Not PC: Michael Bloody Bassett

Showing posts with label Michael Bloody Bassett. Show all posts

Saturday, 6 June 2026

"For 40 years, NZers have been told that fewer councils mean better government. For 40 years, the evidence has refused to oblige."

"For forty years, New Zealanders have been told that fewer councils mean better government, and for forty years, the evidence has refused to oblige.

"Until 1989, New Zealand had around 850 elected local government bodies. ... That year, the fourth Labour government swept it away. Two hundred and forty-nine city, borough, district and county councils became 73 territorial authorities. Most special-purpose boards were consolidated into 13 newly established regional councils. The reform was justified solely on theoretical efficiency grounds. No serious case was made that the bodies it abolished had been doing their jobs poorly.

"In 2010, John Key's National government did it again. Eight Auckland councils became one [super-sized bureaucracy] governing 1.8 million people through 20 councillors and a mayor. The same efficiency case was made. A 2025 analysis by TDB Advisory found that Auckland Council's real per capita spending had risen 34 percent in the 15 years since the reform. ...

"Between 2017 and 2023, the Ardern-Hipkins Labour government extended the pattern across other sectors. Twenty District Health Boards, each with elected members, were rolled into Health New Zealand in 2022. Sixteen regional polytechnics were merged into Te Pūkenga in 2020.

"Three Waters would have consolidated the country's drinking water, wastewater and stormwater functions into a small number of regional water services entities. More than 30 mayors organised against it, and the programme was reversed at the 2023 change of government.

"The pattern crosses party lines, with both Labour and National making the same kinds of moves with the same lack of evidence.

"Last month, the current government announced the next round, called ‘Head Start.’ RMA Reform Minister Chris Bishop and Local Government Minister Simon Watts gave councils three months to put forward their own merger proposals or have mergers imposed on them. Again, the justification is efficiency-in-theory. And once again, hard evidence that efficiency will be achieved in practice is lacking.

"Forty years of this trajectory have produced predictable results. ... "
~ Nick Clark from his op-ed 'Why 40 years of council mergers have failed to deliver'

Monday, 9 March 2026

New blog: Brash + Mitchell

There's a 'new' blog in town, and it's called Brash + Mitchell.

It's not entirely new, of course. With the thankful departure of Michael Bassett and Rodney Hide, their old blog of Bassett, Brash + Hide has become Brash + Mitchell -- that's Don Brash and Lindsay Mitchell to you.

I have no idea why Bassett and Hide departed, but I'm glad they've gone.

Without them we might expect the blog to be both more principled, less self-congratulatory -- and certainly less wet.

And since Lindsay Mitchell's solo blog is so criminally under-read, here's hoping her writing will attract a much wider audience.

I commend it to your attention:

Tuesday, 14 March 2023

Taking your eye off your knitting

"Could [government, central or local] have mitigated [the damage caused by Cyclone] Gabrielle? Lurking behind that question is the abolition of Catchment Boards when they were merged into Regional Councils [by Michael Bloody Bassett] in 1989. We were told at the time that their task to restrain the rivers from flooding was largely over. I wonder if the residents of Esk Valley think that today. Dropping a responsibility down in the bureaucratic hierarchy often results in reducing its ability to do its job....
"I wonder whether central government has yet learned that its propensity for centralisation does not always work. Many Cantabrians loathed the way they were pushed around or ignored by Wellington [after the Christchurch earthquakes]. Centralisation is a powerful force in New Zealand politics. While there may be a little difference between Labour and National on this dimension, it was National which was in charge dealing with the aftermath of the Canterbury earthquakes....
"[T]here is a tendency in central government to see itself as much more competent that local government, underestimating local competence and overestimating its own. Additionally, Wellington bureaucrats have a tin ear to local aspirations. We will see whether Labour gets the balance better in 2023 than National did after 2011."
~ Brian Easton getting some things right in his otherwise lacklustre post 'Gabrielle’s Trumpet challenges fiscal stability' [hat tip Point of Order]

Tuesday, 9 February 2021

History without knowledge of history

Last week Labour's Minister of Education announced the compulsory "histories" that young New Zealanders will now be taught in government schools.

Oddly enough, says historian Michael Bassett, the "histories" curriculum (for that is what it is) displays the authors' ignorance of some basic historical facts.

For example, far from rushing to add New Zealand to the British Empire, Britain was extremely cautious before dispatching William Hobson; the Colonial Office was seriously worried that the Musket Wars between Maori had reached the stage where nothing short of military intervention would protect Maori.

This is combined with an emphasis on three "big ideas" that don't so much summarise local history as sanitise it:

Translated, the first ["big idea"] is that Maori history is fundamental to understanding everything about New Zealand.

Nothing, in other words, about the ideas and technology brought here by later settlers that we all now enjoy.

The second one, translated, is that the consequences of unstated, but implied, wicked colonisation continue 'to influence all aspects' of our history.

As if New Zealand's first and second settlements are the only "histories" to tell about this place, and grievance over the latter the only mode of recounting them.

The third is that colonists’ power exerted over the years has invariably inflicted damage, injustice and conflict on Maori. Nothing about economic development which lifted New Zealand after the Treaty from a state of anarchy ... The development of the modern economy is [also] of no account in the Ministry these days where no one seems to give a thought to where their salaries come from.

This is the historic equivalent of a cost-benefit analysis that refuses to even acknowledge any benefit.

And, as I predicted, there’ll be no mention of the Musket Wars in the new curriculum. The government is intent on sanitising our history, presumably in the hope that henceforth we’ll all 'be kind.' ...
Unless someone has the intestinal fortitude to challenge this new proposed curriculum, history is a doomed subject. Certainly there is nothing in it to enthuse today’s students who prefer action, learning about the wider world, new ideas, wars and international affairs.

