I think they should just combine all of the ministries into one big ministry and call it "the government", then divide that off into various sub-groups according to specific areas of concern.
Holy shit. You are onto something here. Maybe if those sub-groups, organised Regional local committees which they can directly fund? WTF is that title.
That sounds like a good idea. Maybe if we also have the person that leads the whole thing to be the prime minister and the sub-group leaders can just be ministers of their respective subgroup so they could be managed well.
Full disclosure - I work at one of these Ministries. We knew it was on the cards, of course, but this announcement is really rough timing and comes after 2+ years of restructures and redundancies.
A former staffer at one of those ministries. The common thread through them is the planning system which involves the RMA reform. Climate change would also be another, if the work had any teeth.
Badly. I've worked with people who went through the MPI merger (MAF, MFish and Food Safety) and even though there was a lot more coherence in the actual work, it took a long time to get sorted out.
In this one, you've got the regulator and the system users combined.
Systems wise it was only mostly sorted a decade later. Culturally wise it never did get sorted. Combine to slash headcount, grow even larger to accommodate the work programe, restructure to slash headcount, rinse and repeat.
What’s the ulterior motive for this change? From the outside this doesn’t make much sense.
Why does there need to be an “ulterior motive”?
From the inside (not of any of the ministries but from the infrastructure sector) it makes a lot of sense. One of the common threads that’s emerged from the decades of talking about both RMA reform and infrastructure quality is that NZ does a very bad job at planning. People often interpret this as meaning we must not plan enough - but really the problem is the opposite. We have too many plans, and often plan for different reasons seperately, and end up with several overlapping plans that are all siloed and frequently conflicting with each other.
Both Labour and National’s RMA reform hoped to fix this by putting a greater emphasis on what we call “spatial planning”, which ties together land use, future infrastructure requirements, and environmental protection all in a single plan. Labour ruled out any institutional changes early on in the process but it was a fairly arbitrary decision. If they hadn’t done so a merger like this definitely would have been on the table. This merger means the central government agencies responsible for each of those functions will now all be a single agency - and infrastructure financing will also be included.
Being as neutral as you possibly can be, do you see any benefits at all in this merger? From the outside it seems incredibly strange with no real obvious advantages other than cost cutting.
Yeap, there is certainly allot of potential benefits from this merger. Tackling infrastructure issues, specially housing, requires various organisations to come together - having them all under one roof (figuratively) will smoothen out operations.
There is also lots of efficiencies to be made in the digital space. We will all share one system, and be able to forecast & plan in the same system - which currently is a major hurdle.
Then comes upper management: you only need one Chief Executive, so two will go, extrapolate that to all senior leadership.
If done correctly, we should be able to save the tax payer some money whilst delivering better outcomes. But that’s IF done properly.
On a more personal note - us, the employees, tend to dislike it. The past 2 years has been very uncertain for us, and now another year. It sucks!
But as a citizen, I wish the best for this initiative even if I don’t want it. Its success will be NZ’s success we all will share.
If we are going to merge ministries into super ministires, can we also merge ministerial portfolios
This new ministry looks like it covers:
Housing - Bishop
Transport - Bishop
Environment - Simmonds
Local Government - Watts
MBIE (the brain child of the last national government) lists 21 ministerial portfolios (+ associates and under-secretaries) as "our ministers".
One Ministry - One Minister, so that there isn't buck passing. Maybe we can save a little money by moving some of the 20 ministers inside cabinet ($327,000), 8 ministers outside of cabinet ($276,000) and 2 Under-Secertaries ($199,800) down to just being MPs ($168,600).
Not to mention all the support staff associated with ministers and deputy ministers. To consolidate a ministry probably means they decrease a bunch of civil servant roles that previously helped deliver that ministry function.
Aussie here. What’s the difference between associate ministers and under-secretaries? In Australia, we only have assistant ministers and special envoys (the latter of whom are basically just spokespeople for a really specific issue the government wants to address).
An associate minister has full decision making authority and responsibility for a specific area in a portfolio. They should inform the senior minister of their activities or at least not publicly contridict the minister. They are able to submit cabinet papers (as long as the senior minister agrees). Additionally they are a member of the Executive Council (i.e. can advise the Governor General).
