Did you see the one about . . .?

National and Act must turn around the public service – Ben Thomas :

It is clear that the most pressing task facing a new government will be turning around Wellington’s under-performing public sector. . . 

The National and ACT opposition are campaigning on fixing headline problems: accident and emergency waiting times, overstretched teachers and opportunistic crime. But to have any hope of success, the government after October’s election must first fix the bureaucracy that will advise on and implement these election promises.

Spending, and staff numbers, supplemented by private sector consultants, have ballooned since 2017, for no noticeable improvement in people’s day-to-day lives.

The chief issue is a breakdown in the relationship between democratically accountable ministers and the professional public service, with communication and accountability faltering in both directions.

Some blame the current Government. In 2017 a cabinet of inexperienced ministers, not expecting to be in government, was armed with utopian polices such as KiwiBuild that were intended to cut electoral losses in defeat rather than be implemented in victory.

Labour cut the previous National government’s Better Public Services targets which set clear and measurable targets in numerous delivery areas from law and order to health, and replaced them, kind of, with catch-alls like “wellbeing”, leaving at best a buffet of options and at worst a vacuum of leadership.

Beyond Labour’s own ministerial cohort, others point to structural issues as the root of the problem. . . 

Some critics blame the Public Service Act, rushed through Parliament during the pandemic after a secretive gestation period in the inner chambers of Wellington.

This opaque legislation, replacing the State Sector Act, has been written off by some as mere window dressing. Others, including the New Zealand Initiative, have focused on subtle changes in the act’s provisions which appear to sever any legislative link between the operation of the public service and accountability to ministers. Instead, the legislation centralises authority over the public service in the Public Service Commissioner.

In practical terms the thread between democratically elected politicians and the bureaucracy has not yet been irrevocably cut. There is certainly a sense in the capital, however, that as institutional knowledge has eroded in our departments and ministries, career-minded public servants have nonetheless become subject matter experts in commissioner Peter Hughes’ likes and dislikes.

A report by the Public Service Commissioner on the Ministry for Pacific Peoples’ $40,000 farewell for its outgoing chief executive, was an old school spending scandal.

But it also highlighted a problem with public sector prioritisation. The spending, including $7500 on presents for Leauanae Laulu Mac Leauanae (whose salary was $346,000 per annum), was blamed on the agency’s dedication to a “culturally appropriate” event.

It adds to the perception that while the public service has become much more dedicated to a broad priority of cultural competence (which is of course better than cultural incompetence), it has been adopted in many cases as an insular and inwardly-directed aspiration for the agencies and their staff themselves, as opposed to an input towards achieving better outcomes for under-served communities.

So what is to be done? . . . 

However, at a bare minimum it will require clearer communication of expectation to public servants and a return to formal, measurable targets, goals supported by both National and ACT.

National’s social investment model, which forms the basis for policy pilots in a range of areas including mental health and also over-arches government, may also encourage more initiative from the public service heads, as well as better monitoring and accountability.

An ACT-National coalition would likely do some pruning of parts of the public service from which efficiencies and delivery cannot be wrung in any case; the part where “under-performance” shades into “waste”.

ACT in particular has been clear about its goal of chipping away at the inert, impenetrable granite of the bloated public service to find the lean and efficient David concealed within it.

It has released a list of programmes, mostly within the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment, comprising around 3000 positions which it intends to cut.

The numbers are surely aspirational. But rather than mere ideological reflex, they do lay down an important question for officials and indeed the new government to answer: what do all these extra staff actually do, and how does the public benefit?

Stop the panicked fearmongering if we want to make the world better – Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan B. Peterson :

The meaningful exchange of truly diverse ideas and perspectives has withered over recent decades.

Unorthodox thinking is increasingly trashed or disregarded, even as the chattering class’s fear- and force-predicated approaches repeatedly prove inadequate to cope with the true complexities and crises of the modern world.

We need instead to foster and promote critical thinking and constructive discussion.

We are making every effort to ensure that our new Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), an international coalition of politicians, business leaders, public intellectuals and cultural commentators, will help ensure that a broader range of perspectives can be heard globally.

Consider the world’s response to the pandemic.

A panic-stricken lockdown orthodoxy far too soon took hold, and those whose policy proposals deviated quickly were labeled “COVID deniers”.

Governments that went the farthest were feted by public intellectuals and in newspaper opinion pages.

The obvious downsides to universal lockdowns were ignored by those striving to garner credit for simple-minded immediacy of response.

Thus, we saw increases of inequality in income distribution and wealth, widespread loss of employment, substantive declines in spending and general deterioration in economic conditions; serious declines in mental health and wellbeing, delayed and diminished access to healthcare and record high levels of domestic violence.

