ACC to competition” is actually “privatisation”.

National sees ACC and workers’ injuries and livelihoods as a tradeable commodity. Labour doesn’t.

We have said we will reverse any privatisation of ACC, but in the meantime, it’s coming our way.