An under-secretary assists the minister in specific areas as outlined in the letter that appointments them. They have no decision making powers, cannot submit cabinet papers (they have to go via the minister) and aren't on the Executive Council. I can't think of when an under-secretary has ever made public statements.
Ah, thanks for the explanation. I’d always found the three-tiered ministerial hierarchy a bit confusing. In Aus, we only have ministers and assistant ministers, so the delineation of powers and responsibilities are a little more clear-cut. Although, it might be worth noting that assistant ministers are still officially called “parliamentary secretaries”.
You're in luck - ACT proposal for next election is that no minister will have more than two departments reporting to them, and no department will have more than one minister.
Worse, it will sideline housing, putting its only value in investment (instead of, y’know, homes for people to live in). It’s a final Fuck You to ordinary NZers, especially the poor.
That’s complete speculation. Chris bishop (Minister responsible for most areas covered by the new Ministry) has stated publicly that he wants house prices to come down and is working actively on densification, rezoning land and freeing up planning to make housing and development more accessible.
There’s still no plan to make them affordable for renters, especially those at the bottom. Look what happened with emergency housing, we should be counting down until stuff like that happens with state housing too. Building more housing isn’t enough, and he either doesn’t know that or doesn’t want to know that. Remember “negotiate with your landlord”? How out of touch do this lot have to be?
Rental prices are determined by supply and demand, increased supply of housing means increased supply of rentals.
Have you ever actually tried negotiating with your landlord? For decades we have had rising rents so it hasn’t made sense, but in regions where rents are falling (especially Wellington) it can actually work - I own my house but have friends in Wellington who have successfully got rent reductions after sending their landlord a list of similar places that were listed with lower rents. The ability to move into a cheaper rental if the landlord says no is the reason why it works - if you’re overpaying relative to the market, you have the power, not the landlord. They have to accept the market price if you move out. Negotiating mean they can get the market price but don’t have to have the place empty while they look for a new tenant.
All these Ministries are significantly smaller than the ones that merged into MBIE though so it's more like MBIE Jr. At least in terms of actual size, and not their span of activity which is quite broad and significant.
Demonstrating just how low a priority the environment is to this government, it is being lumped in with competing ministries (which often have opposing desired outcomes) to ensure environmental considerations never get in the way of any proposed business or housing venture.
They've already undone most meaningful policy and goals related to the climate crisis and paved the way for natural resources to be plundered, so it's no surprise that their regressive dismantling of anything environmental would follow.
Fuck it, lets cut costs even more but cutting and merging every government job that exists so that theres only one person working for the government who does everything. Luxon can be the guy who prints off the new Rego for my car, stitches up my wound after I get hit by a car, and washes my blood off the road.
No mostly just Bishop’s take, but it’s an important take. Doing a better job at co-ordinating land use planning with infrastructure planning and environmental protection has been a key part of both Labour and National’s RMA reform (via a greater focus on “spatial planning”). These reforms merge the agencies responsible for governing all those functions, but also go a step further by integrating infrastructure funding and financing responsibilities too.
Yes, typically. It gets a bit confusing because a “spatial plan” is both a generic term for the concept but also a specific legal instrument in the planned reforms (which has a narrower focus).
Under the currently planned reforms the “spatial plan” will just be land use and infrastructure planning (prepared by local councils), environmental protection will be done via its own specific plan (prepared by several local councils collectively in a region) and they they all get joined up into a “combined regional plan”.
The combined regional plan is what most planners would call a “spatial plan”, but that name’s already taken.
If you were just applying common sense - what does a move like this do to a teetering economy? Is Christmas spend going to be great when people are 'oh no, more government restructures', and public servants see that it's not over, they could be next! This government is entirely stupid.
The merging of the Crown Research Institutes is a complete shit show. They don’t want you to know how bad these mergers end up. We divide things up, then say it’s not working and merge them, then divide them again. Lots of people lose their jobs, but rarely those whose ideas created the problems. Classic upper management
What a waste of money if and hopefully NACT lose the upcoming election more money wasted.
Why not wait till after the election if you win then implement it.
Why do they need to specify cities and regions? Literally everything could be considered a city or a region (in the outside of the city sense, not the political unit sense)
We've seen what current public sector changes have done and guarantee this will cost much more than $30 Mil.
