The results so far are pretty obvious, Bill.

Have your say and show Bill English that New Zealand wants a smart green capital gains tax.

Also, check out what we’ve been saying about capital gains and why it’s a good idea by visiting our smarter tax page.

Anyway, we’ve survived the first one.  Just one to go!

We’re on the way out. The world is going to end on May 21, according to a man called Harold Camping. Harold runs Family Radio in Oakland California. He has predicted the end of the world by doing maths with the Bible. Having crunched the numbers in the Book of Genesis, he’s fairly certain tomorrow will be the day when it all kicks off.

Perhaps that’s also how Bill English got his GDP per capita growth predictions that supposedly see the Government accounts in a healthy surplus by 2014-15.

BTW, anyone going to a rapture party tomorrow night?

I make no pretense of being unbiased, but I think Russel nailed the real economic issues facing New Zealand very well:

Bill English didn’t.

So let’s give $36 million to a yacht race:

Team New Zealand will get $36 million from the Government to contest the 2013 America’s Cup, the Government has confirmed.

Acting Economic Development Minister David Carter said the Government was contractually obliged to give the money to Team New Zealand to fight for the 2013 America’s Cup in San Francisco.

Team New Zealand today formally announced it would mount a challenge, and the Government confirmed it would honour its commitment to the $36m funding.

The Government says it’s a contractual obligation. Like the BMW fleet purchase, I’d love to see the contract.

They reveal that within two months of entering the DGS, South Canterbury Finance breached its Deed of Guarantee by lending almost $90 million to its parent company, Allan Hubbard’s Southbury Group Limited, without Treasury approval.  SCF explained that misdemeanour away as an “oversight”.

Then in April 2009 Treasury reprimanded SCF for failing to file a section 37A certificate under the Securities Act to extend its prospectus in the allowable timeframe.  Another “oversight”.

Treasury brought in corporate recovery specialists KordaMentha to report to it on SCF.  Preliminary findings reported by KordaMentha in August 2009 included:

• Credit policy is not always complied with, to varying degrees.
• Inappropriate level of analysis of borrowers at origination.
• Lack of covenants and regular monitoring will prevent company from identifying at risk files and taking action to mitigate its position.
• Lack of independent valuation evidence, either at origination or subsequently, is inappropriate.
• No existing risk grading framework, which makes analysis of the loan book (especially for provisioning) extremely difficult.
• Lack of exit strategies when writing loans compromises liquidity. In many cases there are no realistic exit strategies, particularly for business loans.
• Directors and other related parties appear to have been involved in loan management and lending decisions outside the credit chain although we understand this is being addressed.
• Loans have been managed directly by Allan Hubbard, including the Southbury loan [to his own company].

KordaMentha’s final report to Treasury on SCF in September 2009 reached much the same conclusions.

All this, despite SCF’s Deed of Guarantee requiring that:

During the guarantee period (12th October 2008 for two years) the principal debtor shall ensure its business and operations (and the business and operation of its subsidiaries) are conducted in a proper, businesslike, efficient and prudent manner. (my emphasis)

Which poses the question of why wasn’t SCF booted out of the Deposit Guarantee Scheme, given that its business practices were demonstrably so sloppy that it was clearly in breach of its Deed of Guarantee requirements to conduct its operations in a proper, businesslike, efficient, and prudent manner?

The taxpayer has to fork out $1.1 billion (and we’re still counting) to companies and individuals who knowingly made high risk investments in SCF.  And the rest of us are going to suffer for that, come the Budget next month.

The buck has to stop somewhere, and in this case it should stop at Karori’s Dipton’s most prominent resident, Finance Minister Bill English.  The Treasury documents show he was kept up with the play throughout the whole sorry debacle.  Allan Hubbard even asks Treasury to thank English and John Key for their support at one stage.

Why, upon becoming aware that the sheer incompetence of SCF’s business practices would place them in breach of their Deed of Guarantee, did English allow their guarantee to be continued?

Bill English:

…over the next few years New Zealand’s advantages would become more apparent.

“One is the wage differential. We have a workforce that is better educated, just as productive and 30 per cent cheaper,”

Now Bill English is saying that our low wages are a good thing. Hmm, which is it? Does John Key’s government want a country with high skill, high wage jobs or low paid ‘internationally competitive’ serfs?