You know, like explaining all those things that give the context to the history of this small island nation.

Bassett heaps blame for the mess:

Superficially, we can blame those ... devising this mumbo-jumbo curriculum, but I think the rot goes far deeper. This report follows on from those recent ones about falling literacy and numeracy in our schools...
There is a pattern here. Educationally, New Zealand has lost its way.... Coming on top of the alarming reports about our educational performance overall, what is proposed is just another piece of evidence that substantial segments of the country’s bureaucracy, and the ministers who control it, aren’t fit for purpose.

This may be the most relevant local history that the next generation of students will need to learn: the gradual decay of learning in this place.

NB: A former minister himself (though not of education) Bassett studied history at the University of Auckland back when History was the University's third-largest department. He has three degrees in history, was a senior lecturer in history and a member of the Waitangi Tribunal. He has published 13 history books and authored four biographies for the Dictionary of NZ Biography.

[Hat tip Point of Order, from whence comes the short Bassett bio.]

Tuesday, 3 November 2015

Rodney Hide still defending the indefensible

He’s back: The man who sold out a city's ratepayers for the sake of ministerial power, and all-but destroyed a political party in the process.

Rodney Hide took all of ACT’s declining credibility and bet it on the losing horse of super-sizing Auckland council amalgamation—so bad a bet he had to leave the city, ashamed to show his face in front around the ratepayers he shat on. Yet he’s back this week, flogging that same dead horse, telling punters in the face of the abundant evidence to the contrary appearing in every spiralling rates demand they receive that “nothing has changed,” and at the same time that all the changes are “under the hood.”

Apparently service is better, infrastructure is better, bylaws are better, and now every new home has a pony. Sadly, there are nowhere near enough new homes. Partly because of the planners’ plans being written by Rodney’s super-sized and wholly unaccountable council planners…

Housing affordability measures are an excellent ‘test’ of how well local government is performing and coping with growth [points out Hugh Pavletich] …
    Around the time of the Auckland Councils amalgamation, 3rd Qtr 2010 data ( 2011 7th Annual Demographia Housing Survey) shows that Auckland housing was then 6.4 times household earnings …
    http://www.demographia.com/dhi2011.pdf
    … and by the 3rd Qtr last year, as this year’s 11th Annual Demographia Housing Survey illustrates, Auckland housing had hit 8.2 times household earnings …
    http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf
    … with Auckland’s housing inflation exploding these past 12 months by 25.4% from a median price of $615,000 through to $771,000 … near 10 times annual household earnings.
    What this means is that the young couple on say $100,000 a year could expect at the time of amalgamation to pay $640,000 to house themselves … but now it is close to a million dollars.

As commenters say in replies to the odious prick’s self-serving Herald puff-piece …

Rodney Hide sold the idea of super-sizing council as delivering smaller council, greater efficiencies and lower rates. Every promise has proved disastrously wrong. The myth-making continues: “We didn't just push eight councils together,” says Hide. “We disestablished eight councils and built a new one. Nothing like it has ever been attempted in Australia or New Zealand.”

Well, yes it had been tried before: in Brisbane. And in Adelaide. And just like Auckland’s council amalgamation, they were disasters.

And it had been tried before in New Zealand, by Michael Bassett, delivering the same result as this amalgamation: not disestablishing eight sets of councils and their staff, but building a whole new set of council parasites on top – with egos, power-trips and huge rates bills to match.

Hide has learned nothing and forgotten everything.

If he had simply remained as the perk-buster who turned poacher he could have simply remained just another political joke. That he instead had the power-trip that saddled us with Len Brown’s super-shitty super-sized council bills means he deserves only contempt.

I suggest you punch him next time you see him. Punch him hard.

They’re spending your money over there

I thought you’d like to know this: that 77 former MPs and their spouses spent $716,000 of your money last year on international travel.

Nice, huh?

No, not on any parliamentary work. Not to promote NZ in the wider world. Not even on some secret Prime-Ministerial missions about which they must remain tight-lipped.

No, they spent your money travelling around the world on holiday. Or on business. Or to see their grandchildren.

Nice, huh?

These loathsome low-lives spend their careers with their noses in the trough, then upon being rejected by the electorate continue on afterwards as if they have a lifetime right to put their hand in your pocket.

Disgusting.

These are the top 15 thieves most inflicted with entitle-itis:

Former MP/ year left Parliament:
1. Harry Duynhoven (2008, Labour)
2. Roger Douglas* (2011, Labour/Act)
3. Michael Bassett* (1990, Labour)
4. Lockwood Smith (2013, National)
5. Kerry Burke (1990, Labour)
6. Warren Kyd (2002, National)
7. Chris Carter (2011, Labour)
8. Marian Hobbs (2008, Labour)
9. John Carter (2011, National)
10. Michael Cullen (2009, Labour)
11. Doug Kidd (2002, National)
12. Graeme Lee (1996, National/Christian Democrats)
13. Jim McLay (1987, National)
14. Don McKinnon (2000, National)
15. Clem Simich (2008, National)

The spouses spending your money have similar surnames, with the addition of Philip Burdon’s wife Rosalind who tops the list of grasping spouses.

Give them all a kick next time you see them. Hopefully, it won’t be at some place overseas.

* Just in case you’re wondering why ACT’s David Seymour is out there defending the indefensible…

UPDATE: The standard defence for having their nose in a lifetime-trough is that MPs back then accepted a lower salary in return for under-the-table perks like these.

The entitlement had its genesis in the days when MPs set their own salaries and long before the concept of a 'total remuneration package' saw the light of day. The pressure on MPs to be seen as toeing the line in keeping salary adjustments to the absolute minimum was huge and a large gap appeared between MPs salaries and what might be seen as comparable salaries in both the public and private sectors. MPs are human (well mostly) and they looked around for under-the-counter ways to enhance their remuneration. The so called travel perk was one of those initiatives.

