The Auditor-General’s office is supposed to be the ultimate watchdog for the eN-Zed government and therefore for the eN-Zed taxpayer. Their sole job is to ensure our hard-earned money is spent wisely, efficiently, and transparently. Yet, a recent report raising alarm over Associate Education Minister David Seymour’s revamped school lunch programme leaves us asking a glaring question: Who is the Auditor-General actually looking out for?
The report points out that the revamped programme is successfully saving money, around $360 million, compared to the previous government’s approach. That’s an eye-watering amount of money to save for the taxpayer. Instead of celebrating a massive win for eN-Zed’s fiscal sanity, the Auditor-General’s office chose to nitpick implementation speed, waste, and early nutritional benchmarks. As Seymour rightly pointed out, it feels as though the Auditor-General would be perfectly happy if the government kept bleeding 100s of millions of taxpayers’ cash.
Once again we’re seeing civil servants behaving like they run the country and not the elected officials. Don’t they understand democracy? Look what’s happening in Albania when civil servants forget what democracy means.
If the Auditor-General is truly dedicated to protecting eN-Zed taxpayers’ incomes, why train the crosshairs on a programme actively cutting costs? Where is this same aggressive scrutiny when it comes to the real black holes of government spending?
Consider the staggering, unchecked IT spending failures at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). Where is the urgent, front-page report on that? What about the appalling internal spending decisions across countless government departments and ministries? We regularly see public sectors funneling millions into ideological charities and NGOs, only to turn around and cry to the government for more funding because their core services are broke.
And let’s not forget the absolute pinnacle of bureaucratic absurdity: the $4 million taxpayer-funded “whale song and kauri dieback” scam. Four million dollars of taxpayer money spent on tracking whale sounds to prevent a fungal disease, an initiative so ridiculous it sounds like satire or a grubby scam. Where was the Auditor-General? Why the deafening silence on outright waste, while a programme that actually drove a hard bargain for the taxpayer gets dragged through the mud?E
eN-Zed desperatelu needs a Audit office that protects bloated processes and coddles upset, displaced contractors. We need an Auditor-General’s office that goes after genuine, systemic waste and dishonesty and stupidity. If they can’t (or won’t) do that, they should quit before they’re sacked.
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