Taking the piss

National is busy cutting social housing, which has resulted in increased scrutiny of politicians' housing entitlements. First, there's Social Development Minister Louise Upston, who is being paid $1000 a week to live in her own house while cutting payments to everyone else. She's "comfortable" with that, and of course she is - because she's being paid $1000 a week when she doesn't even have a mortgage! But the worst case so far is NZ First's Andy Foster. Foster is a former mayor of Wellington, and he's lived there for over twenty years. But now, for entitlement purposes, he's suddenly contriving to "live" somewhere else, so he can trouser more money from the rest of us:

Despite owning a home in Wellington for 26 years, Foster is claiming a $36,400 per year taxpayer-funded accommodation subsidy intended for non-Wellington MPs. Foster’s parliamentary expense reports show he claimed $22,700 in 2025, starting with $3,100 in the April-to-June quarter, followed by the maximum possible amount of $9,800 in every quarter since. He confirmed to The Spinoff that he continues to claim the allowance.

MPs are eligible for the accommodation subsidy if they live “outside the Wellington commuting area”. In 2025, Foster purchased a second home in Wairarapa, where he intends to run as a candidate in the 2026 election. He now lists the Wairarapa property as his “family home”. Foster still owns his Karori home and stays there during parliament sitting blocks but told The Spinoff it was “no longer my primary place of residence”.

At this stage, I must point out that this is not theft and it is not fraud, because - as the politicians love to say - it's "all within the rules" (which the politicians wrote to suit themselves). I must also point out that paying MPs to live in Wellington so they can do the job properly is good. We don't want only rich people or people who live in Wellington to be able to be MPs. But in this case we're not paying Foster to live in Wellington. Instead, we're paying him to not live there, so he can campaign for election elsewhere. And that's just taking the piss. Its not necessary for him to do his job, and arguably is an unlawful use of parliamentary funds for a political purpose (subsidising his election campaign).

MPs rorting their expenses like this delegitimises parliament and is one of the reasons they regularly feature below real estate agents on public trust surveys. Fortunately there are solutions. They clearly can't be trusted to manage their own accommodation arrangements ethically, so its time Parliamentary Services bought an apartment block to house them. And if this results in them being less comfortable than they are at present, they will only have themselves to blame.

(And while we're at it, we should do the same for ministerial housing, and electorate offices. If these thieves can't help themselves from double-dipping, then the decision needs to be taken completely out of their hands, and suitable workplaces and accommodation provided for them).

Priorities

Back in 2018 the then-Labour government legislated formal targets to reduce child poverty with the Child Poverty Reduction Act - and took actual steps to achieve them, with a $5.5 billion families package to boost incomes and a school lunches scheme to ensure kids didn't go hungry. While a lot of work needed to be done, it made a good start. And then National came along and gutted the targets, replacing them with more "achievable" ones. Why? Because they didn't want to spend the money required to met them:

Documents showed year-on-year progress was not on track and meeting the targets "would require investment in the region of $3 billion per year".

Officials presented Upston with two alternative targets for 2028 that they believed could be achieved.

However, Upston told RNZ the government "disagreed with the advice and this approach, as it would further entrench long-term welfare dependency and the number of children growing up in benefit-dependent homes".

Instead, the government spent $3 billion on landlord tax cuts, effectively deciding to give to the greedy, not to the needy (they also scrapped the survey tracking child poverty, to prevent any evidence of failure). Its a stark illustration of National's priorities, and who they favour in society.

As for child poverty, Upston thinks it will be solved by "growing the economy, improving health and education outcomes, and getting more households into work... rather than welfare payments and tax credit changes". In other words, the usual capitalist magical thinking that if you make rich people richer while shitting harder on the poor and gutting health and education, everything will magically get better. National applied such cruel "solutions" in both of their previous times in government, in 1991 and 2012, and their efforts are why we have a child poverty problem in the first place. Do they seriously expect us to believe it'll be third time lucky? Or are they just spewing bullshit to cover for the fact that they do not give a shit about anyone other than the ultra-rich?

National's linguistic engineering

The National government came into office on a culture-war platform of eradicating te reo from public life. There are the obvious measures, like spending millions changing the names of government agencies, and requiring government agencies to primarily use English. But its not just government agencies. An OIA response I received today showed Ministers are also doing their bit, by eradicating the use of te reo from their official correspondence:

I have noted to officials in a meeting on 11 December 2023 that Ministerial correspondence should either be all in Te Reo Maori or English, not mixed language [sic]. This also applies to the formatting of my letter responses to requestors.

Which invites the question: which English? Or rather, whose English? Because New Zealand English (as opposed to American, British, or pre-Treaty Victorian English) has always included a large number of te reo words, including everyday greetings of the sort that the Minister is targeting with this policy. Modern New Zealand English has adopted (or stolen) more, as more people have grown more comfortable with te reo - but it has always been there. Issuing an injunction against "mixed language" simply denies who we are as a people and a country. But then, that's exactly what this policy is about, isn't it?