Wednesday, July 18, 2007

The Minister of Health is a vet

The Minister of Health is a vet. For me that just about sums up the totally random and screwed up way this country is run. The Minister of Finance has a degree in History. The Minister of State Services, Minister of Police, Minister of Transport and Minister for Food Safety is a dental nurse, and most of the rest have done nothing useful with their lives at all before going into Parliamnet and thence Government when they become even less functionless. The headmistress, to my knowledge, has never trained for anything or done a proper job for money, ever. She's led her entire life in a sheltered and theoretical thinking world, and thinking of a particularly unpleasant nature to my mind.
I've mentioned this before but why can't we have some people with a track record of expertise in their appointed roles runnig the country? An economist in the Ministry of Finance, a senior military man in the Defence Ministry (perhaps not such a good idea on reflection), a lawyer running Justice, and architect in the Ministry of Housing etc.
This constant gripe was brought to mind with the picture of the Minister of Health (the vet) 'checking out' how the new food regulations - opps, sorry, suggestions - were panning out in schools. This when they had been in situ for about ten minutes of course. He was encouraged to see that one school, substituting water for evil fizzy drinks, had saved the pupils from 400kg (the weight of a small elephant - our Minister's vetinary experience allows him to make such profound statements) of sugar. That morning? The seat of learning was 400kg lighter by lunchtime than it was last week?
Why do we have to put up with this condescending crap? 'I will use the elephant metaphor as it makes me look all cuddly and able to relate to how the peasants think. You can't grasp big numbers like 400 or do hard units like kilograms so I will count things in the small elephant unit that you poor people use all the time in your day to day life. I know you all pop into the Mad Butcher and buy 1/400th of a small elephant of mince on a regular basis. I know you are constantly saying 'I am 1/20th of a small elephant overweight and I must renew my Les Mills subscription'. I am sure you will be so pleased that this juvenile pachyderm has been removed from the school as I know you were getting really worried about him trampling on little Johnny in the crush to avoid the Coke machine. I am confident you will feel a warm glow in your heart that I am here this morning ensuring my draconian policies are having the desired effect even though they have only been in force for half an hour. And, oh is that a television crew over there?' Bollocks.
We touched upon the similarity between Auckland Council (and I can't quite remember which of the nine it was) and a drunken sailor last week. As if more were needed we have further grist to the mill this morning. Their ability to fritter away money that is nicked off us is staggering. The estimates for the upgrade of Mount Eden have gone from $6 million to $12 million plus with a possible ceiling of $28 million. We shall leave aside the rather mind warping underlying concept of updating an extinct volcano. What do you do? Restock the molten lava vaults? Stoke up the brimstone at the expense of the fire? The amounts of money involved, even at the lower end of the scale, are mindnumbing. $6million would keep me in Aston Martins till the end of my days. I could have a brand new DB9 every year. But $28 million? 28? How can you spend that sort of dosh on one bloody hill? There are a few looney tune ideas for transporting toursits to the top. All of these seem to involve Jetsons rubber tyred monorails controlled by untested computer systems. None of these seem to involve legs and sensible shoes. There are plans to upgrade the tearooms. Well there's $15 mill down the gurgler I suppose. But there's more. Once the gold plated pavillion of Earl Grey and Lamingtons is complete there has to be a budget for it to lose several million per annum. So the people who take our rates off us waste money to build a new teashop that they expect to lose money on a biblical scale. Well, of course I'll vote for people who want to do that.
There is a move afoot to streamline the mess that is Auckland's regional governance from the, I think, nine bodies into one. How can you argue against it?
It won't happen of course because the those who will have the final vote for that particular Xmas are the turkeys.

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