Claire Trevett: Cost-of-living payment Groundhog Day for Government

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Mark Mitchell

It's back! The second installment of the cost-of-living payment trilogy has hit the cinema and started with a plot twist: a bloodied nose for the Government from the Auditor-General.

For the Government the trilogy is less like Lord of the Rings, and more like Groundhog Day watched three times over as its Budget centrepiece – the $350 cost-of-living payment – makes its way into people's bank accounts near and far.

The second of three monthly payments is out this week after the dramas of the first payments last month, which saw the Government come under fire after people overseas – and possibly some dead people – got the payment.

This time round, the Government is hoping there will be fewer of them after Inland Revenue (IRD) introduced more screening to try to pick up whether recipients were overseas or not. The trouble is that it has proved difficult to close the net completely – and the effort to do so may mean some people who are eligible may not get it.

The opposition Act and National parties are happy as pigs in muck about it: the cost-of-living payment provides them with the perfect case study, delivered on a plate with all the trimmings, for their argument that the Labour Government is "sloppy" when it comes to spending taxpayers' money.

They have had some help from a raised eyebrow from the Auditor-General, who has said the Government should have done better to make sure the money was going to its intended targets – and that it was unacceptable it did not know how much of it was going to the wrong people.

The best we have had in that regard was from Revenue Minister David Parker – a fan of the Australian movie The Castle. Parker declared last month that about 1 per cent of it was going amiss – a figure he seems to have drawn from "the vibe" of The Castle's lawyer Danny Denuto since IRD said it was impossible to say whether it was accurate.

The Prime Minister was never going to buckle to the Opposition's calls for an apology to the taxpayers.

Ardern pointed out in Parliament that National's solution to the cost-of-living crisis, tax cuts, was a much more expensive and less targeted one that would give a lot of money to people who did not need it, and not so much to people who did.

Nonetheless, it is embarrassing for a Government to be scolded by the Auditor-General for its stewardship of taxpayers' money, no matter how well-intentioned its aims.

If the Government had thought that the beauty of its design was in its simplicity – simply rolling it out to anyone who had an income of less than $70,000 - it has learned otherwise.

The Prime Minister refused the Opposition's demands that she apologise for frittering away an unknown amount of money to people overseas, maintaining the good the package delivered to those who needed it outweighed the bad.

She will nonetheless be relieved when the third and final payments are out of the way in a month's time and the monthly pillorying ends.

That second $116.67 tranche will land in the accounts of the needy and some not-so-needy from Thursday. Brace for landing.