ACC

ᔥ NZ Herald

After a good start on the Pullar fiasco Adam Bennett is now having a shocker:

In an emotional letter, she said ACC was “rotten to the core” and said she had numerous examples of ACC claimants’ rights being trampled on that would “seriously embarrass you”.

The letter was sent in October 2010 as part of Ms Pullar’s battle to get funding for treatment for her injuries. She also sent it to the Herald which was investigating the high number of injury claims turned down by ACC on the basis of a pre-existing degenerative condition.

“This is NOT a mistake as you are making out Nick,” Ms Pullar wrote. “You are just covering up corruption that is alive and well within ACC. ACC is rotten to the core and I have numerous examples that could seriously embarrass you, over and above this.”

She wrote that the “abusive processes” had to stop. “Good luck fighting it Nick in the media. You are going to need big PR help on this one. It is everywhere!”

The letter emerged yesterday as Labour continued to demand an independent inquiry into the scandal that brought down Dr Smith.

Actually the actually letter emerged on March 18, after I published it in correspondence Bronwyn Pullar had with me.

The reason I published it was to show that Bronwyn Pullar, despite now crying crocodile tears, had threatened Nick Smith and ACC before. I quess we know what she meant by this “could seriously embarrass you”.

One thing we know now, when Bronwyn Pullar says she will unleash a PR disaster on ACC and Nick Smith she is telling the truth about that at least.

After putting out a press release the other day saying she won’t be commenting, Bronwyn Pullar has spent today…commenting…to everyone.

Clearly her PR maven “friend” Michelle Boag has ditched her because rule number one in dealing with a massive PR disaster of your own making is stop digging.

So Pullar has been thrown under the bus by Boag as she seeks to shore up her lucrative Government contracts.

As a result Bronwyn Pullar is spouting on in the media, contradicting both Michelle Boag’s positions and also her own. She has issued another press release today.

This reads like a statement of facts for the Police investigation.

Right there she has cooked her goose. She has just said that she is holding onto the file to ensure that all the things in points 2-7 are done…that is extortion, indeed blackmail.

It beggars belief that she retains the the file sent in error to her. Any decent person would have destroyed it and given an undertaking as such. No reasonable, decent person retains the file, for months on end, only to produce it at a meeting…for what logical, reasonable and decent reason. There is only one possible reason to retaining it…to extract some value from the file.

ACC has said that Bronwyn Pullar, with her support person there with her threatened to make the file public if she didn’t get what she was demanding. Michelle Boag confirmed that in the original David Fisher article. She talks about only getting 1 year when they were expecting 2 years payments from the deal. That statement doesn’t wash with Bronwyn Pullar’s assertions now that she wasn’t threatening to release the file. And yet miraculously, completely unrelated to this meeting Brownyn Pullar gave the file and a story to Phil Kitchin.

It is interesting that Phil Kitchin says that he never saw all the file, and Bronwyn Pullar and Michelle Boag also say they redacted the file to “protect identities and information”. How then could Phil Kitchin contend that the file, or as he says “thousands of files” contained case information about the nature of the injuries sustained. Given the statements of all concerned this cannot possibly be true. It appears Phil Kitchin has been shopped a story, hasn’t researched it and unnecessarily scared thousands of complainant who had nothing more released than that which is contained in the phone book.

The DomPost also breathlessly reported that Bronwyn Pullar had her accident on the verge of a massive $22 million deal. We already know from Cactus Kate’s post on the issue that she was on the lash with Bronwyn Pullar the night before her accident.

Having been out even to a moderate lunch with Cactus, the claim that on the eve of a $22 million deal you would go to a bar with her ruins any credibility you ever had. It simply wouldn’t be possible, the two events are mutually exclusive.

Bronwyn Pullar’s backstory reads like that of a fantasist. Not unlike that of the Ministry of Defence charlatan, Stephen Wilce. There are many holes and inconsistencies and right now the media will be picking over the more fanciful claims. Especially the Zespri claims and the $22 million deal.

Now onto Michelle Boag. What a piece of work she is. Here she is saying she was at the meeting as a support person. Then today she has spent a great deal of time trying to tell media and other people that she barely knows Bronwyn Pullar. This in and of itself is farcical, but then Michelle Boag is the person who misled a Commission of Inquiry, so what is a little spin between friends when you are in trouble.