Or is Judith Tizard on the money when she said:

The National Party smiled and lied their way into Government, and they have no plan. They have lied about what they would do in Auckland and the investment they’d put there, they’ve lied about what they’d do for NZ business, they’ve lied to NZ families about the support they’d give them, they’re going up and down the country like finance company touts trying to get us to mortgage the house for dubious investments and junk bonds, ‘cause that’s what their asset sales programme is. They’re selling off our assets and our future for smoke and mirrors

?

But for the entire time I’ve been Prime Minister I’ve had the Treasury in my office, week after week, month after month,  telling me South Canterbury Finance was going bankrupt.

Okay, John Key and Bill English may have a case to be forgiven for the first sign-off of South Canterbury Finance into the Retail Deposit Guarantee scheme – it was the day they took office as Ministers.  They would have been so excited about the enhancement of their political careers that perhaps the details may have passed them by.

But the guarantee was renewed on December 11 2009, updated on All Fools’ Day 2010, and amended on June 17th 2010, all signed off on behalf of Bill English.

Contrast that with the premature phase-out of the Christchurch earthquake business subsidy. As Canterbury Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive Peter Townsend said:

My concern is we’ve got 60,000 people which is more than a quarter of our total workforce (on that wage subsidy). If you turn this off too quickly it could have a marked adverse effect.

So unthinking Government support continues, despite several opportunities to review it, to largely wealthy investors in SCF who were stung by bad commercial decisions by their company’s Chief Executive that had been flagged, and the Government had known about, for many months.

But the Government support for businesses and workers affected by an unforeseen  natural disaster gets promptly turned off, leaving business owners facing bankruptcy and workers unemployed.

However you look at them, John Key’s  Government’s priorities in Canterbury have to be crap?

Yesterday, Statistics New Zealand released numbers showing the economy grew by 0.2 per cent in the three months ended December 31, having contracted by 0.2 per cent in the third quarter last year.  So we’ve avoided recession, but only by our fingertips.

Or have we?  Yesterday evening Radio New Zealand reported:

…damage to Statistics New Zealand’s building in Christchurch following an earthquake in February meant some information usually used to compile the figures has not been included.

BNZ economist Stephen Toplis said the information unable to be retrieved relates to 20% of the economy and any revisions could be substantial.

And that 20% will relate largely to Canterbury, where the economy would have already been feeling the impact of the September 4 earthquake.

Perhaps Bill English shouldn’t be so optimistic about the economy after all.

As Russel pointed out yesterday, we think a small, temporary earthquake levy would be a much better and fairer way of funding the rebuilding. Depending on how you set it, it would raise between $230m and $1b per year for rebuilding.

By contrast, cutting from ‘high income’ brackets of WFF would raise very little.

As Bill English himself pointed out in 2008 (hat-tip to The Standard for digging that one out), cutting WFF completely for families with an income of more than $100,000 back them would have saved just $1.1m per year. It would take thousands of years to pay off the cost of rebuilding at that rate.

We asked the Parliamentary library for figures showing how much WFF costs at different income levels. Even cutting support from families earning over $80,000 would hardly produce any savings – just $70m per year, nothing like the billions needed for earthquake recovery.

Clearly, to get any meaningful savings from WFF you’d have to cut from significantly lower income brackets.

A temporary earthquake levy of the kind proposed by the Greens could raise up to $1b per year. To save that much from WFF would require cutting support completely from families earning over $40,000. That’s clearly unacceptable, even to this Government. It would affect more than 160,000 families around the country, and cost them up to $180 per week.

Since that option is so unpalatable, it’s more likely that the Government would either change the abatement rates or lower the payments.

Neither option is particularly appealing. Changing the abatement rates so that people earning over a certain amount receive less from WFF could actually create the perverse incentive for them not to seek more or higher paying work, which is the exact opposite of what this Government is purportedly trying to achieve with its work-focussed welfare changes.

Lowering the payment rates across the board would affect people in every income bracket, and make it harder for many low- and middle-income families to make ends meet.

And neither would save significant amounts for earthquake recovery! David Farrar models some possible changes to WFF over at Kiwiblog today, which he thinks National should campaign on at the election. Funnily enough, he says nothing about how much this would save for earthquake rebuilding – because it would be very little.

By contrast, a temporary levy at the highest level we’ve modelled would cost an individual earning more than $50,000 just 58 cents per week and raise over a billion dollars a year.

I know what I think sounds more fair!

When Bill English is encouraging everyone else to cut back, spending $6.8 million on new limousines for Ministers to swan about in when the existing fleet is less than 3 years old is indeed a disgrace.

