Do you want some savings? 

I have found a couple of hundred million for you then. 

A report out has looked at who gets the Winter Energy Payment. It's a shedload of money that is yet again going to be doled out this month for the colder period, so oldies don’t freeze to death. 

It's one of the more shameful decisions of this new Government and reminded me of the Christchurch Call, which they also inexplicably carried on with. 

The Christchurch Call isn't that expensive, but it is a grandiose truckload of virtue signalling, psychobabble that, as information revealed this week shows, has achieved basically nothing but “feels”. 

If a new Government was looking for easy day one savings, that would have been a goodie and the Winter Energy Payment would not have been far behind. 

So, the detail is that 53% of those getting superannuation don’t need a heating top up. They have enough to look after themselves. 

So why do they get it? 

Well, that’s Labour all over, isn't it? It's a high trust model. You can opt out if you like. But who does? No one. 

So, the waste builds. With that 53%, if you didn’t hand it out you have just saved $205 million. 

Now, you can only blame Labour until someone else comes along to re-introduce a bit of reality to the room. 

Except the new lot decided not to. 

It's not dissimilar to John Key who thought Working For Families was communism by stealth, until he decided to carry on with the programme. Here it is to this day, churning through billions as you work and pay your taxes only for them to take your money, have an entire battalion of public servants rifle through your entitlements and, if you are lucky, hand some of it back. 

It is ruinously wasteful. 

I assume someone, somewhere thought about the slightly simpler idea of you keeping the money in the first place so you don’t need the paperwork and hassle of trying to repatriate it. Of course, if they did it that way they wouldn’t have a financial hold over you, which of course is what a previous Labour Government had in mind when they invented it. 

So, we end up with $205 million in wasted money. 

Clearly not all money saving ideas have been exhausted.