In your last column a whinging letter writer lucked on to exactly the right question.
"Why have we become so useless?"
He asked how a small country which built itself a huge infrastructure of roads, hydro dams and social security, had become a larger country run with such profound incompetence, that it can’t even pay its running costs.
Our forebears built the House of Kiwi. Today we can’t find the money to repaint its roof, and don’t even show up to mow the lawns.
How this happened is simply described. Decades of government mission creep have finally lifted its spending to the lofty summit of "Peak Stupid."
From peak stupid we presently gaze towards an even dumber future.
It’s a future where "innovative" education means many Kiwis can’t read a microwave dinner’s instructions. Where our best brains must escape our clutches. Where we’ll drive slower than our nannas. Where hospital waits are worse than Air New Zealand phone queues.
Where we tell overseas farmers: "Don’t worry that it is YOU guys who create 99.9% of ruminant methanol. We’re proud to announce that our guys — being world beaters — will undertake some very costly chemotherapy on your behalf."
You claimed these problems could be solved if government took away spending on "nice but not truly necessary services" and used it to fund the "must have" services.
Fine thoughts, but you’re being unrealistic. Government doesn’t understand how to shrink. It won’t take itself off to Jenny Craig. All it can do is tax more and grow more. On and on, like a fat man remorselessly eating himself to death.
DIS Custard
Thanks for the thought of dispatching Government to Jenny Craig. You don’t think Weight Watchers might do? However,
"It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money."
Thus wrote P.J. O’Rourke, in Parliament of Whores. I think "misguided" effort, and "fanciful" planning, would be closer to the truth, but why try improving on America’s finest political satirist?
The worst legacy of Britain’s Fifty Day PM, Liz Truss, is that her crazy timing made tax cuts seem unrespectable. That’s fine for now. But it lets governments avoid the better second path to keeping the ship of state afloat — that is, mending its spewing leaks.
My last Uncle Norm noted NZ Initiative research figured one-third of government money gets wasted — $20 billion a year. A dozen new Dunedin Hospitals. Some waste is laughably clear (like our Pacific Ambassador for Gender Equality), but much is hidden, just like the submerged 90% of the iceberg which lay waiting to gut the Titanic.
In the private sector, a company which can’t control costs, or has wild schemes that fail, is despatched. It can no longer keep sucking its creditors dry. Not so with the public sector. Government is a business that, failure or not, keeps on sucking
So — where do we go?
Solving the cash problems of government doesn’t require any huge breakthrough in management technique. The answers are found in Housekeeping 101.
We are running out of money for roads and hospitals because government has moved into too many roles. Because it has decided to do more than most of us ask or even imagine we want. And none of this helped by its attitude to other people’s money being no better than a casino owner’s.
Right now it needs a Chief Accountant who carries a very big stick, plus a CEO who insists it is used.
And the opposition? We don’t yet know Christopher Luxton’s reformist stripes, because as the National Party’s leader, his relative silence follows Napoleon’s advice on how to win battles: "Never interrupt the enemy when they’re making mistakes."
The polls are indicating Luxton will probably win next year’s election helped by Act doing the harder yards on subjects like public squander.
Their main challenge won’t be reducing taxes. It will be the grinding task of raising very large amounts of money by meticulously harvesting cash from the billions of waste. Much of it is low-hanging fruit. They’ll have to work tree to tree.
A large chunk of their problem will be working with a public service that has been diverted from the nuts and bolts.
This month the Waikato DHB is hiring a sparky for Thames Hospital. Their job description expects this electrician has "cultural competence", and will play their Te Tiriti-inspired part in eliminating inequities and ensuring cultural safety.
In its own odd manner, the screwed-up job description sums up the loss of focus by Government. What Thames Hospital needs is a proficient guy or girl who shows up with a smile and knows their way around a screwdriver. But it sounds like they’re hiring a missionary.
— John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
