You can call it a success, because it's offering the greatest opportunity to all. Subsidising the poorest workers with the tax dollars of the highest paid New Zealanders for the benefit of the next generation. An example of a caring, inclusive society.
Or you can look at it another way, which is how Fran O'Sullivan saw it in yesterday's NZ Herald.
She said it is really quite disturbing that the Government is having to fund a massive increase in Working for Families tax credits and the level of the accommodation supplement simply because for many families their take-home pay packets are not sufficient to live on.
She says it's evidence that New Zealand is failing in terms of wage growth. She uses the term stagnating. Stagnant productivity. Stagnant export growth. Low wages in a high cost economy. And because the Budget concentrated on helping people who get paid and still can't live on what they earn then it lacked a real vision of growth.
So you can call it a failure, because Working For Families is proof that 1.3 million families can't pay their way in the world we created.