This is how phony-crony public-private bullshit-business works. The government announces a scheme costing you and I nearly half-a-billion dollars. Moochers and looters graciously assemble to hoover up riches they couldn’t earn honestly. And when all begins to go pear-shaped, honest businessmen and women are left to pick up the pieces.
Latest example: the Key/Green home insulation subsidy, set up to buy votes by throwing pork at insulation installers. The collapse of Wellington-based Energy Smart shows the sort of vermin schemes like this attract—i.e., people unable to make an honest buck—and the consequences of their foray into the wider business world.
Energy Smart (sic) was set up to suck up taxpayers money by city councillors from Hutt City, Wellington and Greater Wellington, and a former chief executive of the Public Trust. Moochers all of them. But even when taking money straight from the trough, and “having carried out five per cent of the 115,000 retrofits across the country since it began in June 2009,” they couldn’t make their “business” work, leaving suppliers from Auckland to Christchurch out of pocket by a seven-figure sum.
Such is the way these schemes work. Such are the scum they attract. Sure, this is not as bad a result as Australia’s insulation subsidy scheme, that cost several people their houses and four installers their lives. But not having killed anyone is not a good enough standard by which to judge the dispensing of taxpayers’ money and government favours.
Best just to not dole them out at all, eh.
[Hat tip for the story to commenter Tribeless]
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