John MacDonald: Fuel relief plan is focusing on the wrong people

I reckon the Government is going about this fuel price rescue package the wrong way. It seems to think it's doing the right thing picking low-to-middle income earners who, it assumes, are struggling to pay the higher fuel prices.  Of course, someone on the minimum wage, for example, is going to be harder hit by $3.30, $3.40, $3.50 a litre than someone earning $100K. Finance Minister Nicola Willis says the people the Government wants to help are the working New Zealanders who have little option each day but to get in the car and drive to work. It wants to avoid a blanket cut to the fuel tax and it doesn't want to invent a new scheme of income assistance from scratch.  As the Minister puts it, she wants something that doesn't involve any paperwork. Which sounds like tax credits to me. But I think the Government needs to lift its sights and think a little bit more strategically about this.  It should be thinking about the wider consequences of higher fuel prices, however long they continue. And, instead of paying a few bucks to people on the lower pay grades, what it should be doing is providing support or providing interventions for the likes of food growers, food manufacturers, the transport and logistics sectors. Because all of those groups, they're paying higher fuel prices. But they don't just suck them up like your average motorist does. They pass them on, don't they?  Which means the low-to-middle income people being compensated for spending more on diesel and petrol for their vehicles will still be paying more for their bread and their fruit and their veggies. Any savings will just be cancelled-out by costs passed on to them from the food processors or producers, the manufacturers, the transport sector and the farmers at the supermarket checkout.  Maybe the Government's trying to avoid the type of criticism that would inevitably come its way if it did what I think it should be doing. Because there would be no shortage of people saying it was just looking after its people and the fat cat farmers and the corporate food manufacturers.  Can't you hear it? But all the Government would have to say to quieten-down those people is that, if it didn‘t, they’d be paying more anyway. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.