KEY POINTS:
There are now more media communications and public relations staff working for the Ministry of Social Development than there are journalists working in individual newsrooms for media organisations across the country.
The MSD apparently employs 61.5 media staff. Quite what the half person does is not clear but the rest appear to be trying to put a positive spin on everything the department does. All appear to be failing spectacularly.
The Ministry of Social Development, or Te Manatu Whakahiato Ora to its friends, claims it "provides strategic social policy advice to the New Zealand Government and provides social services to more than one million New Zealanders".
Sadly, the second part is true. A quarter of the country have somehow managed to become state beneficiaries. However, the first part about it providing policy advice is not entirely the case.
Parliament's social services select committee heard this week that the MSD spends more than $50 million a year on obtaining policy advice from other people, which it then turns around and hands to the Government. It performs its role as advisory middleman despite employing some 350 policy advisers itself. Presumably these several hundred internal policy advisers advise the ministry on which policy advisers to employ on contract.
Actually, I suspect the 350 policy advisers are too busy with the 61.5 media people working out how to spend your money telling you that they are working hard for you. Last year, the MSD budgeted 15 million taxpayer dollars to promote, for example, the Working for Families scheme this election year. The Government is anxious to remind you that it is looking after you - even if you don't want to be looked after.
With this in mind, the Government last year published, at your expense, a brochure subtly called We're Making a Difference. It is designed to tell you how good the Labour Government has been for you and, not surprisingly, the courts and Electoral Office came to the conclusion it was campaign advertising for the Labour Party under the Government's stunningly stupid Electoral Finance Act.
However, last week the Government started ducking and diving in Parliament about whether the brochure would be counted against Labour's spending cap for the election. Labour Party secretary Mike Smith has been telling the Electoral Office that the breach of the act wasn't committed by the Labour Party, it was committed by the Labour Government, or more precisely, the Prime Minister's Office, which is entirely different, says Mr Smith.
Quite how the Labour Party's Prime Minister and the Labour Government is divorced from the Labour Party is not clear, but members of the Labour Party must be wondering if this is final confirmation of what they have felt for years, the party's parliamentary wing is a law unto itself and no longer has any connection with its rank and file.
Under questioning from National's Bill English, Justice Minister Annette King fudged the issue. Instead, she gave us an insight into the amazing pettiness that drives the Government's thinking behind the Electoral Finance Act. Apparently referring to National's quite effective and often funny billboard campaign before the last election, she dismissed English's questions, instead talking of "the whining and whingeing from the National Party because it cannot spend the millions of dollars that it had planned to spend on its election campaign, right up to three months before the election, pretending that it did not count as election advertising. Its billboards would have been right around New Zealand. National is not able to do that. What we get now is its whingeing and snivelling about it."
What she is saying is that the Government rammed through an act of Parliament, put the Electoral Office to enormous expense, tied up endless amounts of police time investigating alleged breaches of the act, and further troubled the overburdened court system with litigation about the meaning of the act because Labour was worried National might put up billboards attacking the Government this election year.
All is not lost. Some Government departments are wisely becoming wary of being caught in the crossfire over the Electoral Finance Act. The Inland Revenue Department has set up a special monitoring system to avoid being sucked into Labour's PR machine. National has revealed some IRD emails that talked of flagging MPs' email addresses to watch for and stop any politicians making large orders for IRD publicity material.
To its credit, the department also cancelled an expensive advertising campaign for the KiwiSaver scheme, an IRD email says, because it was "concerned that in the current environment it leans too far towards the promotional".
Sadly, other Government departments don't have the same strong backbone. Just look at your TV tonight and count the commercials that carry a departmental logo as they push some marvellous initiative.
