Robert MacCulloch
Robert MacCulloch is a native of New Zealand. He worked at the Reserve Bank of NZ, before he travelled to the UK to complete a PhD in Economics at Oxford University.
What has been the one of the biggest drags on NZ’s economic performance the past decade? Regulation and red tape – whose costs way exceed its benefits. Have our councils, in particular, done cost-benefit analyses to assess whether most of their stupid projects, like Wellington’s idiotic new conference venue, or cycle ways that no one uses, to name but a few of the thousands of such projects, were value for money? No.
How do I know? When John Key’s government was in power, I investigated that specific matter and, at the time, discovered that there was only one economist with that kind of expertise working in the entire Auckland City Council. His employer gave him hundreds of tasks to do and he was barely ever asked to devote any time to working out whether the thousands of projects Auckland Council was embarking on were justified by producing a net benefit for Auckland and the country. I tried screaming this outrage from the rooftops.
I asked a former chair of the Reserve Bank of NZ, Arthur Grimes, about what was going on. Arthur told me that our public sector “doesn’t take cost-benefit analysis seriously”. The only people who were interested in this issue turned out to be ACT Party folks and, in particular, David Seymour.
The new ministry is being done exactly correctly. It should be staffed by a relatively small number of highly paid staff with specialized knowledge of costs and benefits of regulations. Hipkins is talking through a hole in his head when he argues it is hypocritical to be doing so at a time when the public sector is being downsized. Where’s the hypocrisy in laying off thousands of people that Hipkins hired to do nothing, pretending to “work” from home, and replacing them with 90 people to create even more efficiencies in the economy?
The White House in the United States has an Office for Information and Regulatory Affairs whose job it is do similar things that Seymour’s ministry is going to do. It is a Federal office that Congress established in the 1980 Paperwork Reduction Act. It’s disappointing that even the Taxpayers’ Union doesn’t seem to understand the necessity of the huge task that Seymour is correctly embarking upon.
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This article was originally published by Down to Earth Kiwi.
