Bruce Bisset: Greed over need beggars belief

Bruce Bisset

No doubt all the beggars and beneficiaries will be cheering ex-PM John Key's receipt of Australia's highest honour this week in expectation that the "big four" banks may be about to unleash a torrent of investment credit back into the local market.

And that if they do, the "trickle down" theory might actually work and some of that money will devolve eventually to them, lifting them out of grinding poverty into the blue-tinted better New Zealand they've been promised for so long.

Excuse me while I wipe away the excrement that flying pig deposited.
Point is, the Australian-owned banks have done extremely well on the back of a speculators market topped with $100 billion in government borrowings they've played a part in arranging; so giving Key a gong is just the sort of political payback they'd manifest in order to see a continuation of the golden weather National has provided them.

Sure, bank profits have flattened of late after six years of records, but the sector still reaps around $5b profit a year from Kiwis. Most of it going to Australia, with very little coming back.

At least, not into the sort of business projects the unemployed might take heart from; the vast majority of profit is garnered from residential lending, which has boomed thanks to the over-cooked housing bubble Key, ironically, spent so long denying existed.

Oh, wait. Putting off taking action allowed the banks time to make even bigger windfalls, didn't it? Guess Sir John really earned that ribbon.

Meanwhile, at the coal-face end of the scale, Metiria Turei has been busy proving she does have activist cred by admitting she did what every beneficiary has had to do at one time or other: lie to the State.

Anyone who has relied on a benefit for more than a few weeks has had to lie to keep it because our social welfare system is broken and punitive; the "safety net" contains holes the size of speculator's rentals through which the unlucky fall - nowadays too often all the way down to begging level.

So the only way to survive on a long-term benefit is to engage in some form of black-market deal: be it working "under the table", not declaring otherwise legitimate income like partner or flatmate contributions (as in Turei's case), or something more overtly criminal.

Sure, it's illegal; but faced with having your electricity cut off and nothing to eat, you do what you must. This is Turei's point.

Even so, benefit fraud is estimated to only cost around $25 million per year; contrast that with tax fraud, now estimated to cost the economy around $1.2b annually.

How many multi-million-dollar "professional" (ie, white collar) fraudsters get actual jail time? Very few. But pocket a few thou you "don't deserve" from WINZ and watch the cell door close.

Different strokes. The rich can afford the cost of justice; the poor have to take it on the chin. And no one, except the odd likely-voluntary rights worker, will lift a finger to help.
Oh, by the way: people couldn't do "cash jobs" if no one offered to pay them. The black market economy only exists so long as those with money facilitate it. So, who is the criminal?

Fact is, those at the top move in circles that are in effect above the law, and do what they do because they can.

Those at the bottom do what they do, regardless of the law, because they must.
That doesn't make either set right. That's just how it is. But it's hypocritical to pillory one and excuse the other.