However let’s look at the role of the support person. Imagine for a moment that you have friend….that friend is angry, bitter, thinks they are hard done by in dealings with a un-caring government department. This friend acknowledges that they suffer dreadfully from their head injury, that they need assistance with cognitive functions. This friend then comes to you and says that she has a file, it is personal details of other claimants and has an idea that she could use that to get a better deal for herself.

At that point the support person had a decision to make. they could have counselled that friend and explained that to ask for consideration of any sort in return for destroying the data or returning it is extortion, or blackmail. A good friend acting in a support role would have done that. Instead what happened is the support person actually went along with the whole set up. They attended the meeting, and knowing Michelle Boag she most certainly would not have been sitting there giving Bronwyn Pullar shoulder rubs and pats on the hand as she cried about how hard done she was. No, she went along and supported her friend, her is acknowledged as having a head injury in what has been described by ACC as an attempted black mail. The support person is now in a worse position than the bewildered, unstable, angry claimant….they are actually more responsible now for the perilous legal position of the claimant. Some support huh?

Now that the proverbial is hitting the fan large, Michelle Boag is running around pretending that she only barely knows Bronwyn Pullar…except Bronwyn and Micheel were virtually joined at the hip at every National party function, and Brownyn always skited to everyone about her good friend Michelle who helped her get a settlement with an insurance company and then who introduced her to one of the trustees of her fund set up to invest that settlement.

A support person helps, not hinders a distressed person and when times are tough they don’t abandon ship. The actions of Bronwyn Pullar and Michelle Boag have taken out a cabinet minister. Who else have they put at risk?

Both of these women need to shut up and put down the shovels. Someone needs to have a coffee with Michelle Boag and tell her just quietly to emigrate…she will never work in public relations again.

Michelle Boag has never delivered a single good headline for the National, but plenty of bad ones. It is time all her apologists carded her. Nothing good comes from her involvement.

As expected the bus has run over Nick Smith as events spiraled out of Michelle Boag’s ability to control the spin.

He has now resigned all his portfolios. Nick Smith just told parliament that he has resigned from all his portfolios in a personal statement before the House. He tendered his resignation and the Prime Minister has accepted it.

Nick Smith conducted himself with humility and decorum, well done Nick. Unfortunately the Opposition will still heap vitriol onto him.

It is a pity that he has had to resign when he was making such progress in Local Government reform.

I guess this was what Michelle Boag meant when she said she didn’t want to embarrass Nick Smith? Well, congratulations Michelle, you just cost a man his job.

It is Michelle Boag and Bronwyn Pullar who deserve the blame for this whole issue, not Nick Smith, unfortunately it is Nick Smith who has paid the price.

Michael Laws sets of Andrew Little on a complete bender on Radio Live this morning. As Michael Laws says no wonder the people of New Plymouth set him packing:

If Nick Smith is thrown under the bus would he be eligible for ACC?

Who would be his support person?

Was all this what Michelle Boag meant when she said she didn’t want to embarrass Nick Smith?

I am on Larry Williams Huddle with David Farrar this afternoon at 1740.

Our topics are the ACC privacy breach and the loopy Australian proposal to tax online transactions.

You can listen online.

I’ll post the audio tomorrow.

The soap opera continues today. Michelle Boag and Bronwyn Pullar are spinning crocodile tears now and only really have Phil Kitchin to shop stories to. He is trying valiantly but it is more out of self preservation than anything else.

Any day soon other journalists are going to compare his breathless reporting against the facts and find that the much vaunted investigative journalist has hyped a story that was fed to him by two women on a mission.

Meanwhile in the NZ Herald we find out more about the lengthy communications relationship between Bronwyn Pullar and Nick Smith:

Then-ACC Minister Nick Smith wrote a reference for his friend and National Party insider Bronwyn Pullar as she was battling to secure entitlements from the corporation.

Dr Smith said last night it was sent “as a friend” in July last year to provide evidence of his knowledge of her state of health before her cycling accident in 2002.

He said the letter was written only so Ms Pullar could give it to her medical assessors, and this morning told Radio New Zealand he’d be quite happy to make it public.

Why on earth would Nick Smith do that? He is an MP from Nelson, she is a marketing person from Auckland. It seems strange that a minister would compromise his position in such a way.

Dr Smith said Ms Pullar had emailed him many times seeking his intervention in her case after he became minister in 2008 but he had declined saying it would be inappropriate.

This morning he told Radio New Zealand he would be happy for the letter to be made public.

Oh good grief…emails, letter, multiple times….anyone would think they used to be lovers with all that carry on.

