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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".
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:
"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, 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.
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. ✍️
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.
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.
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":
"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).
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.
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).
And while the [taxpayer
funded] spin doctors in Nicola Willis' Beehive office are keen
to promote the 13 percent ($274 million) reduction in spending on contractors and consultants, 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 more employees 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:
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: 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, New Zealand's top paid female
exec – 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).
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:
“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]
That's it for this week Friend, have a great weekend. 😊
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Jordan
Williams
Executive Director
New Zealand Taxpayers’
Union
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