When Michael Cullen left parliament he was on a salary of over $250,000…

Wednesday, 10 June 2015

So why would you want to amalgamate councils anyway?

There are many lessons that could be drawn from super-sizing Auckland’s council. I’m astonished that one of them from different parts of the country is still “let’s do that too.”

What? Are they blind?

Sure the bureaucrats’ bureaucrats at the Local Government Commission are always going to want more power for bureaucrats. Why wouldn’t they?

But why would a ratepayer, a home-owner, a would-be builder (to take just a few) want to replicate in their own places the disaster Rodney Hide and John Key bequeathed to Auckland?

So thank goodness that the push to amalgamate councils around Northland and Wellington are off the table. For now.

So it’s just Hawkes Bay that’s currently under threat – where plans will proceed “unless 10% of a current Council’s population call for a referendum.” (Get onto that people. Now.)

Aucklanders were sold the Super-Sized City on the basis of promised "efficiencies" and putative cost savings. That canard should be shoved back up Rodney Hide’s arse along with Aucklanders’ pole-vaulting rates bills.

Auckland’s cost blow-outs are only a symptom of the big problems with amalgamation. Here’s one problem that’s compounded by amalgamation: The oxymoronic “power of general competence” granted all councils by the 2002 amendments to the Local Government Act, enabling already over-extended bureaucrats and planners to expand into new areas totally outside their limited areas of competence.a big cause of all the rest.

And that, with amalgamation, unleashed a major power: the Power of Big Egos.

Let me tell you a story about that. Let’s go back to 1985, before Michael Bassett amalgamated borough councils, and you want to add a carport to your house.You go to your local borough council office, talk to a chap or chappess who knows your street and can virtually tell you then and there what you need to do, and what council’s decision will be. If you’re not already talking to the chap who will be making that decision, that person is probably only one office away – and you can talk to them if you want.

Fast forward to 2005, and the chap or chappess you’re talking to barely knows your street, and the person making the decision is on the next floor – and you can talk to them, maybe if you make an appointment. See, that person is suddenly “important.” And they do a lot of meetings.

And now, in 2015, and you want to add a carport to your house … you talk to someone with no knowledge of your area, little knowledge of your issue, no ability to make a decision – and the person actually making the decision is on the top floor. They’re “very important.” They write policy. They have meetings. They attend conferences – many of them. And they’re a whole new layer of parasites on top 0f the layer that began emerging after Bassett’s blunder.

These are people with egos. Real egos, with salaries and well-appointed corner offices to match.

And egos don’t build or restore multi-million-dollar infrastructure; they build multi-billion dollar monuments – and then have the arrogance to send you the bill.

Instead of “rolling out” more super-sized councils, we should instead be dismantling the one we have.

‘Auckland effect’ scuppers more amalgamations – JO HOLMES

Monday, 10 June 2013

Urban 'environmentalists' raising urban house prices

It's often said that an 'environmentalist' (being someone who defines themselves by their opposition to new development) is usually someone who already has their own bush cabin.

A new report by the New Zealand Initiative suggests that high housing prices in our cities are the product of similarly place 'urban environmentalists'--rich and old greenies opposing new developments who already have their own spread, and several rental properties besides.

Report authors Michael Bassett and Luke Malpass argue that 'richer and older property owners with green agendas' who have managed to capture the planning process are responsible for an anti-growth atttitude 'that has suppressed house building and caused a housing affordability crisis.'

"Although a slim majority of New Zealanders now think rising house prices are undesirable," they say, "the current policy quagmire has created a situation where the interests of those who are lucky enough to own property are often opposed to the interests of non-owners."

The report -- Priced Out – How New Zealand Lost Its Housing Affordability -- looks at long-term trends in housing regulation and social situations, as well as the changing roles of local and central governments.
Bassett and Malpass said anti-development attitudes, tighter building regulations and artificial restrictions on land supply are responsible for New Zealand's new house building lagging household formation by at least 10,000 houses a year. They points out the number of new houses built dropped from a record 34,400 in 1974 to a little over 15,000 last year, despite the economy and population growing over that period.
Fear of ‘urban sprawl’ had resulted in urban limits and restrictive and prescriptive zoning, which had conferred a virtual monopoly market power on landowners near the city fringes, they said.
"Some of these attitudes reflect the rising discipline of urban planning: a discipline pregnant with questionable assumptions, some of which have proved to be self-defeating," they said.
"As New Zealand has become more prosperous, green agendas of more affluent New Zealanders have trumped traditional egalitarian social aspirations, such as suburban homeownership," they said.
“Although a slim majority of New Zealanders now think rising house prices are undesirable, the current policy quagmire has created a situation where the interests of those who are lucky enough to own property are often opposed to the interests of non-owners or younger people.”
NZ Initiative’s Executive Director Dr Oliver Hartwich said it was scandalous that ordinary New Zealanders were increasingly priced out of the housing market and housing affordability had to be restored to to improve social mobility.

Less than 1% of New Zealand is built upon even after including landfill and roads, Bassett and Malpass said. "Fears of ‘using up all our farmland’ are grossly exaggerated," they said in the report.
"Changing the face of the housing market will require political will and perseverance as well as overcoming a central part of New Zealand’s economy that sees investment in housing as a way, or indeed the best way, to make individual wealth," Bassett and Malpass said.
"We should remember that individuals can get wealthy off housing, but the country cannot."

Posted with Blogsy

Wednesday, 4 April 2012

Government profligacy comes back to bite an irresponsible govt

An announcement this week shows this government’s alleged economic management is even more irresponsible than we thought.

