Trouble is, the advice this Government got on KiwiBuild, roading, feebates on EVs and fees-free students appears to have been accurate . . . and yet they barrelled on anyway.
For example, one of the first bits of advice the Prime Minister got from her specially appointed business advisory group was that we don't have enough roads and need to build more.
She rejected that advice; no one has cancelled more roads than this lot.
Treasury advised the same thing. They said the lack of roading was an economic handbrake - more advice rejected.
KiwiBuild. Papers that came to light just last week said it was nigh on impossible from day one. Most of us saw that, of course.
How they thought they could enter a market with next to no labour available and have them bang up 100,000 homes defies any sort of logic.
How they thought $650,000 was affordable is laughable, and how they thought first-home buyers would snap up these boxes off the plans showed yet more naivety . . . and yet the advice spelling all this out was in front of them.
The fees-free has proved pointless.
Student numbers are static, a third of those who took the free ride dropped out.
There is no evidence anywhere that those who were "locked out" of uni went as a result of the policy.
They have thrown hundreds of millions at an idea that has produced nothing, and once again the evidence by way of advice was in front of them if they'd cared to look.
Then the feebate scheme on EVs. Treasury, poor old Treasury, how sick of all this must they be getting?
Anyway, Treasury have told them the scheme will make next to no difference to our carbon footprint. It is literally a theoretical waste of time.
Upon hearing this, Julie Anne Genter dismissed it outright. They are wrong, she said.
Are they? How on earth would she know?
And in this attitude is the danger.
No, you don't have to take every bit of advice that is offered, and yes, a government has every right to progress a broad-based ideology if they want, but the critical question to ask I would have thought is . . . at what price?
How much economic and political damage do you want to do before it becomes too late.
They appear caught between a rock and a hard place. They've disappointed those who thought they would be the transformational government they promised to be . . . and yet are not even close.
The endless announcements that are really intentions, not policy, the school lunches to a handful of schools, the mental health announced last Sunday in a tiny number of clinics . . . forever dabbling with rats and mice, the seed of an idea . . . without ever planting the whole field.
And then the disappointment of the rest of us who look at an out-of-their-depth, deeply inexperienced group, who tinker . . . interfere . . . and fail to listen, mess with everything, while actually delivering next to nothing. The retail government gives people what they want, they scratch itches, they solve problems. National did it for nine years.
The ideological government up-ends the status quo to achieve their political utopia and to hell with the electoral consequences.
This lot appear to want to be popular, while messing with stuff they believe in . . . and yet don't know how to enact, while also ignoring those charged with giving the sort of advice that might've helped, if only they had listened.
