Robert MacCulloch
Robert MacCulloch is a native of New Zealand and worked at the Reserve Bank of NZ, before he travelled to the UK to complete a PhD in Economics at Oxford University.
To deal with the proliferation of regulation and red tape in NZ, which means you can barely go to the bathroom without getting permission, National’s Chris Bishop and NZ First’s Shane Jones told us they would “fast track” a bunch of selected projects. Around 384 projects have applied under this process.
Of course projects must be completed faster in NZ. We’ve had enough of detractors like former failed PM Geoffrey Palmer wanting to bog NZ down in never-ending legal arguments regarding such matters. At some level, his way is driven out of self-interest – to create more work for Palmer. It’s the same with his views on race relations: a never-ending story of ever more complex legal arguments with the ultimate purpose of giving Palmer more to write about because, unlike dumb-dumbs like you and me, he claims to be the only one who understands the “nuances”. Give us a break.
So its a shame to see that on the fast-tracking issue, Bishop and Jones took a good idea and stuffed it up. They sadly politicized it by wanting to give themselves powers to make decisions about which projects would be accepted. After 10 years of pleading with the Nats, including personally begging John Key, to take politics out of these decisions and leave them to an independent, objective cost-benefit determination, I confess to giving up. Bishop and Jones reverted to National and NZ First’s bad old ways. They wanted to be big men, holding big power, deciding who got what. Now in an embarrassing back-down, they’ve reversed themselves. They’ve recommended changing the Fast-track Approvals Bill so “Final decisions on projects will not sit with ministers but with an expert panel. This is the same as the previous Labour government’s fast-track process.”
But they’ve got it wrong again. Why revert to another layer of bureaucracy by setting up a new Labour Party-style committee, staffed with the usual assortment of in-bred Wellington nobodies or dubious Kiwi “business leaders” with political connections? Will they put Paula Bennett on the panel? Or a property developer who donates money to National? What should they have done? The 384 projects should simply be referred to the NZ Treasury/Infrastructure Commission for evaluation and ranked highest to lowest in terms of benefit-to-cost ratios. Those institutions should send their ranking/recommendations to Cabinet for ultimate sign off. The rankings should be publicly available. Should Cabinet accept a project low on Treasury’s rankings, then we’d know it was because they wanted their mates to get the job, unless some very good reason otherwise was presented. For National to adopt Labour’s same fast-track “panel” process tells us one thing. Both National and Labour have failed to deliver for NZ and they still don’t know how.
Sources:
https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/huge-interest-one-stop-shop-fast-track-bill
This article was originally published by Down to Earth Kiwi.
