Metiria Turei must have known she was taking a risk when she confessed to benefit fraud at the Green Party conference last weekend. She appears to have underestimated just how great that risk was.
In releasing the Greens' family policy, Turei told a sympathetic audience of party members that she lied to Work and Income about her living circumstances in the early 1990s, when she was a solo mother doing her law degree and raising her young daughter while on the Domestic Purposes Benefit. She had flatmates to help her pay the rent in three of the five flats she lived in over a three-year period but did not tell Winz officials because they would have cut her benefit.
Turei told the story to illustrate, as she put it, that "being on the benefit... made me poor and it made me lie". She wanted to draw attention to the Greens' policy pledge to increase all benefits by 20 per cent and remove penalties for beneficiaries who fail drug tests or do not look for jobs. The party is also promising to increase Working for Families payments and introduce a new top tax rate, theoretically boosting living standards so that in Turei's words, no one will ever have to lie to WINZ to put food on the table again.
As a media strategy, it has failed dismally. Public attention immediately zeroed in on Turei's personal ethics and critics demanded she should pay the money back. Turei replied that she would do so if an investigation found against her. That wasn't enough for Act leader David Seymour, who demanded she should pay it back now.
There is some confusion about the amount involved - the Taxpayers Union has claimed Turei owes $57,000 but this is based on converting her benefit into today's dollars. It seems more likely that she could owe up to $13,000, based on the DPB rate at the time of $83 for a solo parent with one child, and possibly much less if her benefit should have been reduced, not cut off altogether.