I have seen first hand the issue within a certain government agency, the absolute shit show with multiple people using 2 laptops to access 2 separate domains to get their job done, 3 weeks to get atlassian accounts for new starters, then backtracking and getting the Internal IT people to manage it. If this goes through, and wild it should be able to just before an election year with no certainty on the outcome, it will be costly, it will be detrimental to Aotearoa New Zeland.
It will cost more public servant jobs, less spending in the capital (guess what can't spend money if you don't have a job) and cause a lot of people to leave the country or go private. Through the next 6 months it will be severely detrimental to a lot of people's mental health, with this uncertainty for the 2nd, 3rd or 4th time restructures have been pushed for. All citizens & residents, all with lives, all who contribute to our county.
While I'm angry at this completely illogical and unnecessary change, I'm even sadder that public servants are now going to go through more rounds of redundancies. And to have this possibility looming over you before Christmas? Fuck NACT1.
Remember this all at voting time, people, and tell anyone who will listen.
“But none of the parties represent me accurately” shut up. None of them ever will. Also wasps, splintery wooden spoons and weird biting ants exists. The world isn’t fair. Get the fuck out there and vote because I promise you the racist old chooks who don’t care if the world burns cuz they’ll be dead in a year will all be there for certain.
Yeah, another super organisation that will address and solve all the problems, just like MSD, or the Auckland Council.!! At least one lucky person, hopefully a Kiwi, will receive nearly a million dollars to head the entity.
One of these is not like the others. Sure, housing and transport are both forms of infrastructure, but managing the environment is a completely different task than building stuff for people to use.
I fucking hate how they keep going on about how it’s regulation and too much care for the environment that is making housing costs high. Basically every county in the world is laughing at us for not implementing capital gains tax. We are literally the example given on the wiki page of what not to do.
While we are apparently at it, can we roll the Ministry for Regulation into that too? We can save a bunch of money there by letting go of that whole ministry please.
With a bit of layeral thinking we could easily group the lot of them into four large Ministries, especially with a population our size; Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Love, Ministry of Plenty.
Idiots. What the fuck does housing have to do with transport? At best it’s maybe a series of discussions about how transport policy impacts zoning, but that doesn’t warrant collapsing Ministries that have totally different regulatory objectives.
Rather than combining Ministries to create hodge-podge ones like MBIE with multiple responsible ministers and Byzantine turf wars, just directly rationalise them by changing operating mandates and legislation, and get rid of shared Ministerial responsibility for agency level decisions.
If Sweden can operate with 23 ministries, we can get rid of 20 basically immediately.
Transport and housing are interwoven far beyond just simply fiddling with zoning. There’s a ton of work ongoing to build a better system of infrastructure provision that enables urban growth. Transport is a massive part of it.
We'll see how it goes, but it seems like a good idea to me.
Getting a balance between these 3 is critical and will be more efficient if it's done within a single ministry. They can all keep each other in check.
They're not going to start building cities and motorways in National Parks if that's what everyone is thinking. Better synchronising housing and transport will be a huge win for the environment.
It's fun to talk in hyperboles, however Shane Jones has already gone on record that he wouldn't let endangered endemic or native species stand in the way of a mine
I’m not implying they are Captain Planet villains polluting beaches for the lols. I am implying they do not give a shit at all about the environment and would allow business or private individuals to destroy anything at all if they could get away with it because they care about money for themselves and their donors.
Every single time the conflict is between the environment and moneyed interests the latter wins under this government. Maybe if you took of your own glasses you’d notice. It’s a shame too. When I moved here just before Key took over the Nats were not like this. But between giving Shane Jones everything he fuxking wants and their inability to stand up to any industry at all, this political term has been on Le environmental loss after another. The new RMA bill is more of the same.
I think they should just combine all of the ministries into one big ministry and call it "the government", then divide that off into various sub-groups according to specific areas of concern.
And since the one big ministry doesn’t exist anymore, perhaps they could repurpose the term to describe the specific areas of concern.
Holy shit. You are onto something here. Maybe if those sub-groups, organised Regional local committees which they can directly fund? WTF is that title.
Too long. I suggest regional council. Short and has a nice ring to it.
No, that sounds "Woke" and "Communist."
Give this guy a ministry
He sounds like he knows what hes on abt
You get one too. Your spelling of about makes me think you know a thing or two about efficiency
A vowel saved is a vowel earned.