When the recession hit the decision facing everyone in the country, from politician to businessman, from borrower to creditor, was this: whether to hunker down, look at your bottom lines and reduce every overhead you can to meet falling revenues, or to keep spending like a drunken sailor and borrow heavily to cover the ever-increasing gap between incomings and outgoings.

It is now a matter of record that governments both central and local, both here and overseas, almost to a man and woman chose the latter course. Lacking both the courage and the conviction to do what had to be done, even what the Prime Minister himself told the world needed to be done (“you can’t spend your way out of a crisis,” John Key told the March, 2009 Wall Street Journal*) the National Government in particular chose to pursue the opposite course: raising spending year after year with borrowing of around $300 million per week to keep the government’s spending spree on the road.

So much for responsible government. Their pledge to the public, supposedly justifying this golden shower of government profligacy, rested solely on the imaginative—not to say heroic—assumptions by Treasury that the government’s Budget would somehow go from red and bleeding over the last few years of National’s management to black and bonny in 2014/15.

How would the National Government achieve this wondrous state of affairs without cutting any spending? “Somehow” came the answer from both Treasury and the Blue Team’s alleged economic managers. Even at the time the “plan” appeared to be little more than borrow and hope—borrow to keep the bread and circuses coming, and hope the economic situation picks up.

How? Somehow.

Even at the time this looked stupid. Now, it’s just pure fantasy.

When this assumption of balanced budgets by 2014 were first announced they were roundly rubbished, but after enough people kept repeating the same thing over and over again then “serious” economic commentators who should have known better began repeating the inanity themselves.

But it’s not true and never could have been. Those who downgraded the government’s credit knew it, even if Bill English didn’t.

The assumption was laughable in 2009. And now in 2012 when those who made it now concede it is not possible—and sober economic commentators understand it was never possible—it’s no longer laughable, it’s tragic.

* * * * *

* Key told the Journal his idea for New Zealand was to “grow it out of recession by improving productivity,” “putting Mr. Key National Party at odds with Washington, Tokyo and Canberra” noted the Journal.

“Those capitals are rolling out billions of dollars in stimulus packages -- with taxpayers' money -- to try to prop up growth. That's ‘risky,’ Mr. Key says. ‘You've saddled future generations with an enormous amount of debt that then they have to repay,’ he explains. ‘There is actually a limit to what governments can do’.”

There is. This is true. But somewhere between Wall Street and Wellington Mr Key appears either to have visited Damascus or to have thought he could tell one group of people what they wanted to hear and another what they wanted to hear—with both messages at total odds with each other. Or in other words, to place deception above doing the right thing.
Which of the two choices do you think he made?

Monday, 7 September 2009

No Maori seats for Auckland

It was good to see from last week’s announcement that even in the process of setting up a decidedly un-super local government for Auckland last last week, there were at least no racist seats on the menu.

Thank goodness for small blessings. Seats based on skin colour would enshrine separatism, tribalism and race-based favouritism and would be, as David Round points out, a precursor to the inevitable Balkanisation of New Zealand.

You can still hear the bleating of the Apartheid Party and their more unthinking supporters however, who are still bleating that to fail to provide racist seats is itself racist. Irony itself is too ironic for these people.

The Apartheid Party makes three points in its rearguard protest in favour of racial favouritism:

Race-based seats were “a specific recommendation of the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance.”
Race-based seats would be “consistent with current provisions in the Local Government Act 2002.”
Race-based seats would “uphold the partnership relationship established between Maori and the Crown through the Treaty of Waitangi, including the partnership established with the mana whenua of the Auckland region.”

As Muriel Newman points out, none of the three points lasts a minute under scrutiny. First, The Royal Commission on Auckland Governance was set up by Labour, long-time friends of race-based law, to effect the Auckland super state along with the race-based seats it so favoured. Just because Rodney Hide and John Key are delivering the amalgamated uber-council that Labour wanted, that places no onus on them to make that uber-council a racist one.

Second, if race-based seats would indeed be “consistent with current provisions in [Sandra Lee’s] Local Government Act 2002,” then this just gives one more reason why Sandra Lee’s law should be struck down. Sandra Lee gave councils the “power of general competence” – a power they’ve used to dabble in things they can’t do, and their ratepayers can’t afford. A power Auckland’s new council megalith will wield. If she also gave the power to deliver race-based seats, then this only makes the repeal of her Local Government Act more urgent, and more necessary.

And third, where exactly is this “partnership” established in the Treaty of Waitangi – except in the imaginations of those who support it? As Michael Basset says,

“Constant repetition of assertions that Maori have a Treaty of Waitangi right to dedicated seats on the new Auckland Council doesn’t make them correct. It is clear that neither Tuku Morgan nor Len Brown, nor most of the other advocates of separate representation, has read the Treaty.”

Neither the word nor the concept appears in the Treaty’s three spare clauses -- under Article One, the chiefs of New Zealand ceded their sovereignty to Queen Victoria; Article Two created private property rights; and Article Three conferred on Maori the rights and privileges of British subjects, making all New Zealanders equal under the law. There was nothing in there about “partnership” between state and tribes, and as Muriel Newman notes,

If such a special relationship just applied to Maori, then the Courts would have been responsible for elevating Maori to the status of a ruling class superior to all other citizens. By definition, all other non-Maori New Zealanders would therefore have been relegated to an inferior status as second class citizens. Since that is clearly not the case, any talk of Maori having special partnership status with the Crown is just wishful thinking by Maori separatists.

I have to agree. Talk about the difficulties of Maori councillors being elected onto council is both irrelevant and (according to historian Michael Bassett) questionable. I hesitate to use the word “merit” about the sort of self-serving scum who usually end up sitting on council and kicking us around, but if you can’t persuade a truckload of people to vote for you based on your character rather than just the colour of your skin, then I’d suggest it’s not a megaphone you should be using when you call others racist, but a mirror.