One thing is for sure, as more information filters out, is that Bronwyn Pullar cannot in anyway be called a “whistle-blower”. She only became a “whistle-blower” once it became apparent that her and Boag’s standover tactics had failed. That just makes her look like a petulant blackmailer.

It looks like ACC follows the same rule si have with blackmailers…never pay them, otherwise they just keep coming back for more.

This is now likely to play out in parliament, especially if Winston has gotten a whiff of the players involved in this tawdry affair.

ᔥ National Business Review

Rob Hosking has a Q and A on the ACC saga:

What is Michelle Boag’s role in all this?

She’s a National Party chum of Bronwyn Pullar’s, apparently. Just a mate. Nothing political going on here at all. Perish the thought.

Really? Michelle Boag is involved, and there’s nothing political going on?

Apparently. Well, it could happen.

It’s a bit of a stretch though, isn’t it?

Well…. you ever seen the photo of the world’s largest rubber band? Something a bit like that.
The story is they are both old National Party mates but Boag says she hasn’t been ‘involved’ in the party for nearly a decade. She was president back then, but hasn’t held an official position since.

So there’s no National Party connection now?

She says, not. She was quoted as saying she’d had no involvement with National for a decade. Apparently she finished as party president and then severed all ties. Didn’t use those contacts she’d built up in that time at all.

You’re not serious?

No, I’m not serious. Apparently Boag is, though.

ᔥ NZ Herald

Bronwyn Pullar is a piece of work. She has issued a statement to the NZ Herald where she says the emails that I published aren’t a threat to the minister concerned:

With regard to the leaked emails, Ms Pullar said it could not be construed as a threat to go public, “as it was openly copied to five people in the media at the same time”.

Ms Pullar suffered a head injury in a 2002 bicycle accident that she said left her unable to work fulltime, and has been battling with ACC over its assessments of her ability to work.

Perhaps she was pissed when she wrote up that excuse, perhaps even as pissed as when she fell off her bike.

Anytime a correspondence with a government minister has media copied into the message openly that IS a threat. An implied threat at least, that if you don;t get any resolution to the issue that those very same media people will get more information…or perhaps they will start chasing the story.

he final point is that media are not the public…so she very definitely was threatening a minister some time before her fateful meeting on December 1.

ᔥ NZ Herald

Bronwyn Pullar issued a press release yesterday. Unfortunately, as is always the case it is the cover up that undoes people.

On Sunday Michelle Boag told David Fisher:

“In the meeting he said if we agree on this as a way forward, a condition would have to be that you return the information.”

…

The ACC report stated a letter had been sent to Pullar after the meeting that insisted the information be returned to ACC. According to Boag, there was more information in the letter – including the offer of a single year’s benefit.

Boag detailed her recollection last week in an email to Collins, which was obtained by the Herald on Sunday. The email said it was “verbally agreed” the information would be returned “on agreement on the way forward”.

Then in her press release Bronwyn Pullar says:

In a statement this morning, Ms Pullar denied ACC accusations that at a meeting in December she attempted to use the data to get a two-year guaranteed benefit from the corporation, saying she never used the words “payment”, “guaranteed” or “benefit”.

“I made no threats and no demands of ACC. I made no threats and no demands for return of the information. I did not threaten ACC that I would inform the media of the alleged privacy issue. I did not threaten ACC to get my own way in any way,” she said.

Really? Then how can Boag have said what she did? The two positions are impossible to exist together. One speaks of a deal and the other says there was not even a suggestion of a deal.

Why didn’t Bronwyn Pullar and Michelle Boag simply hand over the data? Why not in August? She still had it in December FFS? Why were they holding all that back? And why wouldn’t ACC have simply demanded the data back?

Neither of Bronwyn Pullar’s nor Michelle Boag’s explanations are believable. The worry is that both of these women are supposed to be PR and marketing professionals. Bronwyn Pullar and Michelle Boag are not speaking from same page. This is what I believe David Farrar would term a PR clusterfuck.

There are times when you should just STFU…this is one of them. But Michelle Boag and Bronwyn Pullar can’t keep their mouths shut….nor can they get their stories straight.

Remember these two have done this before to an insurance company, they suggested to me to do the same.

A reasonable person would have handed the data back or at the very least deleted it. You can’t tell me that ACC doesn’t have a disclaimer on the bottom of their emails, all major corporates and government departments these days have qualified privilege statements on the bottom of emails.

It is unconscionable that she retained the data between August and December, worse that she has shopped it to Phil Kitchin and god knows who else before.