.
Get out of here with all your preaching. If I wanted a Ministry…
That sounds like a good idea. Maybe if we also have the person that leads the whole thing to be the prime minister and the sub-group leaders can just be ministers of their respective subgroup so they could be managed well.
Or just combine it all and then sell it to the highest overseas bidder.
Full disclosure - I work at one of these Ministries. We knew it was on the cards, of course, but this announcement is really rough timing and comes after 2+ years of restructures and redundancies.
What’s the ulterior motive for this change? From the outside this doesn’t make much sense.
Is this a logical change? Or an attempt to minimise the responsibility of one of these departments by hiding it under the other two?
A former staffer at one of those ministries. The common thread through them is the planning system which involves the RMA reform. Climate change would also be another, if the work had any teeth.
How do you see Environment faring in the merger?
Poorly. I see it retracting to its 2015 levels of about 300 odd FTEs at worst. This depends on the Election though...
Badly. I've worked with people who went through the MPI merger (MAF, MFish and Food Safety) and even though there was a lot more coherence in the actual work, it took a long time to get sorted out.
In this one, you've got the regulator and the system users combined.
Systems wise it was only mostly sorted a decade later. Culturally wise it never did get sorted. Combine to slash headcount, grow even larger to accommodate the work programe, restructure to slash headcount, rinse and repeat.
I meant being able to function as sorted. Low bar but they managed that after a good while.
Just to be a cunt to as many people as often as possible all the fucking time.
Why does there need to be an “ulterior motive”?
From the inside (not of any of the ministries but from the infrastructure sector) it makes a lot of sense. One of the common threads that’s emerged from the decades of talking about both RMA reform and infrastructure quality is that NZ does a very bad job at planning. People often interpret this as meaning we must not plan enough - but really the problem is the opposite. We have too many plans, and often plan for different reasons seperately, and end up with several overlapping plans that are all siloed and frequently conflicting with each other.
Both Labour and National’s RMA reform hoped to fix this by putting a greater emphasis on what we call “spatial planning”, which ties together land use, future infrastructure requirements, and environmental protection all in a single plan. Labour ruled out any institutional changes early on in the process but it was a fairly arbitrary decision. If they hadn’t done so a merger like this definitely would have been on the table. This merger means the central government agencies responsible for each of those functions will now all be a single agency - and infrastructure financing will also be included.
Good luck at not being on the block for the next round of trimming.
Similar story here (work in a CRI/PRO)
Being as neutral as you possibly can be, do you see any benefits at all in this merger? From the outside it seems incredibly strange with no real obvious advantages other than cost cutting.
Theoretically? Sure a restructure can lead to change. However, from https://www.thepost.co.nz/politics/360778286/reaching-change-our-public-service-obsessed-restructuring out 484 restructures, there were a total of seven formal reviews to even remotely check if it was beneficial.
People at the top do not remotely give a fuck if it improves things.
Hey, I work at the one of these Ministries -
Yeap, there is certainly allot of potential benefits from this merger. Tackling infrastructure issues, specially housing, requires various organisations to come together - having them all under one roof (figuratively) will smoothen out operations.
There is also lots of efficiencies to be made in the digital space. We will all share one system, and be able to forecast & plan in the same system - which currently is a major hurdle.
Then comes upper management: you only need one Chief Executive, so two will go, extrapolate that to all senior leadership.
If done correctly, we should be able to save the tax payer some money whilst delivering better outcomes. But that’s IF done properly.
On a more personal note - us, the employees, tend to dislike it. The past 2 years has been very uncertain for us, and now another year. It sucks!
But as a citizen, I wish the best for this initiative even if I don’t want it. Its success will be NZ’s success we all will share.
I reckon you should count on this government going for "literally"
Two of the four entities have recently signed a new lease, so they will not be “literally” under the same roof for another 2-3 years.
I was more thinking about how great an opportunity this is to write working from home out of contracts
Merry Christmas from the National Party!
If we are going to merge ministries into super ministires, can we also merge ministerial portfolios
This new ministry looks like it covers:
MBIE (the brain child of the last national government) lists 21 ministerial portfolios (+ associates and under-secretaries) as "our ministers".
