KEY POINTS:
Former union leader Ross Wilson has taken over as chairman of ACC at a time when it is staring down the muzzle of the most radical change in accident compensation for 30 years.
The National Party is ahead in the polls a year from the next general election
and has said it wants to introduce competition not just to workplace accident cover, as in 1998, but to the motor vehicle account and the earners' account, which covers employees against non-workplace injuries. That represents two-thirds of ACC's levy income, which was just under $3.3 billion in the latest June year.
But don't look to Wilson, who has just ended an eight-year stint as president of the Council of Trade Unions, for firebrand rhetoric in defence of the status quo. His style is low-key and subtle. "I'm in a different role now than the one I was in before. It's not appropriate to be a strident advocate," he said.
"If there is a change of Government and a change of policy then obviously ACC as an organisation accepts that, but we do have a responsibility to try and inform the debate. That's quite different from fighting tooth and nail."
If a competitive model - "they don't use the term privatisation" - is what the democratic process delivers, ACC would have to be in a position to meet that challenge, he said.
"Although as I understand it the in-principle decision has been made there is still a lot of thinking to be done about how it might be done and to what extent it might be done."
Whether there might be a continuing role for ACC as one competitor among many was the kind of detail that had yet to be fleshed out.
In the meantime the focus would remain on improving the scheme and ACC's performance.
Surveys of employers' satisfaction levels with ACC find large firms more approving of the corporation than small and medium enterprises.
"I'm not absolutely sure but I suspect the large companies are probably more aware, if they are also operating in Australia other countries, that the levies here are comparatively cheap and that the benefits and assistance delivered are, well, incomparable really. We do very well on both scores. Visitors here are quite amazed and ask how we can do it."
Perhaps because the no-fault nature of the scheme has taken lawyers out of the system?
"Well that helps," Wilson - a lawyer himself - said.
"And maybe taking insurers out of the system as well. In a scheme of this nature the only debate is what proportion of the cost of an injury is borne by the scheme and what proportion by the injured person and their family.
"There isn't another discussion about what proportion goes to lawyers and what ... goes to private profits."
The bottom line is that an annual report compiled for workplace relations ministers in the Australian states and New Zealand consistently finds that standardised average premiums here are well under half the Australian average.
At the moment ACC is going through its annual consultation process for 2008/09 levies.
The corporation proposes levies for the work account - the result of merging the employers' and self-employed accounts - be cut to $1.25 per $100 of liable earnings, from a weighed average of $1.32 last year, and maintained at that level for seven years.
The account has excess reserves, and ACC's policy, opposed by business lobby groups, is to spread the return of that excess to businesses over several years to avoid volatility in levies.
"That comes from experience," Wilson, who served previously on the ACC board from 1986 to 1991, said.
"In 1981 there was a dramatic levy reduction which was a response to a call from employers to return reserves to them. The direct consequence of that was a dramatic increase in levies in 1986. And again in 1991 there was a similar response from the Minster of Finance to return reserves to employers and again the employers' account got into trouble a few years later. My sense is that employers generally are as much concerned about levy stability as anything else."
Plans to end ACC's monopoly don't extend to ending comprehensive, no-fault accident compensation.
"I note that all the political parties are committed to the fundamental Woodhouse principles. There is no debate around comprehensive entitlement, complete rehabilitation, real compensation and administrative efficiency," he said.
"The debate is around delivery and the role of private - mainly Australian - insurance companies in providing accident insurance."
But Wilson suggests that fragmentation of accident insurance could undermine some of the most progressive features of the social insurance scheme Sir Owen Woodhouse and his colleagues designed more than 30 years ago. "Sir Owen made the point very strongly in the original 1967 report - and he still makes it - that everyone contributes to society and that there should not be a distinction based on the cause of the accident or where it occurs. It is a fantastic concept and model."
It doesn't make much difference to an employer, for example, if an employee was injured on the job, at home or on the road in between. Either way he is one man or woman down.
The risk with a competitive model is that if there are different insurers covering work, non-work and motor vehicle injuries there will be boundary disputes, and maybe litigation, as one insurer tries to offload the liability for an injury to another.
For ACC, as things stand, it is merely a matter of internal book-keeping to which account the costs of rehabilitation and earnings compensation are sheeted home.
Fragmented delivery also poses a risk to investment in injury prevention, Wilson suggests. "There is a risk that investment [in injury prevention] might not bring rewards for your organisation because you might lose that company's business in the next round of competition," he said.
"There are a whole lot of [other] issues that we need to have some public debate on."
Asked if there was enough commercial expertise on the ACC board these days to foot it in a competitive environment, he said, "Well, there is a mix of skills, but yes I do."
"There is a huge amount of expertise in the organisation, of course ... One of the risks for us is that we might lose expertise because that is where our competitors would look for their skills and experience - if 1998 is anything to go by."
The former leader of the union movement now finds himself heading an organisation with 2300 employees and a staff churn rate of about one in seven a year. By the standards of the labour market generally that was not a particularly high churn factor, Wilson said, but he would like to see it lower.
"The goal is to ensure ACC is seen as an attractive place to work not just in terms of salaries but the workplace culture. Of course you would expect I would be concerned about that, but it has been an initiative our chief executive [Dr Jan White] has been pushing strongly for some time now."
Another goals is to lift claimant satisfaction rates. "For us 85 per cent satisfaction from claimants is not good enough. We wan to improve on that."
The number of claims ACC received last year jumped 5 per cent. Wilson put the rise down to increased awareness of entitlements, especially among Maori and Pacific people, as a result of an advertising push. "We would hate to think people were not getting the help they are entitled to just because they did not know they were entitled to it."
Injury prevention remains a primary focus, as does rehabilitation - not just because of the benefit to the injured but because of a one-to-five cost/benefit ratio in terms of earnings compensation avoided. "Increasingly we need to see our role as ensuring that if someone is injured and unable to return to their pre-accident employment they are able to be reskilled for a secure sustainable position in the labour market that is going to obviate their economic loss and ensure they still participate in the workforce."
With a very tight labour market, and no prospect of that changing, that investment just makes practical sense, he said.
Ross Wilson
* ACC chairman
* Age: 61
* Family: Married with three sons.
* Originally from: Balclutha.
* Educated: Otago University. BA (in politics) and LLB.
* Career: Ten years legal practice then roles with railway and port unions. President of the Council of Trade Unions 1999 to 2007.
* Unionist braced for ACC fractures
