The government's creative storytelling must be addressed

Today, I'm happy to share a guest post from one of the best people I know. My dear friend Helen Gilby is so bright and so funny. And y’all loved her last posts, Seymour's Aotearoa: How to Lose a Country in 10 Clauses and America: Making the Reich great again, and her personal essay I'm the 'deserving poor' and you could easily become me. 

So I asked her to write another piece for us. And she did!

I’m really grateful that because of paid subscribers, I can commission and pay for pieces from other writers in Aotearoa x over to Helen!

National's strategy of misleading the public

• Helen Gilby

I’m counted as a ‘failure’ by a lot of the metrics National like to throw around. I’m a solo parent, I failed School Certificate maths, and I have been on a benefit in the past. I probably tick most of their hate boxes.

My abject failure of high school maths is now a little ironic, because lately I’ve found myself reading government reports to understand what Louise Upston, Minister for Social Development and Employment, has been telling us about the so-called 'long-term beneficiary dependence'.  

When I started poking around some of the stats Upston’s been parroting at every opportunity, I had to check twice and then make sure I still understood what mean, median and mode are.

If I’d known this much maths would come in handy, I might’ve paid attention in school instead of figuring out how to wag next period.

It turns out the numbers tell a very different story from the one being shouted at us.

The figures Upston keeps quoting actually come from the Ministry of Social Development’s own annual reports and the Long-term Insights Briefing: Preparing All Young People for Satisfying and Rewarding Working Lives, which tracks outcomes for people leaving the benefit system each year.

The latest MSD report follows 125,400 people who left a main benefit in the year to June 2023, tracking what happened to them up to June 2024.

It found that 61.9 percent, about 77,600 people, went into work, tertiary study, or training, and 55.7 percent went straight into employment.

Despite a tougher economy in 2023 and 2024, almost 46 percent of those who entered work stayed employed for a full year. That's higher than pre-COVID levels.

Upston's narrative about “dependency” ignores that this data already excludes people who return to benefits within a month, and that many who remain off benefit support are in low-paid or insecure work. It also misses how people in casual, seasonal, or part-time jobs often end up being counted back into the system between contracts or when work dries up temporarily.

This means they're racking up “years on a benefit” even while they’re working most of the time.

The numbers make it sound like long-term dependence, but what they really show is the instability of low-wage work.

It also overlooks that 8.3 percent of people who left the system did so by leaving the country altogether, which probably says more about New Zealand’s wage structure than about motivation.

And here’s the kicker: that stat Upston loves to throw around, the one about the average beneficiary being on a benefit for 18 years, isn’t what she makes it sound like.

It’s a modelling estimate from MSD that projects how long people might receive a main benefit over their lifetime, things like Jobseeker, Sole Parent Support, or Supported Living Payment.

It’s not a stopwatch counting 18 straight years on welfare, and it definitely doesn’t apply to everyone.

The number includes people who’ll always need support because of disability, as well as people who are working casually or part-time and dip in and out of eligibility.

But Upston’s been selling it like every young person who signs up for Jobseeker is settling in for two decades of couch time.

It’s the political version of a Tinder profile, technically true, just taken at sunset with three filters and a very generous definition of “outdoorsy.”

Meanwhile, the Long-term Insights Briefing paints a much more grounded picture of what’s actually happening for young people.

It shows that 22 percent of those aged 16 to 24 spend more than half those years in “limited employment,” meaning under-employed, part-time, or cycling between study and short-term work.

It lists the factors that drive this: poverty, housing insecurity, leaving school early, lack of a driver’s licence, and being a young parent.

Māori, Pacific, disabled youth, and young mothers are most affected.

The briefing describes these as systemic, not moral failings.

If Upston is reading these same reports, how does she get from “structural inequality” to “lazy youth ruining the economy”?

Upston isn’t alone in creative storytelling.

Judith Collins recently "mixed up her messages" and told the public that teachers with ten years’ experience were on $140,000.

In reality, that was the top of the pay band for senior leadership roles, not the average classroom teacher standing in front of thirty students every day, trying to teach fractions while also managing the ones like me, who were daydreaming and planning how to wag next period.

It’s become a theme.

Simeon Brown waves around infrastructure numbers that ignore inflation and cost blowouts.

Collins and Stanford announce “average” pay rises that include only the highest earners.

And Upston’s been making it sound like the biggest threat to the economy is an eighteen-year-old with a backpack and a part-time café job.

National have taken the kind of tactics you usually find in real estate advertising and applied them to government statistics.

The language is all careful exaggeration and selective framing, “up-and-coming area,” “minor wear and tear,” “great bones.” It’s probably not a coincidence we’ve seen a noticeable uptick in ex-Nats becoming real estate agents. Here’s looking at you, Paula Bennett...

National are standing true to form, blaming anyone but themselves for how the economy’s performing, lower than your standards on a Friday night in 2002 when it’s a two-for-one special on house wine.

They’ve decided there’s nothing for you to see here, and please don’t ask hard questions.

Instead, they’ll tell you the reason you’re struggling with the cost of living, the reason the country has no money, is because of eighteen-year-old school leavers.

The fact is, National are lying to us.

They’re obfuscating information, cherry-picking figures, and misleading the public.

It’s only when unions, teachers, and nurses push back that the record gets corrected because young people don’t have a union to defend them, so the spin sticks.

This raises an important question for us, and for politicians: When does glossing over something descend into outright lying?

This constant stream of disingenuous information, half-truths dressed up as facts, is doing more than confusing people. It’s eroding trust in democracy itself.

If you can’t trust what you’re being told, why would you bother trying to change it?

Maybe the numbers were never the problem.
Maybe it’s the people writing them.

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