The following is a letter I intend to send to every media, politician, interest group, etc, I can think of.
Any of you who wish to copy and send it to whomsoever, feel free.
We motorists are being ripped, raped, and rooted by a cynical system which has one ace in its armoury.
The bastards can identify us.
Registered Road-Users Are Being Ripped Off
Dear Sir,
I am writing the clarify some issues regarding the proposed ACC levies on all registered road-users.
The Minister, Nick Smith asserts that all registered road-users, other than motorcyclists are subsidising motorcyclists.
We know that statistics can be twisted and pulled to suit any argument. Smith is relying upon the following data to support his contention.
Car Occupants:
- 8525 active claims
- $208,305,000
- $24,434 per claim
Motorcyclists:
- 3173 active claims
- $62,523,000
- $19,704 per claim
The foregoing comes directly from ACC’s own statistics.
Smith, very artfully, is using the number of claims related to the number of registered users (of type) to support his position. Ergo 8525 claims from 1.6 million registered private cars, as opposed to 3173 claims from amongst 128,000 registered motorcycles.
Using these data Smith can clearly assert car drivers are subsidising motorcyclists.
However, as with all politicians wishing to con the public, Smith has artfully ‘forgotten?’ to mention that 89.9% of motorcyclists also own a car, which they register and pay the ACC subsidy.
However, buying into this petty argument is not the thrust of this dissertation.
The thrust here is founded on one simple principle. Sir Owen Woodford designed ACC as a no-fault insurance. Today, 99.8% of all claimants still benefit from that part of the original plan. However, 0.2% of all claimants otherwise known as registered road-users, do not.
All registered road-users are forced to pay an extra levy which of itself presumes some level of fault.
Registered road-users, including cars, trucks, motorcycles, taxis, ambulances, cop-cars, buses, etc, in total claimed just under $480 million dollars during the 2008/2009 year.
Now measure that claim-sum against the total sum of claims ($24 billion). It follows that all road-user claims amount to less than one fifth of one percent of the total annual claim.
Yet all registered road-users are required to pay and extra –fault-targeted levy.
It follows that, using Smith’s criteria, all registered road users are subsidising all the rest. In other words, 0.2% of ACC payers, are subsidising the other 99.8%.
Yet all registered road-users are ‘also’ a part of the 99.8% whom they subsidise because they pay, like everyone else, an ACC levy via their income.
Smith argues that ACC levies for all tax-payers will have to rise. So? That doesn’t lessen the fact that most of those tax-payers are motorists and thus are burdened with an extra levy.
Why are motorists of any sort burden with an extra levy?
The answer is as simple as it is cynical. There are no cops or council staff out there checking to see if the player of sport, the home handyman, the lunatic lawn-mower, the crazy mountain climber, or the erratic employee has paid up his/her ACC levy by way of registration.
Motorists, of all types have been an easy target because the law enforcers can identify them, specifically. Moreover, they have been granted almost draconian laws to enforce the will of ACC.
That is the only reason the governments (all of them) have been happy to levy motorists because motorists are the only group over which the law-enforcers have meaningful and specific power.
Therefore, the current ACC levy on motorists is utterly undemocratic, it is cynical, it flies in the face of the ‘no-fault’ concept of ACC, and if forces 0.2% (all registered motorists) of the population to subsidise the other 99.8%.
The current ACC levies against a target-group (motorists) is nothing more than an outrage. The proposed increases mark this new government as fascists in the extreme.
Yours faithfully
David Peppiatt.
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Originally Posted by McJim
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