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Hi Friend,

Like rust, government waste never sleeps, and your humble Taxpayers' Union has been in the media this week exposing it.

We also fact-check an ACT Party brag, and have bad news if you're an ASB Bank customer.

EXCLUSIVE: Film Commission's $145,000 French soirée  🎥🇫🇷🍾💸

The Taxpayers' Union is not very popular down at the Film Commission thanks to our tipping-off the media about their latest junket.

The Film Commission consider their entire raison d'être is hobnobbing with the glamorous – after all, it's hard work convincing foreign media bigwigs to pleeeease take our taxpayer money film subsidies.

Hot on the heels of last week's Climate Change junket to Bonn, our investigations team this week revealed that just four hungry little bureaucrats from the Film Commission managed to chew through more than $145,000 on a single trip!



The junket, sorry, work trip to the Cannes Film Market (held in conjunction with the Cannes Film Festival) was taxing. Kiwi taxpayers laid it on, hosting booze-laden champagne parties for Hollywood bigwigs visiting the French Riviera.

Making Sir Les Patterson blush 🍾🥴



The Film Commission's business model, as best we can tell, is to fly around the world with an unlimited expense account, trying to soak producers in enough liquor and caviar that they agree to produce a film in New Zealand. 

And then if and when they do, New Zealanders get stuck with the bill for millions of dollars in film subsidies (with screen production grants forecast to cost us $86 million this year alone).

Arts Minister not impressed 🤨

Down at Parliament, all hell broke loose (we hear some MPs were livid they weren't invited!).

Media Minister Paul Goldsmith was more restrained, issuing a classic understated "not impressed" comment. He told the NZ Herald that the spending "does seem excessive" with his spin doctors saying "he'll have to get the details". <[link removed]>

<[link removed]>

You didn't hear it from us, but we are reliably informed that the Beehive's political staff are seriously annoyed that the Film Commission didn't give their Minister a heads-up about the spending, or that the information had been released to the Taxpayers' Union.

We're here to help. 💁

ACT's Todd Stephenson was more to the point: <[link removed]>

"The new Government had repeatedly emphasised the need for spending restraint, but the Film Commission – hardly a core government agency – doubled down on discretionary spending. In a single two-week blowout, four staff spent more than $24,000 on food and drink including fine French dining and dozens of bottles of wine and craft beer. In addition, $21,704 was spent on travel, $24,329 on accommodation, and $74,795 on ‘operational’ costs – including office rental and utilities."

“Browsing the receipts <[link removed]>, obtained by the Taxpayers’ Union, is enough to make you sick."

Indeed.

Left-wing, taxpayer funded, arts listicle website The Spin-off  having a sook 🤭

You know you're on the right track when the luvvies down at the taxpayer funded millennial website The Spinoff are upset. <[link removed]>

Proving that they have a sense a humour (or are drunk on their own taxpayer funding?) they literally compared third rate bureaucrats plying film producers with booze to – wait for it – Prime Ministerial Trade Delegations. 😂

Jesus wept.

If you agree it's time to roll credits on the Film Commission click here to sign the petition. ✍️ <[link removed]>

CTRL+ALT+WOKE? Language Commission's blows $600k on custom te reo keyboards ⌨️⭐

Thanks to an insider tip-off at the Māori Language Commission, we've gone public revealing that at least $600,000 has been spent to develop customised Māori language keyboards <[link removed]>.

The $600k was given straight to PB Tech to develop the keyboards. But here's the thing, PB Tech had been working on an identical project well before the Language Commission became involved (or offered a juicy cheque)!

This is a classic case of a government agency trying to jump aboard a private company's project to bask in the glory. PB Tech had already spotted a gap in the market.

PB Tech reckon there's potential big business in satisfying the bureaucrats who (like the Solicitor General) need Māori macrons on their keyboards to 'de-colonise' their computers. 

Without paying a cent, your humble Taxpayers' Union have managed to obtain a sneak peak at the latest keyboards the public service are rolling out...



Oh, and we say "at least" $600k because we understand (but have not yet nailed down) that PB Tech was just one of many companies the Māori Language Commission have been writing cheques to.

Ka pai 👏

We have to talk about Wellington City Council. Again. 🔥🚨🥱



While the Wellington City Council continues to drive itself off a cliff – for the rest of New Zealand, this soap opera needs to also come to an end.