The education of children was particularly affected: School closures on average robbed children of more than seven months of education. . . 

We need to have a serious conversation about our manner of response before the next crisis (pandemic or otherwise) to ensure that the cure is not much worse than the disease.

Consider, too, the alarmist treatment of climate change.

Campaigners and news organizations play up fear, in the form of floods, storms and droughts, while neglecting to mention that reductions in poverty and increases in resiliency mean that climate-related disasters kill ever fewer people: Over the past century, such deaths have dropped 97%.

Heatwaves capture the headlines.

Globally, however, cold kills nine times more people.

The higher temperatures arguably characterizing this century have resulted in 166,000 fewer temperature-related deaths overall.

Fear-mongering and the suppression of truly inconvenient truths are pushing us dangerously toward the wrong solutions: Politicians and pundits call en masse for net-zero policies that will cost far beyond $100 trillion, while producing benefits a fraction as large.

We need to be able to have an honest discussion of costs and benefits — a true reckoning with the facts to find the best solutions.

We also need to conduct a more mature conversation about how to better help the four billion people who live in the poorer half of the world. . . 

We must zero in on the most efficient solutions first.

More than 100 economists and several Nobel laureates working with the Copenhagen Consensus think-tank have identified the most promising and effective SDG targets.

We could, for example, virtually eliminate tuberculosis, which needlessly still kills more than a million people each year, for an additional $6.2 billion a year.

We could invest $5.5 billion more in agricultural R&D in low-income countries to increase crop yields, help farmers produce more and consumers pay less, reducing the number of hungry people by more than a hundred million per year.

There are a dozen areas where much could be done for comparatively little money.

We could efficiently and quickly boost learning in schools — vital after COVID lockdowns — save mothers’ and newborns’ lives, tackle malaria, make government procurement much more efficient, improve nutrition, increase land tenure security, turbo-charge the effects of trade, advance skilled migration and increase child immunization rates.

These 12 sensible and implementable policies could save more than four million lives per year, and generate economic benefits worth over a trillion dollars (primarily in poorer countries) for an outlay of $35 billion a year for the next seven years.

The new ARC forum can help us envision the future in a positive manner, emphasizing the ability of the properly competing and cooperating people of the world to solve whatever problems confront us, as we have so often and often so effectively done in the past.

ARC thinkers are gathering from around the world to do precisely that.

Enough panicked fear-mongering.

We can focus on what is truly important and attainable, initiate and reward a more nuanced global discussion regarding the problems that will always beset us, and look forward confidently to a world more abundant, more laden with opportunity, more sustainable, and more hopeful.

Green transparency? About time too – Point of Oder :

There’s bad news on the green front – good bad news that is.

But is there enough time for it to filter into the public consciousness for next month’s general election?

Readers with good memories might recall an earlier analogy of thrown stones submerging into a murky river, before finally a causeway emerges.

It’s possible that Europe has reached such a moment in its decarbonization transition.

For years, the reports and complex spreadsheets explaining that net zero will be ruinously expensive have disappeared imperceptibly into the river.

Now the stones are breaking through.

Despite a commanding lead in the opinion polls, Britain’s Labour party managed to lose the by-election for Boris Johnson’s outer London constituency.  The big issue was the impending $25 per day tax – imposed by London’s Labour mayor – for driving an old car anywhere in London.   

Last month we reported on the German government’s discovery that its people didn’t want mandatory replacement of fossil fuel heating systems to start next year.  And its hasty commitment to postpone the problem at a cost of €2.5 billion a year.

It seems strong public support for net zero did not take into account the possibility of having to pay for it.

But politicians are facing enormous difficulty in dodging the regulatory juggernaut.

As Allister Heath reports in London’s Daily Telegraph, such policies are locked into the system on a long-term basis – in the UK, since 2008 in the form of carbon budgets.

He asks, no doubt rhetorically:

“Did you realise that the next two [carbon budgets] – up until 2037 – have already been enshrined in law, making a mockery of the next two or even three general elections?”

And he finds a few more consequences waiting around the corner for the great British public:

“Were you aware that all of the consumer-facing changes – in 18 months, no newly built home will be fitted with a gas boiler, in seven years’ time, it will be illegal to buy new petrol cars, in 12 years, you will no longer be allowed to replace your existing boiler like-for-like – have been accounted for in the plans, gravely limiting room for political manoeuvre?”

You might imagine each of these generating a more desperate and expensive ad hoc response, until finally the finance minister has to admit that the money has run out.

But the political debate has yet to take the next step of focusing on the gross deficiency of this regulatory approach (when compared to a market-based approach).