Monday, 30 March 2009

One city, one neck, one noose [update 3]

With one-third of the country’s population under imminent threat of peremptory amalgamation -- everyone from Port Waikato in the South to Kaipara in the north all answering to one group of busybodies -- I can only agree with Lower Hutt Mayor Wayne Guppy, who says this isn't a “local” government issue any more, but almost a separate state.

A “super” state, with a super bureaucracy. Taking the “local”out of government, and replacing it with a centralised behemoth.

It’s argued one behemoth will improve our lives. “That is a big step forward,” says David Farrar, getting one word out of six right. “One level of rates. One district plan. One set of resourcing consents. One set of bylaws. One Council to decide things.”

He says all that like it’s a good thing. The eight councils in the Auckland region are already out of control – since the passing of Sandra Lee’s Local Government Act a decade ago (which, without any sense of irony, gave them all a “power of general competence”) not one has managed to restrain themselves from increasing the rates burden every year. If they can, they will. So we can expect:

One level of rates increases . . . with even less prospect of protesting the imposition.
One district plan . . . under which Nick Smith’s RMA reforms will make it even harder to protest the intrusions.
One set of resourcing consents . . . with not even competition between regions to keep down the enormous cost and delay in these consents.
One council to decide things . . . one council deciding things for one million people. With the “local” taken out of government, how much listening do you think the decision-makers will be doing with those on whom their decisions will impact?

“One council to decide things” sounds to me like one city under one ego-driven set of councillors telling one million people what to do: one city, one neck, one noose – with nowhere in Auckland to which to escape.

And who’s kidding whom about “efficiencies”? You really think any of the planners, bureaucrats and jobsworths will lose their jobs in amalgamation? You really think a bigger bureaucracy will be more efficient?

North Shore mayor Andrew Williams is not known for saying anything worth a pinch of shit, and once again he’s off the money in saying “job losses may be inevitable” because of the “overlapping” that would occur with an amalgamation. If he really thinks that then he’s a bigger cock than even Whale Oil previously thought.

And so are all those who agree with him.

Jobs and efficiencies in bureaucracies advance in reverse order to the increasing size of the bureaucracy, with the factor of increase being squared.

When Auckland’s borough councils were amalgamated back in the late eighties, they were reduced only in the number of councils, but not in the virulence of their bossiness or the number of bureaucrats with their feet on our throats. The number of councils was reduced by around a quarter, going from around thirty or so to eight, but the factor of intrusion and aloofness was advanced by at least sixteen. Applying the same formula to the now proposed amalgamation – the factor of reduction being squared -- there’s a frightening prospect in store for Aucklanders.

Absolutism limited only by inefficiency.

No wonder that the man responsible for the late eighties amalgamation, Michael Bassett, is against the utterly misnamed “super” city idea.

Apply that same factor to everything involved with the council. To the size of the new building they’ll need to occupy. To the number of bureaucrats infesting the place. To the speed and general snottiness with which your resource and building consent applications are processed. To the size of the ego of the new “elected mayor”-- who will effectively be the second most politically powerful person in the country, but with even fewer restraints on that power than the Prime Minister.

Imagine your own personal political hate figure occupying that throne, and examine how you feel about it.

When London got their first “Mayor of Greater London,” a position barely accountable to the Greater London Assembly, it was the newly resuscitated Red Ken Livingston, whose first move was to ban driving in and out of the central city while embarking on an orgy of monument building. The next (and current) “Mayor Greater London” is an ego-drive cock in a urine-coloured fright wig whose first move was mini-prohibition on the tube – an illiberal, intolerant buffoon with his own authoritarian agenda.

I don't think we want that here, do we?

I know, and you know, what we can expect out of this.

We can expect a bigger city.

With a bigger rates bill.

A bigger bureaucracy.

And with a bigger cock on top than even North Shore can currently manage.

UPDATE 1: Turns out I was wrong about Bassett. About more than one thing. You can’t take the ‘big government’ out of a former cabinet minister.

UPDATE 2: Corrected London information.

UPDATE 3: Liberty Scott offers Yet another reason for Auckland not to be a supercity: “Gary Taylor likes the idea.”

Thursday, 15 January 2009

Super? Shitty! [updated]

Two retired bureaucrats and a retired High Court judge have decided that 1.4 million people in the Auckland region need a super-bureaucracy to keep them properly in check.

That's the only conclusion I can draw from the Herald's suggestion this morning that the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance will assuredly be recommending a new "super" city council to "govern" the region and to meddle in "the social needs" of the region.

Just what we need. A new super-bureaucracy to make the existing uber-bureaucracies of the region look like friendly examples of small-government delight by comparision, and to give the super-bureaucrats a jet-fuelled rocket-propelled career path. 1.4 million people to boss around and whose "social needs" can be attended to. A dream job of meetings, memos and "super" action plans that will tell people where and how they can live, and what they'll be allowed to do if they beg correctly . A 140km strip of the country that the super-planners can dictate from their eyries, which will become even more untouchable and unaccountable than they are now.

A utopia for bossy boots busybodies of every stripe.

The nature of such a "super" city -- which will be truly super only in the size of both the city itself and of the egos of the people who will be clamouring to rule it -- can be gauged by how the smaller borough councils changed when they were forced to merge under Michael Bassett's force amalgamation of the eighties: from small agencies you could talk to, to larger bureaucracies who talked at you.

Ironically, last I read Bassett is not a supporter of the current "super" city idea (and I write this with only limited internet connectivity, so I'm unable to properly check that memory), but new Minister of Local Government Rodney Hide is. With boots on.

