A thought - Nick Mowbray :
Its time NZ looked at our return on bureaucrats. In the year 2000 New Zealand had 1200 Bureaucrats working in the ministry of education.
We had 2800 schools and according to the M.O.E we had 750,000 students. We ranked highly on international metrics such as the program for international student assessment (PISA) We were ranked fourth in reading, sixth in mathematics and fifth in science.
Fast forward to today and student numbers have risen a little over 11% and the number of schools has decreased to 2600, but bureaucrat numbers have ballooned, nearly tripling, a rise of 166.7%. And what have we got for it? Nothing. In fact, we have gone backwards rapidly, now ranked 13th in reading, 27th in Math and 20th in science.
This same pattern is repeated across almost all Government departments. Since Labour took office public service headcount has exploded. Since 2017, Oranga Tamaraki's headcount has increased 49%, MBIE has grown 53%, the Ministry of social development 35% and so the list goes on. These numbers are not small. They are tens of thousands of extra people.
The sobering thing is results and outcomes have gone backwards in every single area dramatically. So, what does this tell us? Like in business bloated bureaucracies stifle decision-making, leading to inefficiencies, and hindering the effective implementation of policies and leading to worse results. I have always found that small agile teams with clear objectives and accountability will deliver better results and do it for far less cost.
The problem with companies like governments is that the creep starts to come in. We have a saying at ZURU "fight the creep". There are no points for adding more people for the sake of it. We are consistently looking at ways to drive efficiency, simplify and rationalise. We know that over time companies naturally become more complex, and complexity drives inefficiency. Inefficiency is the enemy.
Twitter is a great example of creep that got out of control. The workforce has now been reduced from 7500 to below 2000 and they are already delivering record users and on track to get back to profitability.
More people lead to worse results.
Unfortunately, governments are the worst culprits for adding complexity.
Governments bring new agendas, new laws, consultants on top of consultants, and more staff and at some point, they lose context of what it is that they do that is important. They lose focus on the core role of government and things start to get ugly.
When we have obscure ministries like the Ministry of pacific people which had 34 people in 2017 ballooning to 128 people or when communications staff doubled since Labour came into government, everyone should rightly be asking some serious questions about the competence of this government to manage a country in a fiscally and economically responsible way.
How is it the government needs 532 full-time communications staff? That is outrageous.
At ZURU we have zero. Not saying the government does not need communications staff but really 532 of them? What do they all honestly do?
What do 128 people in the Ministry of Pacific People actually do?
Who is holding them to account? At some point, we need to demand better than this. When a government is spending so much more, driving the country into huge debt and not delivering results or setting us up to be more productive in the future, we have serious problems.
Urgent time for change.
Has Labour lived up to its ambitious campaign promises? - Jack Tame :
. . . As has been noted widely already, Covid-19 has had a warping effect on the electorate's collective sense of time.
Although Labour has governed for the last two parliamentary terms, to many voters (and many Labour MPs) the last six years feel like nine. A two-term government has three-term-itis.
For the incumbent governing party, election campaigns have additional dimensions which distinguish it from its opposition.
Parties are differentiated by their respective campaign policies, but the governing party also has a fresh record to be compared against its new proposals.
And what good are new promises if a government didn't deliver on its previous ones?
Labour came to power in 2017 with an ambitious agenda.
Whereas John Key's National government had essentially campaigned on economic stability and steady GDP growth, Jacinda Ardern ran a Barack Obama Hope and Change style campaign.
Labour would tackle the mental health crisis, end child poverty, and solve the housing crisis. Climate change was the nuclear free issue of this generation and a Labour government would rise to the challenge.
In government, Labour has not lived up to the spirit of those promises.
House prices today are more expensive relative to incomes than they were in 2017 (and indeed were more expensive, even before the Covid-19 surge).
Rents are up, too.
Although the Government has substantially increased the number of state houses built, the social housing wait list has ballooned (which Labour MPs argue is due to more generous eligibility criteria).
