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The Soap Box: Seeing blue and spending large

Author
Barry Soper,
Publish Date
Thu, 14 May 2015, 3:09PM
(Photo: Newsmax/NZ Herald)
(Photo: Newsmax/NZ Herald)

The Soap Box: Seeing blue and spending large

Author
Barry Soper,
Publish Date
Thu, 14 May 2015, 3:09PM

Over the years you've seen a lot of your hard-earned dosh spent on silly things. Courses for hip-hop dancing and paper folding, for example.

And, of course, more recently the trip to Europe for Parliament's Speaker and half a dozen of his colleagues would be right up there, along with this week's sojourn to the Cook Islands for a group of MPs, including Luigi Peters, who are known for their ability to trip the light fantastic.

Well they've got to have something to occupy themselves when Parliament's not sitting.

But it's spending of another sort, on conditioning those who're paid to serve their political masters, that's a little baffling. It concerns those who're at the pit face of the welfare system, the pen pushers from the Social Development Ministry.

They've hired a consultancy firm called Human Synergistics on a programme they're calling Building Blue. They equate the colour with behaviour that identifies with achievement, 'self-actualisation', being 'affiliative', 'humanistic' and encouraging which generally means forming a bond with each other and once they've achieved that, to spread a bit of the blue to the beneficiaries.

It seems the bureaucrats have been identifying more with red and green styles which is seen as encouraging avoidance, dependence, being oppositional, competitive and perfectionist.

The colours and their meaning have nothing to do with politics, we're assured, and it would seem that should appease us considering as taxpayers, turning the beneficiary bureaucrats blue, last year cost us more than $320,000 and this year the bill will nudge quarter of a million.

But it would seem there's ongoing work for the synergists with the person in charge of the project at the Ministry, a woman with a rather unfortunate name considering the amount of money being spent on the project, tells us it'll be ongoing for some time yet. Carolyn Risk says they'll be reassessing the culture every two years until 2021, presumably until the bureaucrats are blue in the face.

Surely though the exposure of such a wanton expenditure by the bureaucratic bosses should see more than a few red faces at the Ministry as their political masters struggle to make a surplus!

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