So if the Herald is correct, then, you can expect then to see small government advocate Rodney Hide announce in March that he will be giving his blessing to the largest new bureaucracy to be created in Australasia since Canberrs was constructed in the back of beyond.

Not the sort of legacy, I suspect, that Rodney's small-government voters thought they were voting for when they choser to throw their vote in his direction.

UPDATE: Owen McShane's 2007 column on this is worth a re-read: Super City - or Mega Flop?

Friday, 11 April 2008

Supercity? Bigger not better

As Auckland councils have got bigger and bigger, they've become more and more authoritarian, and less and less interested in helping rather than hindering. So why do advocates of a 'Super City' for Auckland expect anything different to come from a 'Super Council' led by a Lord Bloody Mayor? Sure beats the hell out of me.

When in 1989 Minister of Local Government Michael Bloody Bassett merged the 700 small, humble, ramshackle councils around the country into 93 bigger, beefier bureaucracies, he told us it would lead to greater service, increased "efficiencies," and "increase the rating base for councils." It's certainly done the latter, and a whole swathe of minor power-lusters have been made very happy by the bigger bully pulpits they were given by Bassett's misguided reforms.

The most recent proposal to hit the table would put all of Auckland's 1.4 million people under the power of an egomaniac called a Lord Mayor. That the proposal emerged from the office of Mayor John Banks, who needs no further platforms on which to exercise his egomania is just another reason to be against such an idea.

Bigger councils have become more out of control since amalgamation, not less -- less responsive to the people who are their employers, bigger than ever bullies, and grasping consumers of ratepayers' wealth. Far from giving more power to citizens, amalgamation has given us less, so why on earth an even bigger amalgamation would be A Good Thing for Aucklanders just leaves me bewildered.

All the idea did for Londoners was to resuscitate the political career of Red Ken Livingston, and see them barred from driving in and out of their own city while picking up the tab for the city's spate of expensive monument building. I don't think we want that happening here, do we?

Tell the commissioners currently considering the idea to bury it, forthwith.

Thursday, 6 December 2007

Roger Douglas, 70 not out

The seventieth birthday of Dodger Rugless prompted many people to send him their regards, and to point out that the economic golden weather we've been enjoying in recent years is in many ways due to the reforms instituted by both Rugless and Ruth Richardson (reforms which have been left largely untouched by the Clark-Cullen Government). Cactus points out, for one, that "Without his reforms people like myself would be working overseas to send money back to our poor New Zealand families, Samoa, Philippines and Island style."

True enough -- but it's not quite enough. Reflecting on Douglas achievements from 1984-88, Douglas' former colleague Michael Bassett called the Lange/Douglas reforms "a revolution of sorts," but even if a new generation of activists has apparently been sold the line that a revolution was what was had back then, it's time to be reminded that it wasn't one at all.

Recall for instance that when Lange called for his famous 'cup of tea and a lie down,' Douglas had just announced both a Flat Tax (which everyone now remembers) but also an accompanying welfare scheme called the 'Guaranteed Minimum Family Income,' which everyone now would like to forget -- paricularly Douglas supporters. It would have done for New Zealanders what Helen's 'Working for Familes' has only just done - made most New Zealanders into welfare moochers. If this was a revolution, it's no wonder it was one that today's Labour ministers were able to buy into.

Lindsay Perigo, who as the country's foremost interviewer at the time was front and centre for that whole era, rejects absolutely any idea that it was a "revolution," even "of sorts." Talking to an American audience ten years ago about the myth of revolution, Perigo explained how the various reforms have ultimately failed — and describes the philosophical revolution it will take for liberty to succeed":

When I first spoke on a similar topic to an [American Objectivist] gathering in 1995, I said that New Zealand was a nation reformed by Hayekians, run by pragmatists & populated by socialists. The editor of 'Liberty' magazine, Bill Bradford, quoted that line in his March 1997 'Liberty' article, 'Revolution in a Small Country,' a glowing account of the nature, scope & future of New Zealand's economic reforms...

In a fit of ridiculous hyperbole, Mr Bradford implicitly likened New Zealand's revolution to the Industrial Revolution itself; he called it the "one occasion in the twentieth century when the Leviathan State has been successfully challenged," and described its architect, Sir Roger Douglas, as "the most effective libertarian politician of this century" who "slew the statist dragon."

Well, I hate to be a party-pooper, but Bill Bradford was wrong on all counts. The Industrial Revolution analogy is self-evidently fatuous; the Leviathan State in New Zealand is as invasive and pervasive as ever — indeed, more so; and Sir Roger Douglas, effective politician though he undoubtedly was, was and is most assuredly no libertarian. What the New Zealand experience affords, is — an intriguing object lesson in how far one can go, in a democracy, in making economic changes without a proper philosophy, without a popular mandate, and therefore, without accompanying attitudinal changes.

As the man says, I commend it to your attention: 'In the Revolution's Twilight.'

And as I've said myself before, if it's a revolution you really want, then the place in which to start is with that attitudinal change -- getting a revolution going on inside New Zealanders' heads.

Thursday, 1 March 2007

Justice delayed makes a mockery of justice.

Michael Bassett makes the point in a recent column that justice delayed is justice denied -- that these days one may wait up to five years just for a court fixture, with all the attendant costs and anguish and uncertainties. It was not always so, he says, and he puts the question: Why?

Why have so many elements of today’s justice system seized up like arthritic joints?

