ZB ZB
Live now
Start time
Playing for
End time
Listen live
Listen to NAME OF STATION
Up next
Listen live on
ZB

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Govt is wasting millions on the wealthy and weird

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Wed, 2 Sep 2020, 9:11PM

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Govt is wasting millions on the wealthy and weird

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Wed, 2 Sep 2020, 9:11PM

I’m starting to get quite worried about the quality of the spending that we’re seeing at the moment. 

This Green School is just the latest example of it, but boy have we seen a lot of stuff dressed up Covid spending that in any other situation would surely not see the light of day.

For example, this school is not even registered. The due diligence on it was the minister going on the website and taking a look at the project 

How is that being careful with taxpayer money? 

What about the $72.5 million New Zealand first spent on the horse racing industry? Or the $10 million for AJ Hackett because the Government saw the bungee company as a strategic asset? Or the billion dollars for the Greens’ make-work tree planting scheme?

What about the fact that they’re still not properly checking if the businesses taking the wage subsidy actually qualify for it? 

Now I was find this – what they call a ‘trust model - right at the start when we were panicking and trying to save businesses, but six months on?  Can we really still be operating a system where we’re giving people huge amounts of money without being sure they actually quality? 

Seems a bit reckless, doesn’t it? 

I’m hearing a lot of stories coming out of the wider government and Covid response effort that suggests these guys are just shovelling money out the door as fast as they can so that they can be seen to be supporting business. 

But they are not being selective in their spending. They aren’t doing the necessary checks on it. And actually, they can’t find enough projects to suck up all the cash they’re trying to spend. 

In a way we’re all kind of to blame for this. Because we let them get away with it for three years with the Provincial Growth Fund when we all knew that was just, in my opinion, vote buying. And the spending didn’t always stack up. 

But at the same time, we have DHBs – especially the Canterbury DHB right now – crying out for money. We have schools in the last week telling us how desperate they are for money.

So there are worthy projects out there that we could spend taxpayer dollars on. Instead, we’re shovelling it as fast as we can into the pockets of the wealthy and the weird.

I think in time to come, we will look back at these billions of dollars of Covid spending and judge this Government very harshly for how wasteful it’s being.

Take your Radio, Podcasts and Music with you