Labour & their followers

I've got a feeling that tonight's gonna . . Ooops that's the song in my head.... I've got a feeling that Donkey chops, once she feels she might lose, will go hard and push thru her socialist agenda, then step down about 4- 6 months out from the election.

She will be remembered but not in a good way and as the results of her socialist reforms are realised she will be found to have been the worst leader in NZs history...
Reasons why..

Racial division
Debt
Crime
Suicide rate
Rural divide
Class seperation/divide
Health reforms
Education underachievement
Policing reduction
Small business destruction
Inflation
Beneficiary abuse
Child poverty
...

And to think that 30 years ago we achieved 3x more with 10x less and we had none of the mico managing regulations we have today.
...

This is a tricky one.

There are some fundamental reasons why any government - regardless of political colour - will expand over time. It’s an unfortunate necessity / reality of modern life.

The question is how stringently it should pare back on what it does do and be more self-aware of what it does or does not do well.

That’s not a debate I’ve heard much recently from anyone.

Notable that NZ's OCR is climbing, currently 0.75% (still low but a sign of things to come) whilst across the Tasman the RBA confirmed no change in their rate at 0.1%.
Certainly agree at the personal level to reduce debt in NZ to max extent possible

if u can centralize water into one organization then you can centralize NZ into one organization too.

Of the top of my head...

Get rid of all the seats and have a 5 person management team ( plus advisors) Voted via FPP.

Then introduce a mandatory system where every kiwi can raise a concern ( per day limit) and every kiwis electronically votes on it ( live 24/7).

If a issue receives over 75% votes the managment has to implement it.

After all it is the advisors that make all the decisions. The MPs are just muppets with mouth's.

I’m not going to focus on the actual numbers here because I think you mean to be illustrative not exact.

But conceptually consider for a moment the fundamental reason why this is always going to be the case - namely governments will get bigger and less efficient over time…

1. Scope creep. Half of what Govts do will succeed and half will fail. And in response (and to avoid too much criticism from opposition) they will double-down on the failures and each minister will demand more money & resources to have another go.

2. Labour costs. By definition Govt services are labour-intensive. Teachers, doctors & nurses, social services, police, military etc are all people-based business that won’t be automated anytime soon. In contrast the private sector enjoys far more efficiency gains from tech-enabled automation. Of course Govts can always do more to be more efficient at the edges but fundamentally there’s no escaping the high labour cost. Therefore relative to the rest of the (more efficient) economy, the Govt will appear to get bigger and less efficient.

3. Portfolio creep. We (electorate) will demand that Govts do more than in the past resulting in them having whole new portfolios and departments in response to ‘demand’ eg climate change.

There’s not much you can do about 1 & 2. But 3 is where you can get some gains if you have a Govt that believes it should look to reduce its scope as often as possible eg privatisation of services.

I personally don’t think the Govt should be in the business of housing development either - but they should help create optimum conditions for private sector to perform instead.

So there you go, a defence for some aspects of big government (regardless of colour) and ideas on how some could get smaller.

The downfall of that proposal is people's inability to deal with the complexities and detail. Just like the pollies do now but at least they can get the reports from bureaucrats/consultants. Then the trick is to sort the wheat from chaff.This is where political influence( read $$$) comes in. From experience I can attest that sometimes the public opinion can be way wrong. Mainly from disinformation in media who pursue their own agenda. Media in NZ long ago quit reporting real news and instead created it. Mostly Left Wing socialist "journalists"who got their 'degrees' from tickbox Universities. Like Waikato and guess who's got a tickbox 'degree' in communications from there. 3 years to learn 'don't do as I do, do as I say "