ACC rowleaves maze of questions

TV3’s much-publicised 60 Minutes documentary on the ugly fight between Bronwyn Pullar and the ACC did its best to present the affair as a heroes-and-villains contest. Television likes its stories to be not only dramatic, but uncomplicated, with clearly identifiable good guys and bad guys.

Needless to say, ACC was presented as the bad guys and Ms Pullar as the victim, but the more I read about this convoluted business, the less I’m convinced that it’s quite so straightforward.

In 2002, Ms Pullar had a fall from her bike that left her with head injuries. Since then, she has been locked in an increasingly bitter dispute with ACC.

The nub of it seems to be that Ms Pullar insists she is capable of only part-time work, whereas ACC wants her back in full-time employment and off its books.

The drama has unfolded against a political backdrop in which ACC has been under pressure to rectify a parlous financial situation brought about largely because politicians couldn’t resist extending eligibility for compensation beyond what was envisaged when the system was introduced in 1974.

National installed a new, hard-nosed regime in 2009 and it seems to have been successful in getting ACC back on to an even keel financially, but this has required a concerted effort to get long-term claimants back to work and therefore reduce the corporation’s liabilities.

Taxpayers should applaud this, especially since there has been ample evidence of malingerers rorting the system. But critics say the corporation has been too heavyhanded and that a punitive, suspicious ACC culture has developed in which all claimants are treated as fraudsters.

Against that background, a political backlash has been building. Trade unions and the parties of the Left want a return to the softer, kinder ACC of old, when claims were scrutinised less critically, and the Pullar affair has played right into their hands.

It burst into the public eye when it emerged that ACC had mistakenly sent Ms Pullar an email file last August containing confidential details about thousands of sensitive claims.

Rather than alert ACC to its blunder and return the files, Ms Pullar chose to sit on them.

Why? Good question. I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that she treated the ACC’s extraordinary error as an opportunity to gain some leverage over the corporation. It wouldn’t have been surprising, then, if the ACC executives who met her in December and were told of the blunder felt as if they were being threatened with media exposure if they didn’t comply with her demands.

Ms Pullar and her support person, Michelle Boag, deny making any such threat and back that with a tape recording of the meeting which they made without the ACC’s knowledge. The police listened to the tape and decided there had been no offence. But it’s still easy to see how ACC could have thought there was an implied, if not explicit, threat to embarrass the corporation by going to the media.

ACC’s belief that it had been threatened is supported by the wording of an email later sent by Ms Boag to ACC Minister Judith Collins. In it, Ms Boag said it had been agreed at the meeting that Ms Pullar would return the document once agreement had been reached ‘‘on the way forward’’ – in other words, on a settlement that met Ms Pullar’s objectives.

It seemed clear that return of the sensitive email was contingent on ACC giving way to Ms Pullar’s claims. Form your own conclusions.

That issue aside, here’s how I see things. Before her accident, Ms Pullar was a high achiever with strong National Party connections. Her supporter, Ms Boag, is an even more formidable figure: a tough former National Party president with a background in high-level corporate public relations, good media contacts and an intimate knowledge of the political world.

When Ms Pullar failed to get what she wanted from ACC through the normal channels, she started to pull political strings. This is not an option for run-of-themill ACC claimants. It is available only to privileged political insiders.

Ms Pullar’s decision to exploit her political contacts ended up claiming some high-profile casualties.

The ACC minister at the time, Nick Smith, in a spectacular lapse of judgment, was persuaded to write a letter of reference for her on a ministerial letterhead and lost his Cabinet job as a result.

The deputy chairman of ACC, John McCliskie, whom 60 Minutes described as a contact from Ms Pullar’s political days, made an equally unwise decision to intervene in her case by setting up a meeting with corporation managers. Now, Mr McCliskie has gone too.

Both men should have stayed well away. After the controversy became public as a result of a media leak – one of several – Ms Pullar portrayed herself not as being driven by self-interest but as a public-spirited whistle-blower concerned about the plight of claimants and determined to expose what she saw as a rotten ACC culture.

‘‘This was never about me,’’ she told TV3 reporter Melanie Reid.

Well, I don’t accept it. When the normal channels failed her, Ms Pullar leaned on her high-powered political connections to get a settlement that was favourable to her. It strikes me as convenient to now present herself as having been motivated by an altruistic urge to help the vulnerable.

60 Minutes left unanswered some important questions, such as how much money Ms Pullar has already received from ACC. The programme presented her in a very sympathetic light, showing her overcome with emotion, but Ms Pullar is no helpless victim. To be frank, neither does she come across as a champion of the powerless.

She and Ms Boag are two tough customers who know how to play the system and don’t seem stricken with remorse over any collateral damage inflicted along the way.

The ACC culture may well be in need of an overhaul, as Ms Pullar asserts, but the starting point for this drama was that a determined and disaffected claimant used her inside knowledge, contacts and influence to push for a beneficial outcome.

There’s nothing illegal here, but it smacks of cronyism, and it strikes me as highly ironic that some politicians on the Left, notably Labour’s Andrew Little, have taken up Ms Pullar’s cause.

Since when did Labour, the party that champions egalitarianism, throw its weight behind privileged insiders seeking special treatment?