Taxpayer Update: ACC spending on Māori prayer 🙏🤨 | Taxpayer-funded holidays ✈️🎥 | Record high growth in bureaucrats' wages 🚀💸

August 17, 2024 Connor Molloy

With the Reserve Bank cutting interest rates this week, there's no more important time for the Government to cut wasteful spending to ensure Adrian Orr hasn't jumped the gun and to ensure the scourge of high inflation is dealt with.

Of course, your humble Taxpayers' Union has suggestions on just the place to start...

ACC spends $10.7 million praying away injuries 🙏🤨

ACC is the organisation tasked with providing financial compensation, support and rehabilitation for people when they get injured.

You'd think that any treatment they provided would be based on sound science, right? After all, they're spending your money and it's you that wants to recover.

This week we revealed that ACC has spent $10.7 million on rongoā Māori treatments since 2020.

Rongoa

What is rongoā Māori? Here's what the ACC website has to say:

It's traditional Māori healing with many different techniques including:

mirimiri (bodywork)
rākau rongoā (native flora herbal preparations)
karakia (prayer), and more.

Now I'm not here to tell you what kinds of treatments you should or shouldn't use, but if there's no scientific evidence to demonstrate it works, why should taxpayers be footing the bill?

Jordan spoke to Sean Plunket on The Platform about the issue.

When we asked ACC for the evidence, this was the response we got:

ACC does not hold any clinical, peer reviewed or journal evidence that we have funded. Therefore, this part of your request is refused under section 18(g)(i) of the Act.

In terms of other evidence, it appears officials have panicked. They appear to have collated anything and everything they could find on Google Scholar that vaguely mentions rongoā Māori.

We got back a laundry list of humanities and [checks notes] environmental studies about how these practices make people (at best) "feel" better. Nothing double-blind or scientific, and many were just patient or staff self-selected surveys.

Put another way, ACC is funding treatment based on opinion polling. 🤦

(and if anyone loves a poll, it's the Taxpayers' Union...)

Some illustrative examples (our emphasis).

Perceptions of Te Rongoā Kakariki: green prescription health service among Māori in the Waikato and Ngāti Tūwharetoa rohe. Mai Journal, 4(2), 118-133.

Koea, J., & Mark, G. (2020). Is there a role for Rongoa Māori in public hospitals? The results of a hospital staff survey. The New Zealand Medical Journal (Online), 133(1513), 73-6.

This one isn't even about healing people. ACC "for the land" now?

Mark, G., Boulton, A., Allport, T., Kerridge, D., & Potaka-Osborne, G. (2022). “Ko Au te Whenua, Ko te Whenua Ko Au: I Am the Land, and the Land Is Me”: Healer/Patient Views on the Role of Rongoā Māori (Traditional Māori Healing) in Healing the Land. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(14), 8547.

If these practices work, great! Maybe they do. But let's wait to see the evidence to back them up before spending millions subsidising, among other things, prayer.

Are you aware of any other treatments ACC (or Te Whatu Ora, Health New Zealand) are funding that aren't grounded in evidence? Our research team would love to hear from you.

Film festivals on the taxpayer dime? Great work if you can get it ✈️🎥

Cannes 2024

As if forking out millions in film-subsidies for Hollywood bigwigs wasn't enough, it turns out taxpayers are paying for their overseas holidays too!

They might not have won Lotto's $44 million jackpot, but ten lucky players C-grade "film producers" embarked on a taxpayer-funded jaunt to the French Riviera for Cannes Film Festival. The luxury getaway cost $5,000 a pop (except for poor Carthew Neal who only got $2500 😢) totalling $47,500.

[Editor's note: the irony is that Carthew Neal looks to be the only one with any talent!]

This is the same Film Commission that the Taxpayers' Union exposed last week for spending $16,000 on leaving parties, and $500,000 golden goodbye for the CEO. Oh, and lest we forget the alcohol-fueled jaunt to the Oscars costing taxpayers $58,000 (also snuffed out by.... the Taxpayers' Union).

This trough just keeps getting deeper.

Our research team has it on good authority that the Film Commission also sent two of their own staff, Annie Murray and Philippa Mossman. No doubt they were sent there to tell other film producers about all the free money up for grabs in New Zealand...

Bureaucrat salary growth faster than the rest of New Zealand – growth the highest since records began 🚀💸

Not only are these bureaucrats getting luxury trips abroad, but it turns out they're also getting bigger pay rises than the rest of us!

New data from Stats NZ shows that while average New Zealand wage growth has pulled right back, the salary increases in the public sector are sky-rocketing up by 7.1% – almost twice that of the private sector. For the bureaucrats in Wellington, this is the fastest wage growth since 2002 when they first started keeping records. You're the one paying for it.

Shortly after the figures were released, Nicola Willis (as Minister responsible for the Public Service) rushed out her 2024 Workforce Policy Statement that outlines her new "expectations" for bureaucrat pay and getting the public sector under control.

It's six months later than what we'd have preferred, but otherwise we can't complain. It outlines expectations that pay of Chief Executives needs to start being tied to delivery of improved outcomes, and that future pay increases should not be backdated (those outside of the self-entitled bureaucracy will be surprised to learn that's the norm in Wellington!) and that they should be funded from existing baselines, (i.e. through finding new savings within departments).

The proof of the pudding will be in the eating when the next figures are released by Stats NZ later this year.

Amalgamation is not the magic bullet for rising rates 📣🗳️

While Central Government seeks to find further savings, it seems Councils are looking for a magic bullet.

With double-digit rate hikes plaguing the country, some mayors have suggested amalgamating councils as a way to find efficiencies and drive down expenses.

It may make sense for councils to combine some of their operations, but full amalgamation should be a decision for local ratepayers who are ultimately the ones who will be paying for a new structure.

We have cautiously warned against diving headfirst into amalgamations without first thinking it through. We've seen what happened with Health NZ and the polytechnics when Labour tried a centralisation experiment – it doesn't always go as planned.

And one does not need to know much about the so-called "Super City" that when it has come to Auckland Council, bigger has not meant cheaper!

As these ideas spread around the country, it is vital that we make clear early that there should be no amalgamations without referendums in the affected communities first.

✍️>>> Sign the Petition <<< ✍️

Taxpayer Talk – MPs in Depth with ACT Party MP Parmjeet Parmar🎙️🎧

This week on Taxpayer Talk, I sat down with ACT Party MP, Dr Parmjeet Parmar.

Parmjeet has a PhD in Biological Sciences, is a businesswoman and former broadcaster and was also formerly a National Party MP from 2014 to 2020. In 2023 she ran for ACT at the General Election and was successfully elected to Parliament.

In this podcast we discuss Dr Parmar's upbringing and background before politics, why she changed her political allegiance and her excellent member's bill that would require unions to collect their own fees rather than the status quo which forces employers to do it on the unions' behalf.

Listen to the episode on our website | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeart Radio

Enjoy your weekend.