The New Govt: Long on undoing the last government’s agenda; short on making for a much better future

"[T]HIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE the government of busting public sector bloat, not simply matching previous excess...
    "First, the ministerial list with its 28 ministers and 2 under secretaries ... And then there all the portfolios: 76 of them by my count (up by five, I think, from the previous government, and 68 in the first Ardern ministry). ... It seems to have become a cheap form of pandering (pure portfolio labels themselves don’t cost much, but over time portfolio labels probably tend to beget activities and expenditure) to almost every conceivable sector and population group.
    "It is almost as if your existence isn’t validated until the government has created a ministerial portfolio that covers you.... None of it speaks of a government that is serious about shrinking the public sector and back-office bloat. The amounts involved of course aren’t individually large, but the pennies add up, and people look to actions at least as much as words....

"THE BIGGER QUESTION ACROSS all these documents ... is to what extent the new government’s programme mostly unwinds some of the bad stuff the previous government did and to what extent it genuinely sets a pathway to a much better future. Whatever you think of the state of things when National left office in 2017 – and at least there wasn’t a fiscal deficit – our average productivity performance was then as poor as ever, business investment lagged that in most OECD countries, and no real progress was being made towards abundant and easily affordable housing. And, for example, the Wellington City Council still wasn’t well-run and was still prioritising ideological vanity projects over basics (water, most notably).
     "There is a long list of stuff in the documents outlining the new government’s programme that I like. ... it is long on things (small and large) undoing the last government’s agenda, most of which I put big ticks next to.
    "But it seems .. short on making for a much better future [even] relative to 2017....
    "Time will tell. ... There is a reasonably encouraging list of things to unwind (although many more things could have been added), but having done the unwinds little in the agreements suggests any sort of full-throated seriousness about actually reversing decades of economic failure or the scandal that is house prices in land-abundant New Zealand. I doubt we will even hear again that stuff about once again being a world economic leader: with such an unambitious forward agenda, and weak policy capability, the gap between rhetoric and reality would quickly just be too sad ... "

~ Michael Reddell from his post 'Reading the documents'