The short point is the Council has no money and they can't borrow more. Thanks to a laundry list of unaffordable boondoggles by successive Mayors, Wellington ratepayers are already in line for a near tripping of rates over the next decade.

And with the u-turn on selling off the Council's stake in Wellington Airport, the capital's 'fiscal strategy' is about as steady as the Mayor is [allegedly] inspecting Courtenay Place's nightlife.

Writing in the NZ Herald, Ryan Bridge picked up on our sobering calculation that every household in Wellington is already paying $800 a year in interest on the Council's existing debt. <[link removed]>

Triple that debt, watch the credit rating downgrade, and it's not hard to see how this soap opera ends...

Unelected Commissioner? Careful what you wish for... 👀 🏴‍☠️

As James said in The Post, while it's tempting to call on the Government to replace the Mayor and Council with commissioners, we saw in Tauranga, it "isn't some magic solution": <[link removed]>

"When commissioners stepped into Tauranga, the city carried on sliding into ruin."

"There's a ready-made solution for getting rid of incompetent representatives: voting. The real problem is voters are only allowed a voice once every three years."

Clearly Wellington needs a change in leadership. We say a better mode for Government intervention would be to establish provisions for 'recall elections' as is common in local government overseas.

Back in 2020, we published a joint Proposal Paper calling for the introduction of recall elections across local government (read it here). <[link removed]>

Even in Wellington's Green Party-dominated suburbs, confidence in Green Party Mayor Tory Whanau is gone. So give the voters the tools to hit the eject button. Problem solved.

The Kāinga Ora way: Pay for a mansion, get a dunga 🏚️🧱

Kāinga Ora (formally known as Housing New Zealand) has been tangled in scandal yet again this week.

They were slammed for spending over $1.2 million building each apartment in its Meadowbank complex. Worse still, add in the cost of the land and it's $1.7 million!



It's easy to put this down to the last Government's build it at any cost philosophy, but serious questions still need to be asked about what led Kāinga Ora to rack up $12 billion in debt (that's about six grand in extra government debt per New Zealand household).

On Newstalk ZB on Monday, our Local Government guru, Sam Warren, called for a Select Committee inquiry into the Kāinga Ora fiasco. An inquiry with the power to summon witnesses and demand answers is needed so that lessons can be learned.

We've also written to the Social Services Select Committee setting out the reasons they should take a good look. You can read that here. <[link removed]>

FACT CHECK I: Have ACT actually cut Labour's bureaucrat bonanza? 😲

Last week, Taxpayer Update included a missive about how little the current Government has done to reverse the explosion in bureaucracy numbers. We said:

Despite all the crowing about "brutal" and "unfair" public service cuts in Wellington, we now know that there were still more bureaucrats in July 2024 than there were 12 months earlier!

There's a hell of a long way to go to sling out the extra 18,000 taken on under the last Government(see Connor's excellent visualisation that got us into trouble with Parliament's Speaker here). <[link removed]>

And while the [taxpayer funded]spin doctors in Nicola Willis' Beehive office are keen to promote the 13 percent ($274 million) reduction in  <[link removed]>spending on contractors and consultants <[link removed]>, the fact is the Government has cut less well paid (see below) pen pushers than Chris Hipkins hired in his last few months in office! Even the spin doctors couldn't omit the key figure: the Government has 421 moreemployees as at 30 June 2024 than 12 months earlier.

At about the same time, those cheeky spin doctors working in the ACT Party issued their own crowing newsletter and social media posts about how well they're doing. ACT included this graphic:

<[link removed]'s_infographic.jpg?1729218519>

To our astonishment, some Taxpayers' Union supporters are also signed up to ACT's newsletter. A couple emailed in to ask who had it right. 

Fortunately the Disinformation Project can down tools <[link removed]>: It turns out ACT aren't wrong per se in their graphic, but eagle eyed readers will see that ACT's graphic is a little selective in only going back to June 2022. And there's that convenient little squiggle in the y-axis. 🤨

Always here to provide you with full context, we fixed it. 💁



ACT are right to say that some progress has been made, but as shown by the latest batch of figures released by the Public Service Commission, there were still more public servants as at June this year than twelve months earlier.

Labour hired an extra 18,000 bureaucrats in their time in office. ACT and the other coalition partners in the current Government need to do more than scratch the surface.

