Handouts buying Labour little joy

The Government has discovered throwing money at a problem does not make it go away — and in fact it can create more of them — for itself. Its much-vaunted cost-of-living payment has now been criticised by some because people who are not getting the payment should be — beneficiaries and superannuitants.

And it has been criticised because people who should not be getting the payment are getting it — expats and migrants who have returned to their homelands.

Then came the revelation that not as many people were getting it as were supposed to be getting it, even including those who were not supposed to be getting it.

“We’re supporting 2.1 million people,” the Labour social media posts boasted. It then transpired the first round of payments only went to 1.3m people.

That might increase once various things happened with tax databases and other computations, but would it hit the 2.1m mark? Who can say?

Inland Revenue couldn’t say. It had delivered the 2.1m estimate with a caveat that it had no idea how accurate the estimate was.

Nor could Inland Revenue estimate how many people were getting it who were ineligible for it, despite Revenue Minister David Parker’s estimate that it was about 1 per cent.

It remains unclear whether that was 1 per cent of 2.1m or of 1.3m.

Nonetheless, Labour won’t be rushing to change its advertising to the more accurate, “We might one day be supporting 2.1 million people but we can’t be sure”.

The Government’s defence was it was still more people than would be getting it if they had been asked to apply for it. Instead, people were being asked to pay it back out of the good of their own hearts.

Inland Revenue are now simultaneously engaged in hunting down more people to give money to, and processing money being paid back.

By this stage, it was like watching octopuses playing Twister.

Parker came in to clear it all up, due to the international absences of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson.

He dealt with it by using his most soporific tone and offering up lengthy dry, complicated explanations of how tax datasets work.

By the time he was done, people still didn’t know the answers but had at least had a refreshing nap.