One of New Zealand’s biggest drug busts uncovered, the new policy threatening 20 years behind bars for Kiwis in Bali and Florida braces for another ferocious storm.
Opinion by Richard Prebble
Richard Prebble is a former Labour Party minister and Act Party leader.
The Government has issued the latest 90-day plan for the final quarter of the year.
It is focused on infrastructure and has 43 actions.
The GDPLive website says New Zealand’s GDP annual growth rate is 0.113%.
Richard Prebble is a former Labour Party minister and Act Party leader. He currently holds a number of directorships.
OPINION
Bureaucratic inertia defeated the last two governments. To find a significant achievement by a government we must go back to Michael Cullen’s KiwiSaver Scheme.
It was not for thelack of inspirational goals. Labour’s “ending child poverty”, “zero road toll”, “smokefree Aotearoa” and National’s “closing the gap with Australia” and “predator-free New Zealand”.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk during their visit to Easy Build in Upper Hutt. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The bureaucracy is failure-averse. The Civil Service will spend enormous amounts of taxpayer money rather than admit failure. I discovered the Post Office had spent over $30 million rather than admit it was a mistake buying a software program for less than $2m that they could not make work.
To avoid being accountable, the bureaucracy sets goals so far in the future that when the objectives are missed, everyone working today will be retired. The latest avoidance proposal is to waste resources making a 30-year infrastructure plan.
A 1994 infrastructure plan would not have included, to name a few, the impacts of the internet, digitalisation, climate change, globalisation, Covid and Artificial Intelligence. The next 30 years will bring even greater changes.
No 30-year plan is needed to know that ferries and hospitals need replacing.
Ninety-day action plans force the bureaucracy to address the issues that are in front of the Government.
Christopher Luxon has issued the latest 90-day plan for the final quarter of the year. It is focused on infrastructure and has 43 actions. The pace of the coalition is accelerating.
Government projects suffer from what economists call project optimism. Projects take longer than planned. The unexpected will always occur, ranging from a pandemic to a key person being ill.
My rule of thumb was to calculate how long a project should take, then double it and the time taken was double that. Incidentally, it was also true for my house renovations. It seems to be a universal rule that projects take four times longer than the original estimate.
Even having action plans that made no progress is an advance. The bureaucracy must address the reasons for failure.
The contrast between Christopher Luxon’s approach and the bureaucracy is illustrated by the palaver over heated tobacco.
The private sector succeeds by trying something, failing and trying something else, until achieving success. Maybe heated tobacco works to reduce smoking. Maybe it will not. The private sector would try it and see.
A failure-averse civil service would never know if heated tobacco reduced smoking because it is so scared of failure it would never try. Seeking failsafe certainty results in paralysis.
Ninety-day action plans force the bureaucracy to act. Some actions are failing. There are learnings for the next 90-day plan.
I have no doubt that if Christopher Luxon had not publicly announced the 90-day plans, then as with our last two governments, virtually nothing would have been achieved.
As a minister, the only way I could get the bureaucracy to meet the timetable for a new employment scheme Access was to publicly announce the commencement date.
The 90-day plans have been unfairly criticised for not being focused on stopping climate change. Even if every 90-day plan was focused solely on climate change, there is nothing that New Zealand alone can do to change the weather.
Ninety-day plans can be criticised for short termism. A 30-year plan to reach an inspirational goal is a gesture but to measure progress the coalition’s 90-day plans need an overarching, ambitious but achievable goal.
There is an achievable goal that would improve almost every social issue, including adapting to climate change. The John Key Government set the inspirational goal of closing the gap with Australia. The former Reserve Bank Governor, Don Brash, wrote a plan that was shelved as too politically difficult. The Brash plan’s recommended reforms are still valid.
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