There has been a lot of speculation about what the Government may have incurred as penalties if they had pulled out of the previous Government’s contract for the limos.

But Internal Affairs has today confirmed:

…replacing the fleet was actually “optional”, with no penalty for ending the contract.

Metiria says:

Everyone else is having to tighten their belts and John Key is cutting staff, and creating unemployment in order to apparently tighten the belt of government.

Right on! But I guess if you are a Minister, who cares?  As long as you have a spanking new gas guzzling $200K Beamer to enhance your ego.

That’s not the way the Greens will do it when our MPs are in Government.

So, what’s the latest way MPs are conspiring to earn their bad reputation? Removing any factual test on where they live, allowing them to claim “out of town” accommodation expenses, even if they actually live in Wellington:

Members of Parliament are secretly planning to change the rules around their $24,000-a-year accommodation allowance to make it easier for those who make Wellington their home to still be counted as out-of-towners.

Under the new rules, MPs will be able to nominate a “home base” where they normally live when not doing parliamentary business in Wellington.

If that is outside Wellington, they will qualify for the accommodation allowance.

In recognition of the requirement for them to be in Wellington for longer periods than backbenchers, ministers, the leader of the opposition, the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker would be exempt from even the loose test for a “home base”.

MPs have resolved that for senior members “their non-Wellington home would remain their `home base’ regardless of the amount of time they are able to spend there (thereby also preventing the perception that the member is no longer based in their constituency)”.

An ordinary MP’s home base would be deemed to be in Wellington only if their electorate was within its commuting area or they lived “permanently” in the area.

So, their response to Bill English’s appalling ethical failure in charging the taxpayer $700 a week for living in his own home is to legalise it. And then they wonder why we think they’re dogshit.

But it gets better! That change to transparency around international travel perks, that almost all party leaders have now denounced? It turns out that their representatives on the Parliamentary Services Commission all agreed to it:

Meanwhile, Prime Minister John Key confirmed he would be asking his MPs next week to consider voluntarily disclosing their travel expenses, effectively flouting the Speaker’s ruling. But this appears to cut across the position National took behind closed doors. Its representative on the PSC, Napier MP Chris Tremain, is understood to have raised no objections when Dr Smith outlined his plan.

ACT leader Rodney Hide also called for transparency but his party’s representative, John Boscawen, is also believed to have raised no objections.

The sole exception to this was the Greens. As for the rest, they have only themselves to blame when we regard them as lying, self-interested hypocrites.

It seems some want to protect privilege and impose greater secrecy over what MPs spend public money on.

So, in the interests of transparency and accountability, Metiria Turei this afternoon released the Green MPs’ expenses for the last quarter:

Let’s see which other parties front with theirs!

Update: Labour has released theirs too.

Update 2: The Speaker has reversed his decision and will be releasing individual MPs’ travel expenses.  That didn’t take long.  Well done, Greens and Labour.

But how many Mums and Dads actually are investors? Not many, it would seem. Today the headline reads “Savings? That’s a laugh, say half of Kiwis”

Almost half of New Zealanders are not saving at all, according to a bank survey.

The survey found 31 per cent of respondents did not save because they had nothing left after paying the bills.

a lot of people were also focusing on reducing debt.

Of the half that do save some amount ($5 per week? $200 per week? The survey isn’t clear), the survey found that these are the things that people save for. I’ve bolded the ones that could conceivably considered to be saving as an investment of any reasonable duration.

• Holiday – 21 per cent
• Unexpected cost – 17 per cent
• Large purchase – 12 per cent
• Retirement – 12 per cent
• Necessities (food, clothes and bills) – 11 per cent
• Renovations – 8 per cent
• TVs and whiteware – 7 per cent
• Luxuries and entertainment – 7 per cent
• Cash investment – 5 per cent

Cash is a pretty poor form of investment – any interest earned will barely cover inflation. Still, let’s be charitable and include it anyway and call people with cash ‘investments’ ‘investors’.

I don’t know how the bank found its 1000 respondents so this is indicative only, but:

Retirement + cash investment = 17%. Divide by two because only half of respondents have any savings = 8.5% of New Zealanders who could maybe be called investors. If they have kids, they could even be Mum & Dad Investors, although being Mums & Dads chances are they are saving for ‘Unexpected costs’ or ‘Necessities’ instead. When little Johnny needs new braces it’s pretty hard to justify gambling in the Forex market or buying another ounce of gold.

