A rort is still a rort whether welfare or 'organising affairs'

OPINION: I was but a chit of a thing, a wide-eyed ingenue, when I noticed the difference between the middle class and everyone else when it came to objectionable behaviour. Yet strangely, all new evidence startles me afresh.

I saw it first as a student, watching law students, in particular, get away with vandalism and offensive acts that would likely have sent factory workers of the same age to prison.

In tweed jackets, their hair slicked down, with the right rounded vowels, they appeared in the dock represented by others of their kind, and were judged by yet more of their kind.

They were invariably discharged under section 42 - whatever that meant - and their doting parents gave suitable sums of money to charity in gratitude.

They were untouchable, a swaggering private school-educated elite, and it still takes a lot for me to like them. I knew about their shoplifting, their destruction of public property, their sexual assaults, their drunken vomiting, even their destruction of evidence, and I'd grown up in the sort of family that never gets away with anything, for the simple reason that it had neither money, guile nor connections. And so the world goes.

What became of those wankers? Well, I thought of them last week with the report to Building and Construction Minister Maurice Williamson, the one that pointed out the rorts going on in the leaky homes crisis.

It should have come as no surprise that a growing number of leaky home owners, according to consultants PriceWaterhouse, come out of the claims process without enough cash for repairs once legal bills and experts' fees are paid.

There are, of course decent lawyers; people attracted to the law for the best and most generous of motives. There are the high-minded, and then there are the rest. Either way, ordinary people - people like my family was - never come out of interacting with them without having their pockets stripped and the small change shaken out of their purses.

The leaky homes crisis is an appalling state of affairs. It has robbed people of their money, their homes, their security and wellbeing. And naturally it has become a business opportunity for those who are more fortunate - professional people of high standing in the community.

To win compensation under such a system is pyrrhic, a victory in name only, and all the worse for being called a victory when it's a defeat - of hope, of rights, of justice. It seems the same sort of people do well in law school still.

"We are seeing a rise in the number of claims where the homeowner is being managed by a cartel," the reports says, where lawyers refer suckers to their own experts, who in turn get reports from a connected chain of more experts of possibly dubious competence or honesty.

There's one of us born every minute, and two of them for every one of us. What great dinner parties they must have, and what lush investment portfolios. And we get irate about people on welfare snaffling a few extra bucks.

More middle-class rortery was revealed last week in rip-offs in the Working for Families scheme. Treasury and Inland Revenue have reported that more than 9700 families claim the tax credit while at the same time owning rental properties, and claiming losses on them to offset other income.

Where I came from this would have been called dishonest. Where they come from it's called, as Finance Minister Bill English put it, "organising their affairs".

I need hardly point out that English until very recently organised his own affairs by having the taxpayer fork out $900 a week for him to live in his own home.

Others on high incomes, we're told, use trading companies, sheltered within trusts, to lower their taxable income, so they can pocket thousands of dollars in tax credits that were actually intended for struggling low and middle-income families.

There I go again, shocked at middle- class venality. But the government seems to be signalling a more laid- back, realistic approach than mine.

"It may well be we just leave the tax system as it is, that's one possibility," English said - and he a fellow who read poetry at university with broadcaster John Campbell, not law at all.

There is no reason why the middle class should be more virtuous than people who live closer to the bread line, but the well-off become odious when they castigate the poor for being no better than they are themselves. What is a beneficiary doing but "organising their affairs" when they find a new route to extra welfare they might not be entitled to without a bit of guile?

And if you argue that it's different - they're robbing the taxpayer - that's exactly what wealthier people do when they so cleverly avoid paying their share of tax, leaving honest people to pay for what the country needs.

- © Fairfax NZ News