Angus Aardvark
With a population of only five million people, why do we need teams of government officials to approve internationally used commodities like:
- Building materials, e.g. plasterboard. Cities like Vancouver, Los Angeles etc have similar expectations of building quality and are also sitting on earthquake fault lines. It’s hardly likely that a product that works well there will fail in NZ… and even if it did, will our ‘experts’ avoid leaky home problems when those in Vancouver could not? No, they won’t and didn’t.
- Motor Vehicles. Most are already approved for use in Australia, the USA [and] Britain. Will they seriously fail under NZ conditions? Does our nanny state really need to have its own set of rules to prevent dangerous cars being sold here? No.
- Medicines. If they have passed the approvals for the rest of the Anglosphere, do they really need huge quantities of data for our experts to examine again? Of course I realise that NZ considers itself ‘special’ in its ethnic mix, but the medicines approved in the USA are also used in Hawaii where Polynesians are not unknown.
Many teams of bureaucrats are working away diligently in order to achieve exactly nothing at huge cost. They are not being lazy: they are working hard duplicating what has already been done by larger teams, ‘because they can’.
These duplications will go on expanding as more staff [and] more functions bring more status and higher salary for those at the top. Bureaucracies that expand employ more than those that don’t.
The way around this, should we ever get a centre-right government again, is to simply state that any building material, vehicle or medicine that is approved in Australia, Canada, USA or Britain is automatically approved for use in NZ untouched by bureaucratic hands and with no change to the labelling. Sir Humphrey will say, “Yes minister, we will set up a committee of experts to carefully study how to implement your proposals and report back.” (In three years, once you have moved on). The only practical way to cut the bloat is to announce that as from first of next month, reputable overseas approvals are all that is needed and the dept is closing permanently… You could call it a ‘Captain’s Call’, as with terminating gas exploration in Taranaki.
The world will not end, the number of disasters will be no greater than at present, monopolies will be removed and supply improved, prices will drop and many thousand industrious paper shufflers will be looking for useful jobs flipping burgers.
Unless you are a trougher, what’s not to like?
Darwinist ‘survival of the fittest’ in a bureaucracy always leads to expanding staff levels and function creep. Survival depends on making the case for funding, so administrators who are good at this see their empire expanding, and their own salaries and CVs improving.
Contrast this with the corner dairy, whose funding comes from customers who can choose to go elsewhere.
In a customer-driven organisation, the funding comes directly from customers… so the corner dairy grows or shrinks depending on its service, range of stock, pricing, parking etc.
But a bureaucracy is quite different, as its funding comes though many layers. It grows or shrinks depending on its success [in] extracting funding from the next layer up.