Getting Away With Nothing

I see that Tracey Watkins at the Dominion Post is still rabbiting on about the small increase in electorate funding for Maori and other large-area electorates. She asks “Why should Nats get away with what Labour couldn’t?” I can’t really answer her question, because I have no real idea with what she thinks National is getting away. 

This nearly made it to my “spam journalism” series (again!). But I noticed that this is labelled as an opinion piece, so I took pity. If I shoved opinion pieces into the spam category, I would have to put Matt MacCarten there every single week.  

I must say that the Dom Post is getting lots of mileage from this nothing story. This is Ms. Watkins’ second article on the subject and Vernon Small had a short piece mostly on Jim Anderton’s outraged spluttering. Sadly, Mr. Small did not take the opportunity to point out the irony of Mr. Anderton – whose Wigram electorate  is only 40 km² - complaining about extra funding going to electorates of several thousand km². No sense of satire, these journalists.

Anyway, back to Ms. Watkins’ opinion piece. Perhaps the nicest thing I can say about it is that the conspiracy element has now been removed. Ms. Watkins does not attempt to suggest that this is all some sort of underhand deal cooked up between the Maori Party and the National Party. However, she is still of the opinion this is some sort of pork.

“A generous interpretation would be to hail the sudden largesse toward MPs as a useful job-creation scheme, since the money is to pay for extra staff in their electorates. But are we belt-tightening or aren’t we?

“There may never be a “right” time to throw an extra dollop of cash the way of MPs but there are arguably better times to do so than in the current environment.”

The implication being, of course, that this is entirely unnecessary expenditure, or pork barrel expenditure that can be put off until better times. Ms. Watkins apparently thinks it is fine that people living in large electorates have substantially less access to their MPs than those in small electorates. It has also escaped her notice that this funding works out to $40,000 per electorate, barely enough to fund an extra staff member. Hardly largesse or pork barreling. This is money being spent on grassroots government, rather than policy think-tanks. This is money spent on public access to government rather than ministerial Limos. This is also money that should have been spent by the last labour government when they received the Goulter report. That they ignored this part of the report completely says something about their dysfunctional relationship with the Maori party.

Which brings me to Ms. Watkins’ other objection, that not all the recommendations in the report have been followed, so why this one? Firstly, this is a question that could be asked more pertinently of the last government who picked out the “nice” bits and threw the rest away. Secondly, it is obvious that this is a relatively easy recommendation to follow, as opposed to an independent advisory board (for example) which would require a great deal of cross party negotiation and would be immensely distracting at the moment. That this measure was also clearly used as a bargaining chip in the negotiations between Maori and National is simply politics, and should not detract from the otherwise sensible nature of the idea.

I’m not sure why I have spent so much time on Ms. Watkins’ fluffy opinion piece here. Perhaps it is a slow news day. Or perhaps I just enjoy shooting fish in a (pork) barrel…

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