Clearly all this is very back-of-an-envelope stuff, but that’s all it takes to demonstrate that when National talks about Mum and Dad Investors then either:

A) They are blissfully unaware how few such investors exist.

B) Their priorities are about looking after the rich.

C) It’s just spin.

D) All of the above.

Which is it?

Speaking at a small-business conference at Massey University yesterday, Mr Williamson said he would not discuss the Crafar issue specifically, but the general attitude to foreign investment was usually linked to the ethnicity of the buyer.

“The number of New Zealanders who don’t like the idea of overseas investment and think it’s really a bad thing, really sort of frightens me, and it’s really amazing that some of them have actually got Pommy accents.”

…

“So what’s a foreigner? A lot of it’s more to do with racism. If you look different, you’re a foreigner but if you come from the other side of the world, from Scotland, then you’re not.”

Williamson needs to have a word to his colleague, Finance Minister Bill English, who last month seemed to be pandering to the supposed racism Williamson criticises:

Public debate over the issue “would benefit from more information” such as where most buyers were based.

“Just a tiny fraction of approvals are from countries outside of the UK and the US, France and the Netherlands,” he said.

In reality, Williamson and English are both running racial interference, albeit from opposite sides of the field, for continued slack regulation on foreign investment.  The ethnicity of foreign purchasers is a red herring.

The real issues are that extensive foreign investment is driving up the price of rural land to an extent that it is unaffordable for many would-be New Zealand farmers to own their own farms. High land prices also force farmers to make the maximum possible return from their land through ecologically unsustainable farming practices. The consequences of this are increased greenhouse gas emissions, increasingly polluted waterways, loss of biodiversity and poor animal welfare practices.  Increased repatriation of profits overseas by foreign-owned farms will also continue to drive the widening of the current account deficit.

Williamson and English do a disservice to the debate on foreign investment by trying to divert if from the genuine economic and ecological concerns of New Zealanders to a debate about racism and race.

My concern is about what I see potentially unfolding and that is quite large tracts of New Zealand land coming available for sale rapidly and the consolidation of those farms in foreign hands and whether that’s in New Zealand’s best interests, and my view is, it’s not.

However, the same article contains a disturbingly xenophobic comment from the Minister responsible for the Overseas Investment Act review, Finance Minister Bill English:

English said his review of the act was “reasonably complex” and he was working to try and “tie down” possible rule changes.

Public debate over the issue “would benefit from more information” such as where most buyers were based.

“Just a tiny fraction of approvals are from countries outside of the UK and the US, France and the Netherlands,” he said.

Where foreign investors come from is totally irrelevant to the issue.  As Russel Norman pointed out in his response to English, it is the scale of the sales, rather than the origin of the investors, that is of concern.

Foreign investment is driving up the price of rural land to an extent that it is unaffordable for many would-be New Zealand farmers to own their own farms.  High land prices are driving farmers to make the maximum possible return from their land through ecologically unsustainable farming practices; resulting in polluted waterways, increased greenhouse gas emissions, poor animal welfare practices, and loss of biodiversity.  Increased repatriation of profits overseas by foreign-owned farms will continue to drive the widening of the current account deficit.

John Key should be telling his Finance Minister these are the issues he should be focusing his Overseas Investment Act review on, rather than pandering to the underbelly of New Zealand society whose only concern about foreign investment is that it is from “nice white people like me”.

It’s worth noting that the current rules are way too weak – over the last 5 years around 150,000 ha of farm land has gone into overseas ownership. That’s under the current overseas investment rules, the size of Stewart island.

It was these rules that National wanted to weaken and Labour wanted to keep the same – Phil Goff said in March 2009 that “there were some “technical issues” that could be improved in the overseas investment regime, but its fundamentals were sound.”

Of course they are not sound.

The ridiculous thing is that Bill set up a technical reference group to give him secret advice on the issue and one of those who met with him to give him secret advice was the lawyer acting for the Chinese company trying to buy the crafar farms. There were no minutes taken of the meeting – at least that’s what they have told the Finance and Expenditure Committee when we tried to get them – which is pretty weird. How exactly does Treasury take their views into account when no notes are taken of their views?

Bill got very grumpy when I asked him about ths in the House today.

Much of the post-Budget debate has been focused on whether John Key and Bill English’s prescription for the country’s finances will increase or decrease the gap between rich and poor.

