Taxpayers' Update: 🎶 Singing on your dime | 🙃 $36k for "accountability" | 💸 Te Pāti Māori's broken promise

August 23, 2026 Tory Relf

Hi Supporter,

This week, the team have uncovered millions being spent on public servants singing on the clock, found out Dunedin ratepayers have paid $36,000 to discover that “accountability” is a good thing (no ... Sherlock!), and Labour has misplaced yet another tax policy.

Meanwhile, the Greens are flirting with price controls, we expose Te Pāti Māori for dishonesty forgetfulness, and we have been digging deeper into what voters really know about the increasingly relevant Opportunity Party.

Let's dive in.

ACT takes aim at public service culture wars 🏛️✂️

In their latest pitch, ACT has announced a public service shake-up aimed at getting bureaucrats back to the basics: hire on merit, deliver services based on need, and stop turning government departments into vehicles for ideological or cultural agendas.

Basically, getting the public service back to delivering value for taxpayers.

Radical stuff.

Seymour wants to scrap race-based hiring requirements and cultural criteria in public sector job descriptions and (the bit that really caught our eye) ACT is promising to stop agencies using taxpayer-funded work time for employer-led cultural and spiritual activities.

Coincidentally, we've been looking at exactly how much of that is going on.

Recap on the background: back in April, we exposed MBIE’s daily 30-minute workplace waiata sessions in its Wellington offices.

When management tried to cut back on the waiata and asked staff to get back to their desks, all hell broke loose. The public sector union (the PSA) pushed back, with MBIE staff describing the sessions as a “taonga” and arguing that moving them into unpaid breaks was “colonial” and “culturally insensitive”.

MBIE eventually caved: "compromising" to allow three paid 30-minute sessions a week (down from five).

Around the same time, a deep throat within MBIE sent us this video from inside MBIE showing what those taxpayer-funded sessions actually looked like.

That MBIE video generated a flood of similar tip-offs from elsewhere in the public service that every department was sending staff on waiata, kapa haka, karakia, and similar activities during the workday.

But the answer was considerably more expensive than even we expected.

REVEALED: public service sing-alongs costing $3.5m a year 🎶💸

Thanks to a series of Official Information Act requests we've found at least nine public service agencies are running regular waiata, kapa haka, karakia, or similar cultural sessions during paid work time.

You can't go to an office in Wellington without a sing-along.

Using the very conservative assumption that just 10 percent of staff participate, and the average public service wage, we calculated the cost of that paid staff time at $67,000 a week – that's around $3.5 million a year.

And some of the examples are extraordinary.

MBIE runs up to 90 minutes of waiata practice a week. Inland Revenue, Stats NZ, the Ministry for the Environment, WorkSafe, and Te Puni Kōkiri all reported regular sessions, while the Independent Children’s Monitor said all staff participate in a weekly half-hour waiata session.

And the $3.5 million is the tip of the iceberg. This is only savings from the agencies we identified as requiring this stuff so far!

So we say ACT are onto something. Public servants should be paid to, well, work. Sing waiata, kapa haka, or karakia, by all means. But do it in your own time.

Dunedin City Council spends $36,000 on consultants to advise it on "organisational values" 🙃💸

Something that caught our eye this week was the Otago Daily Times’ report (unfortunately paywalled) that Dunedin City Council has spent almost $36,000 on consultants to "refresh" its organisational values.

And after all that money, the Council landed on...

Commitment. Wellbeing. Accountability. Collaboration.

Groundbreaking stuff.

Around 100 staff were involved in workshops and feedback, with the consultant bill alone coming to $35,986.25.

The Council says the rest of the work was done in normal staff time, which is code for "the true cost to ratepayers was even higher".

It appears the leadership at the Council is so rudderless, it needed outside consultants to explain that staff should be committed to their jobs, work together, and take responsibility for what they do.

Frankly, if spending $36,000 is needed to teach a democratically elected council about accountability, it might be worth adding a fifth value:

Value for money!

The Council spin doctors have assured ratepayers that the exercise is already "showing results" and will "help with productivity, retention, sick leave, and staff engagement".

Sounds like those consultants are really milking this one.

Labour Leader rules Netflix Tax...

...while Willie Jackson sponsors Bill to create Netflix Tax

Chris Hipkins's Ming vase strategy has hit another snag this week with the Labour Party leader firmly "ruling out" a new tax on streaming services.

If only Hipkins's own MPs get the memo.

Hipkins was caught out, apparently unaware, that Willie Jackson has a Members Bill in the Parliamentary ballot to [checks notes] create a new tax on streaming services!

The Bill would impose a "levy" (also known as tax) on popular streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Neon.

And it's not just Jackson. Earlier this year, the same new tax was being touted by Labour’s broadcasting spokesman Reuben Davidson.

Who to believe.

Still, Hipkins has now ruled the streaming tax out, along with a return of the Ardern-era "Ute Tax".

Good.

But if Labour wants to claim it is campaigning on only one new tax — its costly capital gains tax — there is another one it still needs to deal with.

