The ACC debacle has shown what happens when politics and business mix – group eat group. The bikers that are to protest the enormous increase in fees, are, quite justifiably aggrieved; so are the rest of us, but you’d never know it would ya? Aside from the usual New Zealand way of “lay down and take it good and hard from the government,” there is a more sinister back issue, the issue being setting people against each other; let me explain.

Being that the government owns the monopoly shambles known as ACC, it has no interest in providing a quality & affordable product, so if we don’t like it, tough.
This being so, it gives the minister in charge at the time near absolute power to raise prices, reduce services and have you and me foot the bill if the grey-ones of the bureaucracy mess things up to the tune of – on this occasion – $4 billion.
Now, in the interests of being seen to be fair, the minister will split the tab among us; but of course it’s never ‘fair’ is it?
There’s always a gain for one man at the expense of another when a product and its price is set by government decree rather than a market’s voluntary supply/demand principle.
Out of this we see the likes of the bikers getting themselves together to protest the unfairness of the new increased tax. The problem of course is that they are not opposed to government monopoly insurance cover; their grizzle is that they have to pay what they consider is unfair. If they’d not been the ones so hard hit and the tax increase had have been put on another group, then you’d not have heard a murmur from them.
I expect they’ll mount a wee protest, which will, as is normal with New Zealanders who work for living, fizzle away. If, in the unlikely event that they are successful to any degree, the government will simply shift the cost to another group, or across everyone.
In a better world, that is, the bikers were the beginning of a principle-based protest against state profligacy, incompetence and malfeasance, an “enough is enough” protest if you will, and we all got in behind them, and stuck with it; the government would enviably save itself by doing the right thing and whined-up this government disgrace.
The battle is not against what is unfair; it is not us against each other. The battle is one of principle - it is us against the nanny state!