Apparently the last sighted, the thirty-first, Womble was from New Zealand: named Uncle Dunedin. Unknown even to close followers of the hugely popular time-lapse animation series, Uncle Dunedin has a close relative further north called Cousin Wigram. Here she is, spotted in the wild, buttoning up: something she has become quite good at.
Wombles were famous for their thrift and economy, recycling everything possible. Cousin Wigram is economical too: with the truth.
When Cousin Wigram rose in the house to deliver her ‘maiden speech’ to Parliament and, therefore, New Zealand, she fibbed. She is a naughty Womble: claiming to have completed her ‘thesis’, her magnum opus following fully ten years of university (yes: a decade), on the subject of social housing and the building of. That’s a long bow to stretch of a document proclaiming as a title: “Integrating the Nation: Gendering Maori Urbanisation and Integration, 1942-1969”, don’t you think?
Put another way: Cousin Wigram’s thesis contains zero instances of the phrase “house construction”, it doesn’t occur at all, but “gender” or “gendered” appears 281 times (almost once for every page), “beauty” 156 times and “cosmetics” 41. Draw your own conclusions.
Thanks to this extensive ‘knowledge’ of social housing schemes she found herself thrust upon the Housing portfolio where on January 1st, 2020, she announced, without actually announcing it publicly at all, that Kainga-Ora, as it’s known now, would increase borrowing up to about $7,000,000,000 to ‘invest’ in housing, otherwise known as Labour’s re-election chances. Seven billion is a lot of money: nationally significant.
Cousin Wigram is known as a mover-and-a-shaker but this move shakes the economy, looks shady, fools no one and costs taxpayers hugely. Taking on this debt as a crown entity, rather than through regular government borrowings, in cahoots with yet another covert Womble – Cousin Robbo – is a poor attempt to disguise total government indebtedness and costs the taxpayer plenty due to several points higher interest rates incurred by the off-the-books borrowing.
Treasury warned about such mickey-mousery when Twyford mooted borrowing a mere $2B off-the-books in 2018, saying the move was
undermining the reputation of New Zealand as a borrower and increasing borrowing costs across Government
and estimating it would cost taxpayers an extra $11 million per year at the time.
What’s all this extra round-about borrowing set to needlessly cost? Well, on a pro-rata basis it would now have to be around $25 Million tax dollars every single year diverted away from actual houses and towards debt obligations. That’s a disgraceful waste, and a completely unnecessary burden to lumber us with, shamelessly performed for the cheap thrill of simple public ‘optics’- to maintain the shabby ‘we have debt under control’ charade.
What more did we expect from Cousin Wigram? The cynical move is simply debt disguised, covered-up, just very, very expensive cosmetics that we should have seen coming; after all, that was the subject of her PhD thesis don’t y’know.
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