NZ's arthritic justice system has not just denied justice to victims, to litigants and to all those in the dock for years while they await a verdict; it hasn't just denied it to the families of all these New Zealanders; it has not just left people's guilt and innocence in limbo for years; it has not just left a whole mah-jong factory full of lawyers rich beyond their dreams, while delivering little but lawyers' letters and invoices; it has also meant that the arthritis of delayed injustice has fed through to NZ's commercial system, where we find that the delays and the costs of justice are reason enough for justice not even to be pursued, since any gain made in the roundabout of litigation is lost in the swings of delay, and in the litter bin of lawyers' bills.

Contracts below a figure of, say, $50,000 are now hardly worth the paper they're on since a remedy is both too time-consuming and too expensive to realistically contemplate; and contracts between financial unequally parties are hardly worth the risk, since when justice is delayed and debauched as it now is, the winner is generally the one with the biggest pockets -- and of course, their lawyers.

Justice delayed makes a mockery of justice.

Which still leaves the question: Why is this so? Why do we see so much of the justice system and its accoutrements, and so little justice -- why does it take so goddamn long? It's not for a lack of political attention to the question -- as Bassett notes, if anything in recent years we've seen the opposite:

[We've]tried more police, more judges, more prisons and more crisis intervention officers, but our justice system nears a standstill. Many civil litigants have no hope of an early fixture, and dates for serious trials and sentencing take far too long.

Almost everything has been tried, says Bassett, but still the problem increases. But let me sound a cheerier note. There are two thing that haven't been tried - or not at least in recent years:

Fewer laws.
Better law.

I'll let you think about that for a bit.

Thought about it? Well, think about this in relation to dire need for fewer laws: Geoffrey Palmer once boasted of preparing and having passed the most pages of legislation in a year, ever. Boasted, so he did. He's now been surpassed. Legislation is now churned out at the rate of, not hundreds, but thousands of pages a year. Last year alone 1,324 pages of statutes were passed, (comprising 76 public Acts and two private Acts) and 2,762 pages of Statutory Regulation (comprising 325 Statutory Regulations). But this was a slow year, due to the election. In the previous year, the respective figures were 2,062 pages of Statute and 4,116 of Statutory Regulation.

That is over six-thousand pages of legal garbage in just one sitting year. No one can digest all that! No human being anyway. Not even the high-priced vermin that infest so many of our local legal high-rises can read all that.

And Geoffrey Palmer has something else to answer for: the making of bad law. When I call for fewer and better laws, objective law is what I mean by that -- law that is clear, precise, predictable, contextual and rights-based. Geoffrey was explicitly opposed to that. He introduced to local law the concept of ambiguous law -- of law that is intentionally vague and imprecise; law that was totally unpredictable, that in order to be 'understood' needed to be defined in lengthy court struggles (with all parties in limbo until it had been clarified, and with justices frequently asking themselves the question: "What was in the minds of MPs when they wrote this?" Cometh the all-too obvious answer: "Nothing at all.").

The Resource Management Act stands as a monument to Geoffrey's slap in the face of objective law, which principles have been all but forgotten. The undefined (and undefinable) "principles of the Treaty of Waitangi" that Bassett bewails, and that has introduced so much uncertainty into the very heart so much recent legislation is another monument to Geoffrey's work (and as I recall, its introduction to so much legislation was the brainchild of and happened with the enthusiastic support both of Richard Prebble, and indeed of Michael Bassett himself).

Setting a scrubcutter to nonsense law, and to nonsense in law, would at once clear the shelves of law libraries and the overbooked schedules of law courts, and it would give effect too to the promise of the Libertarianz unemployment policy, which promises an enormous rise in unemployment ... among the likes of lawyers, law clerks and court booking agents.

A bonfire of rules, regulations and statutes would lead to less work for lawyers, but better access to law, and more justice for litigants.

Simple.

The astute reader will by now have a number of questions. Perhaps the foremost amongst them is this one: what did I mean by the term "a mah-jong of lawyers"? Ah, I'm so glad you asked. I shall let the great HL Mencken answer that one:

All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half.

Wise words. I must confess, I enjoyed sharing them with the editor of the Law Society's journal, Law Talk before a recent election. I doubt that he published them.

Perhaps, given the current apoplexy over legal aid rates, he might consider doing so now?

LINKS: Slowing down justice - Michael Bassett [Hat tip, Leighton Smith]
What is objective law? - Harry Binswanger
Policies - Libertarianz
Legal snouts - Peter Cresswell

RELATED: Law, NZ Politics

Thursday, 7 December 2006

Bassett on Hager the Horrible -- "Why are today’s hacks so easily beguiled by a polemicist?"

Michael Bassett responds with feeling to Hager the Horrible's hollow book. (I'll quote from his response at length because it's lengthy enough that there's much I've left unquoted even so):

Nicky Hager resembles something washed up on a Fiordland beach. There’s something of the Ancient Mariner about him, but his views are narrow like the Exclusive Brethren’s he rails against....
Such is Hager’s righteousness that he’ll stoop to anything. First he acquired stolen property, Don Brash’s emails. Well-brought up people would have returned them to their owner. Not Hager. He convinced himself that he had a higher duty, to publish them. The fact that he stood to gain publicity and profit from doing so was, you must understand, one of the painful duties of a crusader. Did he pay for the stolen goods? Hager is strangely coy about his own funding. He didn’t contact Brash, lest it alert him. Nor did he attempt to find what was missing. Hager possessed no faxes, phone calls, publicly available transcripts, or meeting notes. He seldom referred to newspaper reports. Just a thin incomplete veneer of emails. Some were doctored as I discovered to my surprise. Who did that, I wonder, and why? In the end Hager fixed us with his glittering eye, producing a beat-up over mundane matters of a kind that all political parties deal with every day. How a party positions itself is what politics is about...
Why are today’s hacks so easily beguiled by a polemicist? Because too many of them were intellectually washed up on his same Fiordland beach. In the 1960s and 1970s, universities and journalism courses taught students to test evidence by asking what other factors might be relevant to a story, before drawing conclusions. In today’s post-modernist, politically correct world, instincts, hopes, opinions and feelings are more important than facts. Thus reporter Ruth Berry could write that Don Brash’s views on the Treaty had “alienated” him from “middle voters”. Surely she meant herself? Brash’s Orewa speech doubled National’s poll support. When he resigned, National was ten points ahead. Too many journalists go around the blogs and talk only amongst themselves. Facts seem superfluous. Sadly, they are also foreign to many modern university arts disciplines where some reporters were taught. Evidence is what you say it is, not what it actually is.

