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Do you want some savings?\xa0

I have found a couple of hundred million for you then.\xa0

A report out has looked at who gets the Winter Energy Payment. It's a shedload of money that is yet again going to be doled out this month for the colder period, so oldies don\u2019t freeze to death.\xa0

It's one of the more shameful decisions of this new Government and reminded me of the Christchurch Call, which they also inexplicably carried on with.\xa0

The Christchurch Call isn't that expensive, but it is a grandiose truckload of virtue signalling, psychobabble that, as information revealed this week shows, has achieved basically nothing but \u201cfeels\u201d.\xa0

If a new Government was looking for easy day one savings, that would have been a goodie and the Winter Energy Payment would not have been far behind.\xa0

So, the detail is that 53% of those getting superannuation don\u2019t need a heating top up. They have enough to look after themselves.\xa0

So why do they get it?\xa0

Well, that\u2019s Labour all over, isn't it? It's a high trust model. You can opt out if you like. But who does? No one.\xa0

So, the waste builds. With that 53%, if you didn\u2019t hand it out you have just saved $205 million.\xa0

Now, you can only blame Labour until someone else comes along to re-introduce a bit of reality to the room.\xa0

Except the new lot decided not to.\xa0

It's not dissimilar to John Key who thought Working For Families was communism by stealth, until he decided to carry on with the programme. Here it is to this day, churning through billions as you work and pay your taxes only for them to take your money, have an entire battalion of public servants rifle through your entitlements and, if you are lucky, hand some of it back.\xa0

It is ruinously wasteful.\xa0

I assume someone, somewhere thought about the slightly simpler idea of you keeping the money in the first place so you don\u2019t need the paperwork and hassle of trying to repatriate it. Of course, if they did it that way they wouldn\u2019t have a financial hold over you, which of course is what a previous Labour Government had in mind when they invented it.\xa0

So, we end up with $205 million in wasted money.\xa0

Clearly not all money saving ideas have been exhausted.\xa0

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