About the ACC Futures Coalition

The ACC Futures Coalition (ACCFC) is a multidisciplinary group of lawyers, care providers, academics, and ACC service consumers dedicated to upholding the founding Woodhouse principles and advocating for the maintenance and improvement of the Accident Compensation scheme in the modern day.  The Coalition strives to preserve the Corporation's financial sustainability, while enhancing its ability to efficiently prevent injuries, and compensate and rehabilitate the injured.  

The Coalition views ACC as a uniquely brilliant social insurance model, a step above and beyond the private insurance models that are predominant internationally.  It is this character as a social insurer, prescribed in the founding Woodhouse Report, that underpins the Corporation's operations.

We were set up in 2009 after attacks of the scheme and signals from the government to privatise various ACC accounts and open these to competition. Since then, decisions taken by successive governments and executive boards have undermined the integrity of the scheme by limiting access to entitlements, prematurely moving injured claimants off the scheme, gutting their own capacity to make clinically-sound decisions, and failing to engage cooperatively with healthcare providers, ACC claimants, and other government entities.  

These changes ultimately represent a move away from the Corporation's social insurance roots - a move that damages both the Corporation's ability to fulfil its rehabilitative role, and damages claimants' trust in the system.  ACCFC's policies aim to realign the Corporation with its social insurance foundation, and strengthen the administrative and clinical efficiency of the scheme promoting prevention, streamlining financial management, and ensuring access to justice for all ACC claimants.  

Members

Chris Casey, Physiotherapist - Co-Chair

Merlyn Remiens, Medicolegal solicitor - Co-Chair

Susan StJohn, Economist

Gay Puketapu-Andrews, Counsellor

Karen Hodgson, Community Law Aotearoa reform coordinator

David Sparks, Community Law Caseworker

Virginia Burton-Konia, Ex-ACC Prevention Worker

Don Rennie, ACC's first director of research (retired)