Without indexing income tax thresholds to inflation, bracket creep will continue to quietly increase the tax workers pay even when their pay rises are only keeping pace with prices.

It may be by stealth, but it's still a tax increase.

Our briefing paper on the subject (published back in January) shows why indexing tax thresholds is the simplest way to stop inflation quietly increasing the tax burden on working New Zealanders.

Ruling out a tax on utes or Netflix is chump change compared to where the real action is. "No new taxes" means ensuring income tax bands are adjusted for inflation.

The Greens put price controls back on the menu 🤮

New Zealand’s grocery market has a competition problem.

The two big supermarket groups control more than 80 percent of the market, and shoppers pay the higher price that comes with a lack of competition.

The Greens’ answer?

Give politicians and regulators more power over supermarket prices.

Their new bill would make it illegal for supermarkets to charge prices bureaucrats deem “excessive”, with fines of up to $10 million for breaches.

Sound Soviet enough for you?

There is a reason governments generally do not tell businesses what their “reasonable” profit margin should be.

If prices are capped too low, suppliers pull back, shortages appear, and goods get rationed in other ways.

There are two ways to ration scarce goods like food: prices or queues.

The Greens appear determined to give Kiwis a refresher course in what a breadline looks like.

The supermarket duopoly absolutely needs fixing, but the answer is more competition, not Soviet-like price controls.

Is the reason we don’t have enough supermarket competition because councils have banned new ones? 🛒

The Greens are onto something in terms of the problem, but their mooted solution would be a disaster.

Our wonkish friends at the New Zealand Initiative - a public policy think tank - rightly point out that the issue is New Zealand's planning laws (and councils) make it neigh on impossible for a new entrant to enter the market.

Their Chief Economist, Dr Eric Crampton nails it in a piece written for The Post where he dives into the various council-imposed rules that literally make it illegal for a new entrant to dive in. Even incumbents have difficulty navigating the system. Regulatory complexity creates a substantial barrier to entry.

Read Eric's piece over on the NZ Initiative website here.

So if the issue is competition (and barriers to entry) what then would likes of international supermarket chains make of it if Comrade Chlöe gets to decide whether its prices and margins are acceptable?

Te Pāti Māori’s $17,000 promise comes due 💸

TPM pockets pay rise after promising to pay it back

Back in April, Te Pāti Māori condemned MPs’ roughly $17,000 pay rise in the strongest possible terms.

They called it “daylight robbery”, said it was “ethically wrong”, and promised to pay back every cent.

But little did they know, the Taxpayers' Union keeps an eye on these sorts of things...

At the time, we optimistically gave Te Pāti Māori credit for it. We backed their co-leaders' call for MPs to reject the increase and said politicians should not be lining their own pockets while households were under pressure.

A few months later, the pay rise has taken effect.

So, check we did.

Through an Official Information Act request, Treasury confirmed that not a single MP has repaid the increase!

Including Te Pāti Māori.

Now, perhaps they still intend to...

But as the election gets closer, we'll continue to keep an eye on what parties actually stand for - rather than simply what they say about themselves.

Which brings us to Opportunity.

Opportunity wants your vote — just not your questions 🤔🎙️

Last month, we enjoyed The Spinoff’s piece digging into who is actually behind Opportunity’s recent surge in support.

It got us wondering about a slightly different question:

What do voters actually think Opportunity stands for?

So we asked.

As part of the August Taxpayers' Union-Curia Poll we found that many voters either see Opportunity as "centrist" or simply are "not sure" whether it sits in the centre, centre-left, or centre-right.

That matters because its policies are anything but modest.

Opportunity is proposing the biggest change to New Zealand’s tax and welfare system in generations - including new taxes amounting to around $21,500 per household, per year.

Its leader, Qiulae Wong, appears unfazed by New Zealand's structural deficit and piling government debt.

And its star policy is a universal payment for every New Zealander.

A pretty radical programme to be selling under a "centrist" label!

But if so many voters still do not know where Opportunity sits, that tells us the party has not yet faced anything like the level of scrutiny its policies call for.

Read The Spinoff’s coverage of our poll on how voters see Opportunity here.

Which brings us to our podcast.

As New Zealand's largest taxpayer group, tax reform is close to our (and our supporters') hearts.

So we invited Opportunity leader Qiulae Wong onto Taxpayer Talk to discuss the party’s tax plans and spending plans.

But her spin doctors say she's "too busy" before the election...

Not quite a decline, but certainly a fob off...

Now, politicians are busy and nobody is obliged to appear on New Zealand's leading taxpayers podcast.

But even Nania Mahuta had the good grace to find the time for a chat about Three Waters at the very height of that campaign. After all, if you're not in politics to defend what you believe in, just why are you there?

Maybe the request never got past the Opportunity Party's media handlers, but when Ms Wong is asking voters to sign up for the biggest overhaul of the tax system in generations, we reckon she should be willing to defend it.

Opportunity wants to be taken seriously as a party of government. That means it also needs to accept the scrutiny that comes with it.

The closer it gets to Parliament, the harder those questions are likely to become.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend,