His piece today is well worthy of the plaudits it is already getting; it even made the 0600 News. Any one laying into the Damned Woman is going to get a favourable audience with me whoever he is. Moore's summary of what Helen has turned into well encapsulates ideas that have been obvious for ages. It also reinforces what I have thought for a long time - she is very good at it. The fact that 'it' is so totally loathesome is the big problem. He also puts much better an idea I floated yesterday. What do the other memebers of the government actually do? The current Labour Government is such a one man (sic) show that it is not funny. Mike Moore puts it wonderfully in the quote of the whole article. He opines that the Ministers outside cabinet and the consort Judith Tizard manage to be 'self important, expensive, trivial and irrelevant' all at the same time - marvellous.
He also gets into a section of 'great command of the bleedin' obvious' mode for a while. These facts are worth repeating. We are the most overgoverned country in the western world with more government departments per head of population than anybody else. We have the highest proportion of GDP siphoned off into bureacracy than anybody else and so it goes on. Mike Moore is well worth a read this morning.
His point about over governance is well illustrated elsewhere in the rag this morning. The rates review was published yesterday and the headline number is that councils should spend less. There could not be a better example of this than the spat going on down at the airport at the moment. The Manukau Council is having a row with the ARC over some land for expansion of the infrastructure to surround our gateway to the real world. Manukau want to do all sorts of sensible things like increase light industry around the airport. The ARC have said no to a piece of the land Sir Barry wants because it is an 'undiscovered gem' (give me a break) of natural heritage. Perhaps it is undiscovered becasue it is best left that way. If we have got this far without discovering it perchance we could actually progress (instead of regressing back to the times of nikau whares and bark capes) by putting a freight forwarding shed over it. Oh no, the ARC says we must preserve it as an untouched wetland within a prisitne and unique volcanic cone (I made that bit up by taking three phrases from the looney 'leave everything untouched forever' phrasebook, but it is near enough to serve the purpose) so that future genrations can enjoy our natural heritage (that bit was from page two of the phrase book - very useful tome) in perpetuity (you don't even have to know what quotes from the phrase book mean to use them). OK so you do that, no one goes to enjoy any natural heritage - well they haven't up to now have they, it's undiscovered - and the freight is handled in Tauranga. This is two tiers of council bureacracy arguing with each other over the same piece of land. Two separate bodies of plonkers so far up themselves they couldn't find their way back to the real world with inertial guidance systems.
And the bottom line for all this council farting around is? It is all ferociously expensive and you and I pay for it.
Out with the chainsaws and get stuck into central and local government - there is far to much of both and it is all of the wrong flavour.
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