Despite assuring us that he cares about inequality, Mr English reckons the gap will stay about the same. But many – including the Green Party – disagree, arguing that the combination of a GST increase that hits low-income families proportionately hardest and a tax cut that delivers the most benefit to those on high incomes will certainly widen the income chasm.

This is important, because New Zealand is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world, according to both the OECD and the UN.

It’s also important because there’s very strong evidence to suggest that the bigger the gap between rich and poor, the worse off we are in all income brackets. The starkest example of this is life expectancy: even someone in the highest income bracket in a country with a high degree of inequality can expect to die earlier than their counterpart in a more equal society.

Clearly, growing inequality is something we should all be concerned about.

However, an alternative take on issues of inequality has emerged, explored by Colin James in the Dominion Post. This view argues that having a big gap between rich and poor doesn’t matter per se, as long as people (or their children) have the opportunity to bridge that gap and move up the social and economic ladder.

This is a common refrain, most famously encapsulated overseas in ‘the American dream’ – the idea that US citizens of every rank can achieve a better, richer, and happier life.

There is no doubt that social mobility is vitally important. If people can’t overcome adverse circumstances, our most vulnerable citizens are condemned to a bleak existence with no hope of a better future for themselves and their families.

But we must not ignore the growing gap between rich and poor in the belief that social mobility will make up for it – quite the opposite.

The evidence shows that having a bigger gap between rich and poor actually reduces social mobility.

This was the conclusion of an OECD report in February, and last year economists from Harvard and the Australian National University concluded that “moving from rags to riches is harder in more unequal countries”.

In their groundbreaking book on inequality The Spirit Level, British researchers Wilkinson and Pickett devote a whole chapter to showing the different ways that entrenched inequality reduces social mobility.

And studies comparing the US to more egalitarian European and Scandinavian countries have found conclusively that the US has both the highest level of inequality and the lowest level of social mobility of all the countries studied.

Sadly, it seems ‘the American dream’ no longer has any basis in reality.

Everyone loves a good rags to riches story: John Key, the state-house kid turned millionaire and now Prime Minister; Paula Bennett, one-time DPB mum, now welfare-reforming Social Development Minister. Even my own journey to Parliament has elements of this popular narrative: I was a solo mum on the DPB before I took advantage of open access to university and started my law degree.

But it’s important to look at the conditions which enabled these high-profile examples of social mobility. John, Paula and I have all benefitted from the world-class social safety net that New Zealand has, or at least, used to have.

John and Paula, whose own social mobility was enabled by sound state housing and welfare provisions, are busy kicking out the ladder behind them: slashing the budget for state housing, cracking down on beneficiaries, shifting the tax burden onto low-income New Zealanders, and generally making it harder for others to emulate their success.

Is this the kind of social mobility we really want? The kind that says I’ll take what I can get, thanks, and too bad for everyone else?

There is another version of social mobility, which is about making sure that everyone has access to the basics, and giving everyone a fair go.

The same OECD research which found social mobility was lower in countries with a big gap between rich and poor also found that progressive tax and benefit policies aimed at providing income support and access to education for disadvantaged families can promote greater social mobility.

It is precisely by moving to close the gap between rich and poor that we can move towards the egalitarian ideal we New Zealanders prize.

As you know, we have released an eight-point plan to combat growing inequality in New Zealand entitled ‘Mind the Gap’. Implementing the solutions it proposes would go a long way towards both closing the growing gap between rich and poor, and enabling greater, fairer social mobility in the process.

I’ve also been working on ideas for solutions to the growing gap between rich and poor in New Zealand, and this morning I’ve launched a major package of eight practical ideas to reduce inequality. Here I am at the launch earlier today.

We’ve called this package ‘Mind the Gap’, and it is the third tranche of our Green New Deal initiatives for dealing with the biggest social, economic, and environmental challenges facing New Zealand. The Green New Deal is what a Green Government would be doing right now to address these challenges. You can read or download ‘Mind the Gap’ here.

On Thursday Bill English will deliver this Government’s second Budget. These solutions should be in there. But sadly, this Budget will be about helping those who have the most, not those who have the least.

John Key and Bill English have choices in this Budget. Inequality is driving health, social, and economic problems, and costing taxpayers billions of dollars per year. An investment in reducing inequality now would pay dividends in reduced costs in future.

We know this Budget will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on tax cuts to the wealthy, and pay for it with a GST rise that will hit those on low incomes hardest.

