Green guns blazing
Peacenik Metiria Turei takes careful aim at her foot and, happily, misses.
As startling political confessions go, Metiria Turei’s of benefit fraud in a past life sits somewhere between Theresa May’s youthful prancing through fields of wheat and the thing David Cameron did with a pig’s head at university.
As a political tactic, it was breathtaking – with the equally audacious ballast of a new Green policy that no beneficiary need account to anyone for how they spend their time and their (greatly increased) state allowance. Turei’s admission that as a solo mother she once cheated by earning money from undisclosed flatmates is unlikely to have loosened any committed Green voters or deterred many Green-leaners. There has been a strong condemnatory response, but it’s doubtful many of the appalled would have tended Green anyway.
But the depth-charge in this disclosure is that it has prompted an I am Spartacus response – and more resonantly, its opposite: a chorus demanding confessions and contritions from the Government benches. While social media thrummed with people declaring their own past benefit cheating in righteous # JeSuis-Charlie solidarity with Turei, there was a concurrent roll-call of suggested equivalences.
Wasn’t Bill English’s Dipton double-dipping on ministerial housing expenses a few years ago a benefit fraud too? Isn’t Todd Barclay an idle state beneficiary? He hasn’t returned to Parliament since his spot of bother last month. And how does the $6 million for gifting a Saudi potentate a free sheep farm in his own country compare with solo mums scoring a few extra dollars to feed their children?
Peaceniks they may be, but this is the most aggressive of gunboat diplomacy by the Greens. They’re saying to the other parties: here’s our dirty laundry – but beware what you make of it because we just might know where you’ve stashed some of yours.
Parties generally have lockers full of scandal-mongery material on their rivals – and friends, just to be on the safe side. But dark hints of deploying it are seldom acted on for the wellrespected nuclear-deterrent principle of mutually assured destruction.
Turei’s disclosure is a probably unique instance where there’s political capital in outing oneself, with the bonus of watching rivals stand by unable to capitalise on it out of selfprotective fear.
Beyond the political flurry, Turei’s experience has generated useful public discussion about how beneficiaries are treated by Winz officials, with some truly disgraceful accounts suggesting a culture problem reminiscent of the one that led to London’s Grenfell fire. When some people at all levels of a social agency are found to be not just unempathetic but in many cases neglectful to the point of not even reading case notes before declining or ignoring people’s requests for help, there’s perilous rot in the system.
FREE CONDOMS HERE
Debate was hectically sidetracked by Act’s new deputy, Beth Houlbrooke, saying people who can’t afford children without a state subsidy should not reproduce – piquancy added by leader David Seymour’s “coincidental!” release of Act-branded condoms. Spartacising raged afresh as the country’s unplanned citizens proudly outed themselves on social media. Since, by official accounts, not even Jesus Christ’s low-income parents actually planned to have Him, this was a debate of moral, ethical and metaphysical futility that eventually petered out in favour of further Labour and Green policies to boost the means of not just beneficiaries but also low- and middle-income households, via taxes and subsidies.
But these were unexpectedly topped by TOP (the Opportunities Party), which wants to give nearly everybody free money just for being born, accidentally or on purpose. To kick-start
Turei’s disclosure is probably a unique instance where there’s political capital in outing oneself.
leader Gareth Morgan’s pet universal benefit policy, retirees, parents of very young children and people aged 18-23 would get a no-questions-asked, income-clawback-proofed $200 a week.
Go to university, go to the TAB, go on the Iditarod, it’s all the same to TOP, which trusts that, given this opportunity, no one will starve.
The party seems a puzzling hybrid of the far left’s ubiquitous state idyll and Act’s “get the state out of people’s lives” fetish. TOP hasn’t fully developed its Unconditional Basic Income to include older, childless working-aged citizens. But this is just week one of the official campaign and already giant pork barrels are rolling down the streets endangering traffic, so give it time.
The hoariest of rollers is Winston Peters’ pledge for a referendum to reduce Parliament from 120 to 100 seats. This is vintage Winston, which makes it retro on a terrifying scale, given that NZ First’s leader is himself pretty much the definition of vintage, even in his resting state. Only a ninja-grade contrarian would contemplate reducing representative numbers at a time of fast-growing population.
It’s a fill-your-boots pitch to those who reflexively hate politicians. Their yes-vote wrath would mean fewer politicians but not less politics – just the same amount concentrated among smaller caucuses, which would inevitably be less diverse, and with power concentrated in fewer hands.
LOSE-LOSE SITUATION
To get to that lower number, there would have to be a lengthy, shouty and – alas, Winston – expensive bureaucratic and consultative process to redraw electoral boundaries for 16.6% fewer seats. During that inter- regnum, MPs’ attention would be diverted to their own survival and away from matters of state. Electoral boundary effects are Lotto-random, so we would inevitably lose some valuable MPs, and some useless ones would survive with larger empires.
Then there’s the reverse economy of scale. There might be fewer politicians, but the electorate ones would have a lot more constituents and accordingly less time to attend to them.
Provincial constituencies – the sector NZ First purports to root for above all other parties – would become enormous, some unfeasibly so. What we might save by having fewer MPs we would spend on the remaining lot’s larger fuel bills.
They’d also need more electorate and office support staff, so there go more of the savings. Provincial people would inevitably get less-attentive service from their MPs because of the logistics. And there would be fewer provincial MPs in Parliament to pursue their concerns.
The result would be inimical both to NZ First policy and Winston’s rhetoric. But perversity has always been part of his brand.
Think how much money could be raised selling tickets to his submissions to the boundaries commission over the carve-up of his Northland electorate.
It’s just week one of the campaign and already giant pork barrels are rolling down the streets.