Heath likens carbon budgets to a Soviet or Chinese five year plan.  It’s a good analogy.

Bureaucrats set targets which cannot recognise adaptation to change, individuals lose control and the ability to adapt, and reality delivers a worse outcome than expected.

Another good analogy is the flagship government infrastructure project, which comes in over budget and where demand fails to match the projections.

Government estimates for compulsory insulation, for example, are unlikely to capture the efficient solution, which just may be insulation for a new house, and cold bedrooms for an old one.  

And the answer to high rents is unlikely to be mandating landlord expenditure on improvements that tenants may not want, and certainly dislike paying for.

Perhaps National and ACT’s leaderships feel they have enough policy wiggle room to respond to a new understanding of the government failure unfolding in Europe.

But it will not be easy to scrap the targets, the mandates and the subsidies and rely on painfully expensive carbon.

Because that would be transparent.

Then again, perhaps some of the public are realising that it would be less painful – indeed much less painful – than the centrally planned approach.

I worry about the Kiwis with short memories – Kate Hawkesby :

Democracy’s interesting isn’t it?

I mean it’s our best option, but look at what we got this weekend in the latest mad grab for power. We’ve got an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist revealed as a NZ First candidate (read the Stuff piece from yesterday and weep), and we’ve got a ruling party announcing no tax on fruit and vege, in a completely pointless policy that even their own Finance Minister hates.

It feels like a world gone mad, but then I have to remind myself, we voted for this, and people may yet vote again for it. Democracy in action can be a terrifying ride. I said on Mike’s show last Friday that I worry about the Kiwis with short memories who are saying they’ll vote for Winston again this time round.

My colleague Kerre Woodham put it best when she said, ‘I’m sure there are intelligent people who vote NZ First, but I’ve never met or heard of one’. To throw a vote to Winston is to waste your vote. The people voting for Winston are doing it because they say he’ll ‘get rid of all the Maori signs’, or he’ll ‘get rid of all the gender nonsense.’ I mean those two statements alone give you some insight into the NZ First voter’s mindset.

But what these people fail to understand is how MMP works. They’re voting for Winston like he’s going to be Prime Minister, like he’s going to have enough sway to move the needle and change things in this country, like the bigger parties are just going to do everything he says. Like he’s going to be in government.

Think again.

Firstly, he’s not NZ First he’s Winston first. His goals for this country are less about caring about what’s right for it and more about what’s beneficial to him. He appointed a losing party to government in 2017, ignoring everyone who voted for him, just because he wanted to take the biggest bribe and settle some scores. He abandoned his base, for power. And once there, he allowed that government to implement all the things he now rails against. . . 

For all the people who bemoan the state of the country and ‘that’s why they’re voting for Winston’, they’re rolling the dice on no change at all, on keeping status quo – but potentially worse. A coalition of Labour, the Greens, Te Pati Māori and NZ First.

Let that sink in for a minute. It’s not a vote for change at all. It’s a vote for a circus act. For those who’re voting for Winston because they ‘don’t like Luxon’, you either want change or you don’t. Think about the party and the policies, not just the person.

For those who’re voting for Winston because they like him personally, bear in mind he’ll be one year off 80 next year and he won’t be hanging around. It’s more for him about scoring points, proving something, making his mark and then buggering off to go fishing again. So if you vote for him thinking he’ll be sticking around, I think you’ll be disappointed.

When I give my thoughts on Winston, invariably people text me that they’re – ‘never listening to me on radio again’. I hope that’s true. The head in the sand Winston worshippers I can live without.

The treachery of the atheists – Brendan O’Neill :

We are living through a great showdown between hysteria and reason. On one side stand the adherents to the cult of transgenderism, hawking their hocus pocus about gendered souls and self-authentication through castration. On the other side stand those of us who know that biology is real, and that every cell in the human body is sexed, and that a man is as likely to become a woman as that chalice of wine is to become the blood of Christ during Mass (apologies, Catholics).

You’ll never guess which side some New Atheists are taking in this clash between delusion and truth. The crazy side. The side that says a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be a lesbian. Which is infinitely more cranky than the idea that a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be the Son of God. How did rationalist bros, those secularists on steroids, those Dawkins acolytes whose hobby for years was to make fun of the faithful, become devotees of such a strange, post-truth sect?

