Entry 2329, on 2024-03-04 at 21:27:37 (Rating 2, Comments)
There are certain things which are technically legal and within the rules but are still quite reasonably thought of as bad. Sometimes they can even be justified by looking logically at the benefits against the drawbacks. But even then, they are usually still bad.
This particularly applies in politics, where perceptions are often more important than reality, so politicians and other public figures need to be particularly aware of this. By now, if you live in New Zealand, you might already know of an example of this phenomenon. Yes, it our new prime minister and the payments he accepted to pay for his accomodation in our capital city, Wellington.
The PM is already pretty rich, having been, amongst other things, CEO of our national airline, and he is being well paid as prime minister too. He owns seven houses, and one is worth almost $8 million, so he's not short of cash.
And one of the major policy directions of his government is saving money by cutting back on existing services and downsizing government departments. So you might think at this point that he might want to set an example by saving the taxpayer a bit on what we pay for his accomodation.
But apparently not.
He initially accepted a payment of $1000 per week to pay for accomodation in Wellington - in an apartment he owns. Was he entitled to this? Yes. Do other politicians accept similar payments? Yes. Was it within the rules and not illegal in any way? Yes. Should he have done it? No.
It really is a bad look. How can you respect a person who tells everyone else to save money for the benefit of the country yet accepts a payment himself which he doesn't really need? You really can't. And the fact that he is now repaying it shows he at least accepts his error, or maybe he is just trying to make the best of a bad situation.
Note that I did vote for a party (Act) which is part of the government that the PM leads, and I don't necessarily think he is a bad prime minister, although so far I certainly don't think he's a good one either. To be fair, I can't think of any good ones, so that doesn't necessarily mean much!
You might say that $52,000 to allow a good leader to live in the center of government of the country could easily result in that being paid back many times over if he does a good job, but that's not really the point. As I said above, it's about perceptions, and the fact that he didn't even think of that shows he is either politically naive (he's quite new to politics so that's a fair explanation) of very entitled (also possible, considering his senior management positions).
I also have to say that this is a very common problem.
Maybe the greatest demonstration of a total inability to understand how their actions are perceived is the people who attend climate conferences. Large numbers of private jets (400 of them in the most recent one, see my blog post titled "No More Leaders" from 2021-11-11) fly from all over the world, emitting a lot of carbon into the atmosphere, to a conference aimed at reducing the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere.
Again, it's possible that if the conference is successful the amount of atmospheric carbon saved might be a lot more than the amount released by the jets of the leaders at the meeting, but again that's not the point. If the elites are asking the rest of us to make sacrifices to save the climate (let's not even get started about whether climate change is real or not) then it's hard to take them seriously when they won't make sacrifices themselves.
It might be legal. It might be practical. But it's a still a bad look.
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