Progress is good. 'Mission accomplished' would be better.

FACT CHECK II: 'Out-of-touch w banker of the week' 🏦💭



Not to be outdone by the 'you should pay a capital gains tax' ANZ CEO <[link removed]>, New Zealand's top paid female exec <NZ’s%20top%20paid%20female%20executive> – ASB Bank Chief Executive Vittoria Shortt – has joined the bandwagon to argue that you should pay more in tax!

“I think New Zealand has to really lean into taxes,” Shortt told Stuff's The Post. 

Apparently, we need to tax Kiwis harder to "invest more in the infrastructure". 

If Ms Shortt wants to pay more tax, then she can go right ahead and make a donation to the Government (the details on how to do that are here) <[link removed]>.

But Shortt should hit the books before she pontificates about infrastructure spending. The ASB Bank boss couldn't be more wrong in claiming New Zealand's infrastructure deficit necessitates ever higher taxes.

Our media response explains: <[link removed]'%20Union%20is%20calling,to%20be%20taxed%20even%20more.>

“The Infrastructure Commission reports that despite New Zealand spending a higher percentage of GDP on public infrastructure than Australia and the OECD median, we rank near the bottom of high-income countries for infrastructure efficiency.”

“Contrary to what the banker says, it’s not that we’re under-taxed or are under spending, rather it’s a productivity problem.”

“Since 2017 tax revenue to the Government increased by 59%. Inflation over the same period was just 27%. The Government does not have a revenue problem – it already collects more than enough. The Government has a spending problem and has no metrics that it can use to evaluate the efficiency of the spending and whether it’s delivering value for money.”

“If Shortt is serious, we invite her to donate some of her reported $5million annual salary to the Government. Or did she only mean for her ASB customers to pay more?”

[continue reading <[link removed]'%20Union%20is%20calling,to%20be%20taxed%20even%20more.>]



That's it for this week Friend, have a great weekend. 😊


Jordan Williams
Executive Director
New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union

<[link removed]>

In the Media:


StuffNational takes big hit in latest political poll <[link removed]>

RNZNational takes hit in new TPU-Curia poll <[link removed]>

Newstalk ZB Watch: PM speaks to media in Laos after Modi meeting <[link removed]>

The PostNational and Christopher Luxon lose support in latest poll <[link removed]>

NZ HeraldNational and PM Christopher Luxon suffer drop in Taxpayers’ Union-Curia poll <[link removed]>

NZ HeraldListener: Duncan Garner: Amid job losses, are climate talks a taxpayer-funded outing? <[link removed]>

Waikato TimesNational is piling up a mountain of pain on its health policy <[link removed]>

InterestHealthcare funding issues may be turning voters away from the governing coalition and giving Chris Hipkins a second chance at occupying the Beehive <[link removed]>

Otago Daily TimesStaying right where they are <[link removed]>

Newstalk ZB Newstalk Bulletin Auckland/Wellington 3pm – Item 4 <[link removed]>- Kainga Ora Select Committee

Newstalk ZB Afternoon Edition: 14 October 2024 – Kainga Ora Select Committee <[link removed]>

The PressMajor parties dip in latest political poll but coalition govt support remains <[link removed]>

Newstalk ZB Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive 14 October <[link removed]> [2:12] and [42:55]

The Post‘Schemozzle’: Govt seeks advice on Wellington Council intervention <[link removed]>

ACTFilm Commission puts itself on a platter for spending cuts <[link removed]>

NZ HeraldNZ Film Commission slammed for ‘six figure junket’ to Cannes <[link removed]>

Newstalk ZB The Huddle: Can Wellington City Council avoid an intervention? <[link removed]>

Hawkes Bay Today ‘Junket’ to Cannes slammed [print only]

NZ HeraldDo Whanau and her council need govt training wheels? <[link removed]>

The Working GroupTVNZ poll, and the Jonesie Awards for Government Waste <[link removed]>

The PlatformTaxpayers’ Union’s Sam Warren: NZME still refusing to run advocacy ads <[link removed]>

RNZData anonymisation tool ‘difficult’ to reverse - IRD <[link removed]>

The SpinoffBreaking news: Things cost money <[link removed]>


New Zealand Taxpayers' Union Inc. · 117 Lambton Quay, Level 4, Wellington 6011, New Zealand
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