Kerre McIvor: Plenty of fertile ground to be had talking about spending taxpayers' money

The Newsroom headline 'Luxon Spies an Opportunity' kind of sums it up really. National's leader delivered his State of the Nation speech over the weekend, and basically went back to the future with a promise to reverse Labour's tax grab should National be voted in 2023. Labour spends your money. National gives you your money back. It's the traditional trope. 
Christopher Luxon was right not to dwell on Covid, even though we've had more hospitalisations and infections with the Omicron variant than we've seen during any time of the pandemic. 
But there is plenty of fertile ground to be had by talking about how taxpayers' money is spent. Nobody minds money being spent on our hospitals. 
If there's one thing the pandemic is underlined is that governments of whatever hue, simply cannot afford to neglect our health system. But I personally do mind that this government spends so much money on looking good, gussying up its image.
The Government spent close to $1 billion on contractors and consultants in the past financial year, Newstalk ZB revealed the numbers just after Christmas. The figure was down from the previous year of 2020. 
But still, tens of millions of dollars higher than it was in 2017. And this after a promise from Chris Hipkins to reduce the number of consultants.
So while some of that might have been necessary for experts on the like, significant sums have been spent on public relations consultants and communications experts. Why do we need public relations consultants being paid tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, to tell us what a good job the Government is doing? If in fact, the Government is doing a good job, we can see that for ourselves. We don't need to be told. We don't need to be persuaded. 
It bothers me that $200,000 is being spent on an American company to listen into social media posts relating to the government rules and policies around Covid-19. Why, why bother? If you think you're doing a good job, if you believe you're doing the best job possible, just do it. 
Why would you worry what people were saying about you on Twitter? Or about your rules. On Facebook, why does it matter? And if you're going to spend our money listening into our conversations, make the reports public, but they will not.

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