Mike's Minute: How arrogant of the Waitangi Tribunal to ask for more money

Is it gall, is it cheek, or is it comedic? 

The Waitangi Tribunal has been reviewed, and the review recommends it needs more people and more money. 

It is strained, says the review. They are of course technically correct. It is strained because the Waitangi Tribunal is busy. 

It is busy with “urgent”, and we use that word loosely, numbers of gripes and grievances around the general state and status of Māori, or more accurately, a small selection of Māori who have seen for years and decades now the Tribunal as an almost endless source of respite in their never-ending list of grievances. 

This is a classic make-work programme. 

Puff your chest out, inflate your sense of self-importance, busy yourself with a myriad of invented tasks and then in the review, guess what? You are overworked and under-resourced. 

The Government is going to do something about all this and, unfortunately for people like me, they are not moving nearly fast enough. 

As we have said a number of times, the Tribunal is well past its useful life. 

The idea that it addressed historic wrongs has come and gone. 

Deadlines should have been placed years ago on those wanting to argue their case, with expiry dates on applications and negotiations. 

All Governments have failed miserably to this point on the discipline required in that area. 

But now it's down to ongoing dabbling in matters of the day that carry no weight and have a growing amount of political agitation about them. 

It's simply a jacked-up, grievance mechanism funded by the taxpayer to supply ammo to the gravy-trainers for an ongoing, if not neverending, list of woe. 

It takes gall in a broke country with cutbacks all around you to then go and ask for yet more resource. 

But then that’s the Tribunal isn't it? Political, wasteful, past its use-by-date and clearly arrogant. 

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