More ACC directors to go

Stuff reports:

A cleanout of the ACC board will continue with two more directors to be released from the top of the troubled state insurer.

Chairman John Judge was effectively shown the door yesterday after political pressure over the Bronwyn Pullar case.

The Dominion Post has learnt that his deputy, John McCliskie, and another director, Rob Campbell, will also be replaced.

ACC Minister Judith Collins confirmed last night that the terms of five board members expired in March, and three would not be renewed.

“I think what you’ll see is a change in direction. The fact is, we have board members whose terms have expired and I’m taking the opportunity to bring in people who I believe will be able to help change the direction,” Ms Collins said.

It will be interesting to see who the new Directors are. They have a challenge ahead of them.

Ms Collins said she had seen a legal opinion prepared by Hugh Rennie, QC, for Mr Judge, which backed the decision to refer Ms Pullar to police over her refusal to return private details about thousands of other ACC claimants she was accidentally sent and blackmail claims.

“I don’t know what else they could do, actually, on the information that they had. They had a situation where the claimant wasn’t giving the information back to them at that stage…

It would be useful for ACC to release this legal opinion. Most importantly so it can be assessed whether it is based on the seemingly false report of the December meeting – or was written after that recording or transcript was made available.

Also if the intent was simply to get the documents returned, then surely the correct course of action would be to have informed the Privacy Commissioner of the privacy breach and ask her office to assist in getting the information deleted by Pullar. Of course they never informed the Privacy Commissioner of the breach.