While Christopher Luxon contemplates bed taxes for a second term (as reported by RNZ, February 2026), there's a number quietly climbing that tells you more about the state of New Zealand than any tourism policy: 1.1 million Kiwis received ACC payments in 2024 (Source: Stats NZ (LEED), taxable-income-sources). That's more than one in forty people in the country.

Go back to 2000, and that figure was 505,000. The population has grown, yes — but not by 120 percent. ACC numbers have. And while some of that is genuine growth in coverage, it's also the story of what happened to work in this country over the past quarter-century.

The acceleration started around 2015. For years, ACC payouts sat relatively flat, hovering around 550,000 to 600,000 recipients. Then something shifted. By 2019, it was 790,000. By 2020 — the COVID year — it jumped to 882,000. And it hasn't stopped. In just four years from 2020 to 2024, ACC recipient numbers grew by 227,000.

That's not a blip. That's a structural change in how many New Zealanders are relying on injury compensation just to get by. And here's the thing these are nominal figures, not adjusted for inflation. With prices up roughly 20-25 percent since 2019, some of this growth is simply ACC keeping pace with the cost of living. But not all of it.

What changed? Work got more precarious. The gig economy arrived. Construction boomed, then busted, then boomed again. Workplace safety enforcement weakened. And when people got hurt, there was ACC — not just for the broken arm on a building site, but for the back injury from lifting boxes in a warehouse with no safety officer, the mental strain from overwork, the cumulative toll of jobs that demand more and pay less.

ACC was designed as an injury compensation scheme. It's becoming something else: a way to survive when your body can't keep up with the demands of modern work. When KiwiSaver managers report spiking hardship applications (as reported by RNZ, February 2026), they're seeing the same story from a different angle. People are tapping every source they can — retirement savings, injury payouts — because wages alone don't cover it anymore.

By 2023, over a million New Zealanders were receiving ACC. By 2024, 1.1 million. That's more people than live in the entire South Island. It's more than the population of Christchurch, Dunedin, and Invercargill combined. And it's growing faster than the workforce itself.

This isn't a crisis yet. But it's a warning light flashing on the dashboard. When one in forty people needs injury compensation to make ends meet, you're not just looking at accident data. You're looking at an economy that's running too hard, breaking too many people, and leaving ACC to pick up the pieces.