The Government has introduced frameworks for emissions reductions and agreed on a net-zero target, but the most difficult emission reductions decisions have been deferred to future governments.
New Zealand's largest-emitting industry still doesn't pay for its emissions and climate experts say a modest drop in our overall emissions is only because it's been raining a lot.
Has child poverty meaningfully improved? Labour consistently points to metrics which show 77,000 children have been "lifted out of poverty", although food banks claim demand has increased 165% since 2020.
Almost half a million New Zealanders need food support each month.
At the end of last year the chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation said "the transformation of mental health is failing."
"Things are overall getting worse, not better."
There is, of course, an enormous caveat to any assessment of the Government's performance.
Covid-19 caused disruption on a scale most of us have never experienced. . .
2023 is not 2017. The political and economic environment has changed. Labour's campaign has a completely different tone from the grand pronouncements and ambitious policies of six years ago.
But while most voters will not scrutinise the exact detail of what was promised on the campaign versus what was delivered in Government, while trying to simultaneously allow for the pandemic's incursion, many will consider Labour's record with some version of a simple question: "After six years of a Labour Government, is my life today meaningfully improved from my life in 2017?"
A pathetic attempt to justify co-governance - Don Brash
. . .But nobody in 1840, or indeed since, has argued with a straight face that Article III of the Treaty (which did indeed promise "in return for the cession of the Sovereignty to the Queen, the people of New Zealand shall be protected by the Queen of England and the rights and privileges of British subjects will be granted to them") meant that Maori New Zealanders were to be guaranteed the same life expectancy or the same income as other New Zealanders, irrespective of their smoking or dietary habits – the very idea would have been laughed out of court.
The reality of course is that there are a great many Maori who live as long as other New Zealanders, and that the gap between average Maori life expectancy and average non-Maori life expectancy has closed enormously over the last half century as Maori living standards have improved. The fact that average Maori life expectancy is still somewhat lower than that of other New Zealanders is a reason to discourage smoking and encourage healthy eating habits, not to pretend that the solution lies in creating a separate and superior constitutional status for Maori.
Nobody can, or does, object to Maori holding positions of authority – in central government, local government, or any number of community organisations – and the evidence for that surely lies in the very substantial number of Maori New Zealanders who hold such positions now. But co-governance implies that those identifying as Maori are entitled to a separate and superior constitutional status to that of all other New Zealanders with a 50% representation in the control of taxpayer- or ratepayer-funded assets (such as water infrastructure), and that simply cannot be acceptable in a democracy. Nor is it consistent with any reasonable reading of the Treaty.
New Zealand is in a democratic crisis but who is listening? - Henry Armstrong :
The Cambridge Dictionary defines democracy as "The belief in freedom and equality between people or a system of government based on this belief in which power is either held by elected representatives or directly by the people themselves".
Most New Zealanders view democracy within this definition as meaning one person, one vote, majority rule. They also believe that in a democratic society, freedom of speech and expression and the right to be consulted on important political and constitutional issues is fundamental, along with a non-partisan media and apolitical universities, inter alia. But this simplistic view of democracy is actually quite incorrect, even dangerous, in New Zealand in 2023. . .
Using the MMP system plus the Maori seats results in New Zealanders of Maori descent having four avenues of entering Parliament, compared to just two for everyone else: elected by Maori to a Maori seat; as a list candidate for any of the political parties; elected to a general (non-Maori) seat; and finally, via Te Pati Maori (The Maori Party).
Taken together, how well are the Maori people (16%) of the population, represented in the New Zealand Parliament under MMP? In 2020, there were 27 MPs of Maori descent out of a total of 120 MPs (22.5%). If this result is repeated in the 2023 election, and if Te Pati Maori (The Maori Party) achieves 5% of the party vote, the number of MPs of Maori descent could quite possibly be as high as 37 of 120 MPs (31%) - not at all bad for an ethnic minority of just 16% of the population.
