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Mike's Minute: The wage subsidy has worked

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Thu, 7 May 2020, 9:39AM

Mike's Minute: The wage subsidy has worked

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Thu, 7 May 2020, 9:39AM

Coming to us thick and fast from the department of "isn't hindsight a great thing” is what would appear a growing obsession among the media to try and find people who they perceive should not be receiving the wage subsidy. Sir Roger Douglas who isn't in the media, but has joined the fray hasn’t helped. 

But the big questions are, where were you six weeks ago? And what's your point?

So far this week we've had examples of what one outlet called "liquor barons." Note the flourish of language, so as to remind you, they are not just owners of booze shops, they are barons. Yesterday we had examples of elite private schools. Not schools, but elite schools, schools most of us can only peer through the shrubbery at.

We've also had the law firms, the large retailers, and the foreigners. There was even a bit of a scrap over dairy companies given they are essential and therefore didn’t close down, thus leading to the question, given they were operating, how could they be losing 30 percent of their business? The advantage of those companies was some of them were owned by the Chinese. Oh, the Chinese, excellent we can add a bit of xenophobia in as well.

So we have a campaign of sorts, an accusatory finger, and a furrowed brow of tut tut.

Just to refresh us with some fact, the government's only criteria for the wage subsidy was 30 percent loss of business. Nothing more, nothing less. This, they argued, was so the money could flow as quickly as possible. And it did, over $10 billion dollars and counting.  There was no rider on whether you looked rich, whether someone might call you a fat cat, whether you were Asian, whether you were elite, or anything else.

So what is this campaign all about? No one is suggesting they've broken rules. An audit is underway and those who have broken rules are paying it back, and they signed at the time, a declaration that what they said was true, otherwise they were committing fraud.

So these stories aren't about dishonesty.

But six weeks in, what are we doing? Are they asking whether the government should've had tighter criteria? That's fine to ask, but why wasn’t that raised at the time?

And if they did, you know what would have happened? We would've seen people screaming blue murder that one company got money and another, which is the same, didn't. Is that the sort of mess we wanted?

The government made it simple. 30 percent loss of business the money is yours, and yours now. Is it perfect? No. They never claimed it to be, but it's worked.

Bitching now is futile, leads no where, and isn't even based on anything that’s actually been done wrong. It's just clearly a dislike of how certain groups look. How very, very superficial.     

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