One by one, atheists are falling at the altar of trans. This week a Twitterfeed called The New Atheists slammed Richard Dawkins for becoming a TERF. Dawkins is a rarity in the new rationalist ranks: he thinks people with penises are men, not women, just as bread is bread, not the body of Christ. He is ‘utterly confused’, decreed his angry apostates. Biology ‘isn’t black and white, it’s a full spectrum of colour just like a rainbow’, they said. This hippyish belief that humans can pick their sex from a multicoloured smorgasbord is entirely an article of faith, of course, not science. Behold rationalism’s turncoats. . . 

Witness the treachery of the atheists. Yesterday’s warriors for rationalism are now footsoldiers of postmodern delirium. The religion-bashers who came to prominence in the 2000s now pray to the gods of gender correctness, whether from fear of cancellation or because they really have had a Damascene conversion to the idea that feelings override reality; that scientific truth must sometimes play second fiddle to our flattering of the self-esteem of men who say they’re women, women who say they’re men, and presumably mere mortals who claim to be God. After all, if Dave with his dick and five o’clock shadow can literally be a woman, why shouldn’t Gary be the Second Coming? Subjectivity rules, no?

The rationalist bluster of the New Atheists was all sound and fury, it seems. The minute a real struggle over reason exploded into public life, they vacated the battlefield or joined the other side, crying ‘transwomen are women!’ as they went to signal their fidelity to the new faith. It’s easy to bash the old religions, especially Christianity. Newspaper columns, invites to literary festivals and conference halls full of the fawning godless middle class awaited those who said: ‘Jesus walking on water? As if!’ The consequences of deviating from the trans ideology are far more severe. Columns are taken away, invites evaporate, the middle classes will gather to scorn not cheer. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that some public atheists value their reputations more than rationalism.  

What makes their desertion of reason even more galling is that they’ve done it in response to a neo-religion that really is harming the young. Fundamentalist Christians might try to convert gay kids out of their homosexuality, but this new religion mutilates them out of it, by transing young lesbians into ‘boys’ and gay lads into ‘girls’. Faith schools might promote zany miracle stories to their pupils, but this new cult imbues kids with far more disorientating beliefs about 72 genders and girldick and lesbians with penises. The old religions frown on blasphemy, and so does this new one, with its treatment of any ‘denier’ of its theological criteria as a social leper. Especially if the ‘denier’ is a woman: yes, this religion also hates uppity women. And yet it is at this moment, with all this unfolding, that some rationalists take a break from rationalism. It is moral cowardice in the garb of social justice. . . 

But the problem is not that the New Atheists made a ‘void’ that others rushed to fill. It’s that they actively helped to foster the very hyper-atomisation that underpins an ideology like transgenderism. With their promotion of the post-God and post-humanist belief that human beings are nothing more than genetic machines, bundles of DNA in a pitiless world without meaning, the New Atheists contributed to our era’s great, tragic retreat of the individual from the social world into the self. From the external world of connection and engagement into the diminished universe of genetic determinism, bodily transformation and jealous cultivation of one’s own narcissistic virtue. . . 

But I do think we need to wriggle free from this clash between biological determinism on one side and self-destructive biological ‘liberation’ on the other. Biology is real, but it does not control us. You cannot change your sex but you can change your circumstances. That, however, requires that we go beyond both the biological Thatcherism of the new sciences and the neoliberal self-regard of identity politics and rediscover our place in a world of other people and other ideas. We’re social creatures, not ‘lumbering robots’ to be controlled or, worse, carved up and replaced with new parts.

 

Why women must have their own toilets – Lauren Smith :

Mad as it may sound, toilet provision is a hot-button political issue today. Indeed, so vexed is the question of gender-neutral vs single-sex toilets right now, that the UK government has felt it necessary to step in. . . 

How on Earth has it come to this? Little more than a decade ago, the idea that laws would have to be passed to ensure the provision of women-only bathrooms would have seemed absurd. But that’s where we are right now. Legislating over toilets. . . 

Of course, it’s true that women are usually perfectly safe when using gender-neutral bathrooms. Yet it’s also true that some men who identify as trans have used gender-neutral toilets to assault or intimidate women. Some are also using them to indulge in sick sexual fantasies.  . . 

Incidents like this involving toilets are too common to be dismissed. The situation is particularly bad in schools, many of which have converted their single-sex toilets into gender-neutral ones. In some instances, girls have been too scared to use the facilities out of fear of being harassed by male pupils. Some doctors have even reported female pupils giving themselves infections because they refuse to use the gender-neutral toilets.

The sad truth is that gender-neutral bathrooms and self-ID policies, which allow people to use any toilet of their choosing, are bad for women and girls. They have turned going to the toilet into a source of risk and anxiety. That the government is now having to regulate toilet provision should be a wake-up call.

In a sane world, ministers would not need to issue edicts about same-sex toilets. Unfortunately, we do not live in that world.