Just how "democratic" is MMP if one's political identity (gender, ethnicity, etc) is the primary reason for representation in Parliament? The answer to this particular question can be found in one of the forty-two different types of systems claiming to be a democracy, namely "representative" democracy, which holds that parliament must faithfully and accurately reflect the social make-up of the society it represents, namely gender, ethnicity, age, culture, religion and other social or cultural differences, (ie, one's cultural identity) as opposed to a person being selected to stand primarily on their merits such as knowledge, experience and qualifications.
The utter incompetence of the current Labour-Green government in New Zealand illustrates what happens when political identity replaces merit. . .
The Treaty itself is a simple, straightforward document comprising three Articles: The crown will govern; Maori are guaranteed continued possession of their lands, forests and fisheries at the time of signing; and Maori people are accorded the same rights as British subjects. Seems fair?
In 2023 New Zealand, however, various academics, historians and political activists now contend that the Treaty does not mean what it clearly says, but means what these charlatans now, in 2023, say it means. Using flawed concepts such as "presentism" (applying today's values to historical events), plus revisionist histories and disingenuous arguments, as well as outright lies, these revisionists claim that the Treaty is a "partnership" between the various tribes and the Crown. They quote an "obiter dictum" by Justice Cook in the 1987 Lands Case as evidence, when he opined that in his view the Treaty was "akin" to a "partnership". The fact that "obiter dicta" have no legal status or authority is simply ignored by the revisionists. Using this approach, the revisionists now claim that under their "partnership" interpretation, Maori are entitled to co-govern New Zealand. Co-governance models for political and constitutional reform are currently being widely discussed with Maori iwi, using two reports - He Puapua (2019) and Matike Mai Aotearoa (2016).
But non-Maori New Zealanders (84% of the population) are not allowed to be involved in any discussions concerning their recommendations. In fact the current Labour-Green government purposely withheld He Puapua from their governing partner, NZ First, in the 2020 election. Only after the election was NZ First leader Winston Peters made aware of its existence. Any further reference to these reports has now been shut down by government and the media, pending the 2023 election, but will surely be resurrected should Labour and the Greens be re-elected.
These documents set out a totally undemocratic bi-cultural constitutional model whereby New Zealand would have two parliaments, one for Maori (16%) and one for non-Maori (84%), overseen by a "Treaty House" comprising equal numbers of Maori and non-Maori which would ultimately pass (or not) all legislation. . .
Given the forgoing examples, New Zealand in 2023 cannot possibly be considered to be a democratic nation. Around the world, there are many examples where ethnicity alone has been considered far more important than the rights of all the people, including Sharia law and the genocide of "ethnic cleansing".
Is this what New Zealanders want? We are now, sadly, increasingly divided by race and face a frightening and very uncertain future. But are we listening?
Infrastructure is boring, but we need to pay attention - Mike Hosking :
The problem with infrastructure is that it's boring.
It's also years away and, given all that has unfolded in this country of late, half of us don't believe it will ever happen anyway.
Nevertheless, it's important. . .
There was a report into the civil construction industry. They have little, if any, faith in our infrastructure to hold up in future weather events.
This all comes at a time when the Government are still considering what they call pumped hydro at Lake Onslow.
Let us learn from Australia, where we find that their pumped hydro project, the so-called Snowy 2.0, has struck trouble. It was announced by Malcolm Turnbull in 2017 and due to be finished two years ago.
Of course, that hasn't happened.
What has happened is the cost has doubled in the past six months. Malcolm said it would cost $2 billion. By May this year that had blown out to $6billion.
As of yesterday it's now $12 billion.
With Lake Onslow the Government, before spending $30million they didn't need to into a report given they already had reports, told us theirs would cost $4 billion, which seemed absurd. But not as absurd as the $16 billion they now reckon it will cost.
And given the figures I have just given you, you know full well that $16 billion will not be the reality, or anywhere close to it.
Our trouble, and clearly Australia's as well, is the idea is one thing but the execution is another.
If the industry doesn't have faith and we don't have the workers, we might like to sort that before we go bumbling forward into the next gargantuan hole we don't now how to dig, or finish.
No comments:
Post a Comment