One Ministry - One Minister, so that there isn't buck passing. Maybe we can save a little money by moving some of the 20 ministers inside cabinet ($327,000), 8 ministers outside of cabinet ($276,000) and 2 Under-Secertaries ($199,800) down to just being MPs ($168,600).
Not to mention all the support staff associated with ministers and deputy ministers. To consolidate a ministry probably means they decrease a bunch of civil servant roles that previously helped deliver that ministry function.
Bishop really is effectively the minister for this given that the main thing environment is doing atm is RMA reform which he’s responsible for.
Another way to stuff things up.
Aussie here. What’s the difference between associate ministers and under-secretaries? In Australia, we only have assistant ministers and special envoys (the latter of whom are basically just spokespeople for a really specific issue the government wants to address).
An associate minister has full decision making authority and responsibility for a specific area in a portfolio. They should inform the senior minister of their activities or at least not publicly contridict the minister. They are able to submit cabinet papers (as long as the senior minister agrees). Additionally they are a member of the Executive Council (i.e. can advise the Governor General).
An under-secretary assists the minister in specific areas as outlined in the letter that appointments them. They have no decision making powers, cannot submit cabinet papers (they have to go via the minister) and aren't on the Executive Council. I can't think of when an under-secretary has ever made public statements.
Ah, thanks for the explanation. I’d always found the three-tiered ministerial hierarchy a bit confusing. In Aus, we only have ministers and assistant ministers, so the delineation of powers and responsibilities are a little more clear-cut. Although, it might be worth noting that assistant ministers are still officially called “parliamentary secretaries”.
You're in luck - ACT proposal for next election is that no minister will have more than two departments reporting to them, and no department will have more than one minister.
Funny because Seymour has his fingers stuck in MANY different ministerial pies currently.
All the better to destroy them, with a crooked grin.
Yeah but they'll be rules for people who aren't Seymour.
Trim another $50k off MP salary, they don't do anything to justify anywhere nearly $170k.
MBIE the second, entirely designed from the ground up to sideline environmental considerations.
Worse, it will sideline housing, putting its only value in investment (instead of, y’know, homes for people to live in). It’s a final Fuck You to ordinary NZers, especially the poor.
National are doing that already, there just gonna move it up a notch.
That’s complete speculation. Chris bishop (Minister responsible for most areas covered by the new Ministry) has stated publicly that he wants house prices to come down and is working actively on densification, rezoning land and freeing up planning to make housing and development more accessible.
There’s still no plan to make them affordable for renters, especially those at the bottom. Look what happened with emergency housing, we should be counting down until stuff like that happens with state housing too. Building more housing isn’t enough, and he either doesn’t know that or doesn’t want to know that. Remember “negotiate with your landlord”? How out of touch do this lot have to be?
Rental prices are determined by supply and demand, increased supply of housing means increased supply of rentals.
Have you ever actually tried negotiating with your landlord? For decades we have had rising rents so it hasn’t made sense, but in regions where rents are falling (especially Wellington) it can actually work - I own my house but have friends in Wellington who have successfully got rent reductions after sending their landlord a list of similar places that were listed with lower rents. The ability to move into a cheaper rental if the landlord says no is the reason why it works - if you’re overpaying relative to the market, you have the power, not the landlord. They have to accept the market price if you move out. Negotiating mean they can get the market price but don’t have to have the place empty while they look for a new tenant.
Rents are related to tenant incomes. If incomes rise, so do rents. And vice-versa.
Yes, tenant income would be one of the determinants of demand.
parliamentarians own a huge housing portfolio (personally) im sure the desire to see their assets devalue is bipartisan and well supported...
lol. Lmao, even.
Fixing the housing market will require investment.
If you're hoping to fix it on goodwill then good luck.
Which could be funded through a mixture of borrowing and current tax revenues. It spreads the risk over time.
Like Kāinga Ora was doing, you mean?
All these Ministries are significantly smaller than the ones that merged into MBIE though so it's more like MBIE Jr. At least in terms of actual size, and not their span of activity which is quite broad and significant.
MBIE investigating mouldy school lunches while protecting Auckland from asian hornets (poorly)
Demonstrating just how low a priority the environment is to this government, it is being lumped in with competing ministries (which often have opposing desired outcomes) to ensure environmental considerations never get in the way of any proposed business or housing venture.