If John Key and Bill English choose instead to introduce a comprehensive capital gains tax (exempting the family home), they would raise around $4.5 billion per year in the long term, that could be invested in other measures to reduce inequality – like a tax-free threshold of $10,000, a progressive pricing system for electricity, extending the In-Work Tax Credit to every low income family who needs it, reintroducing the Special Benefit, building new state and community housing, and ensuring security of rental tenure.

It’s all about choice and priorities. A Green Government would make reducing inequality one of its highest priorities, and we would start with these solutions.

How about you?

As the NZEI have pointed out today, spending on ECE is an investment, not a cheap way to balance the books. In fact, it is one of the most important areas for investment not only for educational outcomes, but for all manner of social issues.

Metiria blogged yesterday about the links between inequality and educational performance. Well, the sooner inequalities start to entrench themselves, the harder it is to overcome them, which is why early childhood education is so important. The authors of The Spirit Level, an important book which is changing the nature of debate about inequality throughout the developed world, have this to say about education:

Early childhood education programmes can foster physical and cognitive development, as well as social and emotional development. They can alter the long-term trajectories of children’s lives, and cost-benefit analyses show that they are high-yield investments. In experiments, disadvantaged children who have recevied high-quality early childhood education are less likely to need remedial education, less likely to become involved in crime, and they earn more as adults. All of this adds up to a substantial return on government investments in such programmes.

It makes me sick to think this Government would ignore evidence like this to make such a short-sighted decision. Changing the 20 hours free early childhood policy would have serious impacts on participation and mean a big step backwards.

I just don’t buy the words of a Finance Minister who can justify messing with ECE to “balance the books” on one hand, yet somehow find an extra $35 million for private schools on the other.

And as for the Education Minister, who said on 1 April that “quality early childhood education and care is a high priority for the Government”, what was that, an April Fool’s joke?

I see Trevor Mallard and David Farrar have jumped into the issue on their blogs today, although neither have got it quite right.

One of the things the ECAN Act does is make it more likely that the planned dam on the Hurunui River will go ahead.

Last year, a bunch of environmental groups applied for a Water Conservation Order on the Hurunui River, in part to stop the dam.

David Carter owns a farm in the Hurunui district, very close to the proposed boundaries of the area that will be irrigated if the dam goes ahead.

(Proposed area for irrigation outlined in pink, Carter’s property outlined in purple).

Although his farm is not inside this area, he stands to benefit financially from the irrigation scheme because his existing consent to irrigate is subject to minimum flow restrictions. There may be occasions when the property cannot be irrigated when the river drops below minimum flow. If the HWP goes ahead and dams are built in the upper reaches, they would have to guarantee 100% reliability to existing water takers from the Hurunui River. This would mean greater security for the Minister’s consent, and potential increased property values and productivity for his property.

I think this is a potential conflict of interest that the Minister should have declared when Cabinet was discussing ECAN. After all, the Act makes it easier for an irrigation scheme to go ahead, and he stands to benefit financially from that scheme.

Worse, the Minister seems to have inappropriately tried to intervene in the Water Conservation Order process. He approached the people who applied for the Water Conservation order at a function in September last year and asked them to freeze their application, even though there was a judicial process underway.

And perhaps worst of all, on 29 September, after this conversation had taken place, I asked the following written question of the Minister:

Has he discussed an appeal on the special tribunal’s report on a Water Conservation Order application on the Hurunui River with any party; if so, who, when and what was the nature of that discussion?

Carter had nine days to consider his reply, before on 8 October 2009 answering “No.”

From time to time Ministers make mistakes answering Parliamentary questions. This usually happens with Questions for Oral Answer, when a Minister gives a spur of the moment answer to a supplementary question of which he or she has had no notice that is later shown to be wrong. In those circumstances, the Minister usually makes a personal explanation to the House later that day or the next sitting day explaining his or her mistake.

It’s less common with written questions, when Ministers have a working week to consider their reponses.

Given that it is Easter recess, Carter has over a fortnight before Parliament resumes to ponder his personal explanation of how, back in October last year, his recollection of then recent events was so faulty.

He will probably have a little longer to ponder his explanation to the Auditor General of why, as someone is potentially personally affected by any decision on the Hurunui Water Conservation Order application or by the construction of the proposed Hurunui irrigation dam, he considered it appropriate to involve himself as a Minister at all.