Having been unhappy with only finding ways to deny current and new claims, ACC appeared to have used their considerable talents and resources to develop technology that even the most skilled and ingenious quantum physicists have been unable to achieve: the ability to travel through time and change the past!
Now anyone who has ever seen Back to the Future, perhaps the greatest scientific study ever of the dangers of time travel, knows that time travel is a tricky business, and often quite unpredictable. What confuses me the most though is how can ACC can afford the research and design costs of inventing time travel (which I can only assume must be considerable) and claim they can’t afford to pay for New Zealander’s treatment costs for, well just about anything really…
Sorry, what am I on about? Well check this out.
ACC have decided, with the help of some legal scullduggery (OK not really time travel, but sort of) that if you were unfortunate enough to have been sexually assaulted prior to 1974 your claim approval disappears in a puff of legal wizardy (kind of like Marty McFly nearly did when he was silly enough to mess around with time travel and get in the way of his parents meeting.)
How do they do this? Well ACC didn’t exist before 1974, so sorry previously we said yes, but now we’re changing how we interpret the law and saying no.
So if you were abused before 1974 and claimed between 1974 and 1992 (when the law was clarified to state that the date the claim was made was considered the “date of injury”) then your claim is now likely to be declined, retrospectively.
Why don’t you just go the full hog ACC and sue everyone for all the money you accidentally spent in the past and didn’t mean to?
ACC has also been messing around with the space-time continuum. In the same NZ Hearld article they were quoted as saying:
“The practice has been that counselling has been provided without any determination of cover. That is what happened in the past.”
Hang on a minute ACC, what? Which past? So now ACC was just handing out counseling willy-nilly, without people even making a claim? What were they doing, knocking on people’s doors and just awarding them counselling? I can tell you I have been filling out forms, quite lengthy ones too, describing injury effects and getting claims approved for some years now. But perhaps ACC is talking about a parallel universe where “Things are different.” That’ll be it. I told you this time travel thing was tricky.
So just one request then, ACC if you do have a time machine, can you go back in time and change the result of the 1995 Rugby World Cup? I’d really appreciate that. And I don’t care about tears in the space time continuum, I just don’t think I can stand history being re-written by Clint Eastwood “Invictus” style. Didn’t anyone tell Clint the All Blacks were poisoned?