I feel sure I've been saying something somewhat similar myself. I suspect the journalists have been visiting the wrong blogs.

I don't say this often, but go read Bassett's piece. It's worth it just for the conclusion.

LINKS: Nicky Hager and the hollow book - Dr Michael Bassett
Thief - Not PC (29 Nov)
Why we need chains - Not PC (28 Nov)
Hager, Brash & Herald humbug - Not PC (21 Nov)

RELATED: Politics-NZ, Politics-National

Thursday, 23 November 2006

Bugger

I'm both sad and happy to hear today's news. Very sad indeed for the country, which now loses the chance to have what could have been one of our very best PMs, but happy for him that he can now get out of the disgusting three-ring circus that is NZ's parliamentary politics.

I'm bitterly disappointed for liberty in New Zealand because it's transparently clear that Brash was the only senior NZ politician who even respected the idea -- which, combined with his acumen and honesty was no doubt the reason he was both so unpopular with his colleagues and so close to winning the last election.

The best accolade to give him is that he was never a good politician. Honesty is not valued in a politician; what is wanted in politics in this place a is the ability to lie with a straight face, to stroke egos, to spin, and to smile as you put the knife in. Brash was never a good politician.

National have for a long time now just wanted "a good politician" for their leader -- which to his great credit Brash could never be -- and that's now exactly what they'll get: Whichever of the three front-runners gets the job on Monday, the new leader will be just another politician.

UPDATE: Michael Bassett says in an enlightening audio interview with Leighton Smith that "malice" from journalists, especially those from TV3, is what brought Brash down. "He has not always surrounded himself with the best advisers" is another obvious insight.

LINK: Statement on Don Brash's resignation - Scoop
Brash stands down - TVNZ
Don Brash: Speaking notes for media conference - National
Bassett comments on Brash resigning - Newstalk ZB [audio]
.
RELATED: Politics-NZ, Politics-National

Wednesday, 1 March 2006

The Douglas-Richardson 'revolution': How revolutionary was it really?

When the various lists of Ten Worst New Zealanders were blogged around the traps last week, most of the lists as I said "predictably included the likes of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson... even though the economic golden weather we are presently enjoying is in many ways due to the reforms they both instituted (and which have been left largely untouched by the Clark-Cullen Government)."

Spirit of 76 felt so affronted by their inclusion that he posted a defence of Richardson and Douglas -- a defence consisting mostly, I feel bound to point out, of an article by Michael Bassett on the Douglas era and the "revolution of sorts" it brought about.

Now, one would think that as a historian himself Bassett would be careful with words like "revolution" to describe New Zealand's reforms of the Eighties and early Nineties -- even with the modifier "of sorts" -- but as a new generation of activists has aparently been sold the line that a revolution was what was had, it's time to be reminded that it wasn't one at all.

Recall for instance that when Lange called for his famous 'cup of tea and a lie down,' Douglas had just announced both a Flat Tax, and with it a welfare scheme called the 'Guaranteed Minimum Family Income' that would have done for New Zealanders what Helen's 'Working for Familes' has only just done - made most New Zealanders into welfare moochers. Douglas was no libertarian.

The best summary I can point you to of the Douglas-Richardson reforms is here, written by Lindsay Perigo to answer "some U.S. libertarians who believe these reforms represented a veritable revolution. Indeed, Perigo explains how the various reforms have ultimately failed — and describes the philosophical revolution it will take for liberty to succeed":

When I first spoke on a similar topic to an [American Objectivist] gathering in 1995, I said that New Zealand was a nation reformed by Hayekians, run by pragmatists & populated by socialists. The editor of Liberty magazine, Bill Bradford, quoted that line in his March 1997 Liberty article, Revolution in a Small Country, a glowing account of the nature, scope & future of New Zealand's economic reforms...

In a fit of ridiculous hyperbole, Mr Bradford implicitly likened New Zealand's revolution to the Industrial Revolution itself; he called it the "one occasion in the twentieth century when the Leviathan State has been successfully challenged," and described its architect, Sir Roger Douglas, as "the most effective libertarian politician of this century" who "slew the statist dragon." Well, I hate to be a party-pooper, but Bill Bradford was wrong on all counts. The Industrial Revolution analogy is self-evidently fatuous; the Leviathan State in New Zealand is as invasive and pervasive as ever — indeed, more so; and Sir Roger Douglas, effective politician though he undoubtedly was, was and is most assuredly no libertarian.
What the New Zealand experience affords, is — an intriguing object lesson in how far one can go, in a democracy, in making economic changes without a proper philosophy, without a popular mandate, and therefore, without accompanying attitudinal changes.

As the man says, I commend it to your attention. And as I've said myself before, if it's a revolution you really want, then the place in which to start is with that attitudinal change -- getting a revolution going on inside New Zealanders' heads.

LINKS: Stupid Kid - Spirit of 76
In the Revolution's Twilight - Lindsay Perigo
Ten Worst New Zealanders - Peter Cresswell
A Spoonful of Principle Makes the Revolution Fire - Peter Cresswell

TAGS: New Zealand, History-Modern, Libertarianism, Politics-NZ

Not PC