Boy, I tell you what this government is outstanding when it comes to job creation. No-one in modern history has created more work in the area of committee review.

Hundreds are now employed "looking into things”. And the latest is the record breaking 11 member panel looking into the state of welfare.  

11 members, unionists , advocates  and academics. They're all there and they're all going to look into ways to ensure people have "an adequate income and standard of living ,are treated with respect, can live with dignity, and are able to participate meaningfully in the community."

And when they’ve found all that out and put it into their report we will either be dead of old age or be able to join hands and sing Kumbaya.

Nothing good ever came of 11 people sitting around looking at anything. Can you imagine the wastage in time energy and effort, as they battle their way through just the sheer weight, of each and every member and their various ideas experiences thoughts and inputs?

Committees by their very nature water things down. By the time you start with a good clean clear simple idea and put a committee onto it, it emerges thrashed, reworked, tipped upside down and virtually unrecognisable.

And in reality this is all a smoke screen for a government that’s big on the concept of consultation and not so much on the reality.  

Ask Chris Hipkins and his gargantuan probe into education. We can't have enough people putting ideas forward, except the ones on charter schools. He's not interested in those, despite the fact he said he was.

But it provides them with the oft used cliché, "after much consultation with the community."

What this welfare committee is really all about is taking restrictions off it, making it easier to get, giving more of it out.

It's an ideology, and you can trace it back to the likes of Metiria Turei, the former Green Party co-leader who lied about her benefits.   

Who's utopian view of welfare involved her being allowed to steal from the system if the circumstances in your own mind thought it was acceptable?  

Welfare, and the word itself is open to tremendous interpretation, has become an industry in this country as we have hooked more and more people into it.  

The dole is welfare, but what about Working for Families?

The sickness benefit has been used to hide unemployment by simply shifting people into a different form of welfare.  

If you include everyone who receives any form of government assistance based on nothing more than their income or circumstances it captures millions of us. And that is what they really should be looking at.  

Looking at how out of control it is, how many are on it for life, how much it's been abused by the political system to ensnare votes and how the idea of it being a safety net as opposed to a lifestyle hammock have been blown out of the water.  

What about how we've raised now several generations of state dependants who know nothing else but welfare assistance?

Will the 11 member panel address any of that?

Of course not. Look at the names they’ve picked, look at the direction they’ve given them. It’s a forgone conclusion and the conclusion leads us nowhere productive.