Word of the day

Impluvious – soaked or wet with rain.

Sowell says

It is not merely that Johnny can’t read, or even that Johnny can’t think. Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is, because thinking is so often confused with feeling in many public schools.

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) April 5, 2024

‘Kiwi “system” is broken’

Robert MacCulloch asks: How can the Christchurch Cathedral renovation x4 be equal to the cost of rebuilding Notre Dame, which is similar to the Auckland Convention Centre!?

He answers his own question :

. . . They suggest it doesn’t matter how much money NZ throws at infrastructure – maybe at pretty much everything – the Kiwi “system” is broken. Competition is bust. Productivity stalled. The country is pricing everyone out because both the private & public sector are not working efficiently. My view is that a set of massive reforms that would make the Coalition Agreement look like a tea party are now required or NZ will become a failed state. Their nature would be to transform our economy along the lines of the Singaporean model. NZ First’s “2023 Election Planks” state that the party “has studied the Irish Celtic Tiger success along with the successes of Singapore & Iceland and believe these are much more sound models than economic experimentalism”. What is it waiting for? Do it.

A couple of months ago I opined that if there’s a silver lining to the current malaise infecting New Zealand, it’s the opportunity to get radical. That has become even more urgent.

Job losses are very, very difficult for those affected but in spite of the howls of anguish about stripping the public service bare, some of the positions were vacant and the jobs that are being cut are far less than those added in the last six months.

From the gory details of job-cuts news, you’d think the public service was being eviscerated.

While the media’s view of the cuts is incomplete, it’s also true that departments have been leaking the particulars faster than a Wellington water pipe (and to be fair, formal update announcements have also commenced).

Consequently, we know of proposed and completed redundancies of some 1000 people to date (give or take), as departments pare their spending in line with reduced and revised Budget allocations, now being finalised for announcement next month. . . 

But those figures remain eclipsed by the number of staff added through just the second half of last year: 368 additions at MBIE (a 5.9 per cent increase); 405 additions at MSD (a 4.5 per cent increase); 12 additions at MPI (a 0.3 per cent increase); and 77 additions at MoH (a 10.5 per cent increase).

All up, the public service expanded by 4.1 per cent in the last six months for which we have data, which amounted to an addition of 2580 net new employees, as of December 31. 

Given the parlors state of the economy and the high odds of a change of government with a brief to cut spending last year, adding so many new employees to the  public service looks like political sabotage.

The big picture is that the public service workforce is now 65,699 strong, an increase of 39 per cent (18,447 fulltime equivalent (FTE) employees) since June 30, 2017, just a few months before Labour’s coalition Government was sworn in that October. . . 

All those extra people for what? Deteriorating services and infrastructure and an economy in recession.

But a leaner and more productive public sector is only part of the prescription to fix what’s broken.

Overall productivity must improve and that requires the newly formed Ministry for Regulation (MfR) to act quickly to get rid of the hurdles and road blocks that hold back and handicap businesses.

The fast track consenting process will help and there has already been progress with policies like simplifying freshwater farm plans and the elimination of barriers to overseas building products.

The country needs a lot more of that common sense approach to reducing compliance and encouraging competition and it needs it quickly.

Woman of the day

Woman of the Day human geneticist Janet Rowley born OTD 1925 in New York, the first scientist to prove that cancer is a genetic disease after identifying that a chromosomal translocation, an unusual rearrangement of chromosomes, can trigger leukaemia and other cancers.

Aged 15,… pic.twitter.com/A53nf8xGHB

— The Attagirls (@TheAttagirls) April 5, 2024

Misinformation experts or political activists?

Misinformation is a politically loaded term. Who’s surprised that experts in it lean strongly left?

Misinformation experts are perhaps not quite unbiased

"Experts leaned strongly toward the left of the political spectrum"

Data from Harvard Misinformation Review, survey of 150 misinformation expertshttps://t.co/J5e3CYu2fQ (here with left to the left and right to the right) pic.twitter.com/RepDrYVA3P

— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) February 16, 2024

This begs the question, are misinformation experts really experts or are they political activists?