“The Opposition will be pushing for big improvements to the Government’s ACC Bill tomorrow (Tuesday) so it goes some way to meeting the overwhelming concerns of New Zealanders,” Opposition ACC spokesperson Gerry Brownlee said today.

“And we believe many Government MPs are of a mood to accept our changes.

“They realise they have overstepped the mark forcing the ACC re-nationalisation on us. It is also clear they underestimated the strength of support for the current competitive system.

“National will be using the committee stages of the Accident Insurance (Transitional Provisions) Bill this week constructively.

“We will be introducing an amendment to require that the huge employers account fund under ACC is subject to the same prudential supervision that the private insurers were subject to.

“The Government legislation currently lets the fund build up – but has no safeguards about where it can be invested or what it can be used for.

“Failure to have prudential supervision in place in the past has contributed to ACC’s poor performance in the past (hundreds of millions of dollars of funds lost through poor investments).

“National wants the prudential supervision measures to ensure the money is not siphoned off by the Government of the day, or into bad or risky investments.

“What with this fund and the new superannuation fund, Dr Cullen is showing a real desire for gathering up other people’s money. We should all be highly suspicious of this trend, but at the very least we’ll make it hard for Labour and the Alliance to misuse it.”

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