KEY POINTS:
When the hounds of the press gallery start baying for blood, it's a case of every man - and Prime Minister - for themselves.
So Labour Party president Mike Williams told a delegate in a closed session at the recent party congress that his proposal that party canvassers hand out promotional material for KiwiSaver and Working for Families was "a damn good idea". So what? It is.
My surprise is that Labour hasn't been proudly plugging this key reform to all and sundry since its launch in 2005.
Interestingly, the recently leaked tape recording doesn't back up the initial beat-up claims that the Labour Party was planning to use the resources of Government departments to campaign this year on its flagship policies. It reveals, probably to Williams's surprise, given he says he doesn't recall the banter, that he reacted in much the way Prime Minister Helen Clark said she would have, if she'd been thrown the same curly question.
If she'd been at the session and heard the idea raised she says, she would have said "hang on a minute".
The tape indicates Williams showed similar caution. After acknowledging the proposal from party councillor, Martin Ward was a "damned good idea" he qualified his support by adding "we will have some generic stuff out for you to hand out pretty soon, once we work out the Electoral Finance Act".
In other words, rather than use departmental propaganda, the party organisation would prepare canvassing material of its own in due course.
Unfortunately for Williams, neither he, or assorted Cabinet ministers like Annette King and Ruth Dyson who were present, remembered this detail when the story first erupted, and the actual dialogue didn't come to light, via the leaked recording, until after he'd inexplicably gone on TV on Sunday morning and said he didn't believe the interchange took place at all.
He admits it was a foolish thing to do. Very foolish, it turns out, given the tape reveals him handling a tricky political situation rather skilfully.
But what a storm in a teacup it's been. Not being a politician, I can't see what's wrong with party workers handing out departmental fact sheets anyway. When the story first broke, a purse-lipped Public Service Association official popped up on television saying how awful it would be if political activists started doing the work civil servants were paid to do. Shock horror.
But if the aim is to get Working for Families and Kiwisaver entitlements to everyone who is eligible, you'd have thought government workers would be grateful for all the assistance going.
If New Zealand is typical of other OECD countries, many potential beneficiaries miss out. An OECD working paper from 2004 reports that "low take-up" of welfare benefits occurs both across countries and programmes. Estimates typically span a range of between 40 per cent and 80 per cent in the case of social assistance and housing programmes and between 60 per cent and 80 per cent for unemployment compensation.
Last month the United Kingdom's Department for Work and Pensions said that unclaimed entitlements could be $24.4 billion a year. It said "The department continues to look at ways to identify those who might be entitled to pension credit and encourage them to apply."
I checked with Treasury, the Ministry of Social Development and various university researchers on Monday, and no work has been done in this country along these lines.
The two departments have published a joint paper patting themselves on the back for their "successful delivery of the Working for Families package" up to August 2006. But it turns out that this success is based on how well up-take of the new benefits has been against forecasts "based on applying historical figures and informed judgment about the response of newly eligible families".
But when you read that childcare assistance expenditure was 28 per cent greater than forecast, and the number of working people and families seeking accommodation supplement was 28 per cent above forecast, you have to question how good the base material was in the first place.
The report acknowledges that awareness among Pacific caregivers (79 per cent) and Asian caregivers (72 per cent) of WFF was lower than New Zealand European (93 per cent) and Maori caregivers (85 per cent.)
Is it knocking the public service to suggest that door to door canvassing by party workers seems an eminently sensibly way of finding people the bureaucrats have missed?
If the Labour Party worker was also to point out which government introduced the benefits, where's the crime or corruption in that. Isn't that the sort of thing political canvassers have done since Adam waved that apple about?
* Starting today, Brian Rudman will write a column on national affairs each Wednesday.
