Mike's Minute: Stop focusing on the trivialities
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For some reason trivialities fascinate some people, especially when it comes to someone else's money.
The Shane Jones story is your latest example. No, he shouldn't have done it, but its $30,000. We have bigger fish to fry.
The "energy in, energy out" equation didn’t stack up, but you can't tell the media that.
Louise Upston became the poster child for accommodation allowances even though, and this is what makes all this stuff mental, she did literally nothing wrong.
Now the Herald have gone and crunched the numbers as to who is getting what, why, and when.
The upshot is a lot more get it than used to, and more Labour MPs take it than National, although not by a lot.
The forgotten part of the equation appears to be the simple rule of allowance.
If you're not from Wellington, you are allowed an allowance. That’s it.
The criteria is geography – are you from Wellington or not? It's not whether you're wealthy, or female, or old, or experienced, or anything. Just whether you are from Wellington.
The fact you decide to buy a place to call your own in Wellington does not trigger any change to your allowance entitlement. So why does it become news?
That would in part mean you are means tested, so wealthier MPs are penalised, which of course is why it isn't means tested because that would make no sense.
Ironically it doesn’t actually even mean you are wealthy. I note Paul Goldsmith bought a pad for $325,000. You don’t need to be loaded to afford that. He, I assume like others who have purchased, simply wants a place he can call home.
Some don’t. Some live in hotels. Each to their own but at no point does the fact you own a place change your entitlement and yet the media decides none of it's fair.
Another of these petty, time-wasting entrapment escapades ensues where people, in this case Louise Upston, are badgered for days on end for no real gain and certainly no enhancement of the media's reputation.
MPs’ work is weird, if not completely unique. They are not overpaid, the rules are not so bad, there are glaringly obvious alternatives.
So let's concentrate on the important stuff, shall we?
Stop wasting everyone's time.
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