They've already undone most meaningful policy and goals related to the climate crisis and paved the way for natural resources to be plundered, so it's no surprise that their regressive dismantling of anything environmental would follow.
Shame on the people who voted for all this.
Fuck it, lets cut costs even more but cutting and merging every government job that exists so that theres only one person working for the government who does everything. Luxon can be the guy who prints off the new Rego for my car, stitches up my wound after I get hit by a car, and washes my blood off the road.
Hey fuck that - lets just replace Luxon with a robot and be done with it.
Hold the phone! Are you telling me Luxon isn't a robot?
Robots are generally designed to be useful and efficient
Oh, what am I thinking, yeah of course - he’s an Electrolux.
I always make note that Amalgamation is literally disestablishment by dilution. This isn't going to go well other than to save a few bucks.
FTFY
It doesn't even save money in the short term, if anything the opposite.
Mergers of government departments = hundreds of millions in contracts for vendors to merge/migrate/kill their backend systems.
True. I’m sure Deloitte or some other consulting firm is getting millions to advise on it too
With their AI created reports no doubt.
Plus the redundancies, which can be eye-watering (great for those who get them, though!)
They clearly missed an opportunity for the Ministry of Environment, Transport and Housing (METH)
Please, it could have been the Regional Environmental Cities and Trabsport Unified Ministry, or RECTUM
For one second I read “New misery…”
Another stupid and harmful idea from this government.
Is this actually needed, other than Bishops take what else justifies this?
Absolutely not. It’s bad.
It's gonna hamstring their attempts to spend billions of dollars on mostly useless roads until after the next election.
No mostly just Bishop’s take, but it’s an important take. Doing a better job at co-ordinating land use planning with infrastructure planning and environmental protection has been a key part of both Labour and National’s RMA reform (via a greater focus on “spatial planning”). These reforms merge the agencies responsible for governing all those functions, but also go a step further by integrating infrastructure funding and financing responsibilities too.
Does spatial planning bring environmental protection into the mix?
Yes, typically. It gets a bit confusing because a “spatial plan” is both a generic term for the concept but also a specific legal instrument in the planned reforms (which has a narrower focus).
Under the currently planned reforms the “spatial plan” will just be land use and infrastructure planning (prepared by local councils), environmental protection will be done via its own specific plan (prepared by several local councils collectively in a region) and they they all get joined up into a “combined regional plan”.
The combined regional plan is what most planners would call a “spatial plan”, but that name’s already taken.
If you were just applying common sense - what does a move like this do to a teetering economy? Is Christmas spend going to be great when people are 'oh no, more government restructures', and public servants see that it's not over, they could be next! This government is entirely stupid.
Hey! I just want to say they are laser focused on outcomes and getting results.
At no point am I saying they are good outcomes or positive results, but they ARE outcomes and results. Laser focused, see.
Pew pew!
Man, MHUD was hived off MBIE so it would focus on housing and urban development. Good to see the lack of importance to the current Government...
At least they are saving tax payer money by no longer pretending there is a ministry for the environment I guess.
Chuckles, cries, gets mad. So sick of this roller coaster.
Seems like an effective way to just totally gut MfE. Grim.
There must surely be a way to encourage co-operation amongst these portfolios without just blunt mallet merging them all.
Ministry of Environment, Transport and Housing... or METH, for short.
Who will be the METH head? Chris Bishop?
Another terrible idea from the coalition of chaos. Got any other ideas rather than fucking over public servants?
No
It’ll be fun with all those conflicting priorities
The merging of the Crown Research Institutes is a complete shit show. They don’t want you to know how bad these mergers end up. We divide things up, then say it’s not working and merge them, then divide them again. Lots of people lose their jobs, but rarely those whose ideas created the problems. Classic upper management
What a waste of money if and hopefully NACT lose the upcoming election more money wasted. Why not wait till after the election if you win then implement it.
Because they might not be able to push funds to whom they want later.
Remember. This is the government that is already sorted. The poors (us) dont count for anything. Anything done is 99% done to help them and theirs.
Unfortunately I worry it’ll lose them 1% of the vote until they forget about it.
I despise this government.
Same
I mean ministry of environment in there is a bit bewildering, they should have goals that contradict the others, much of the time.
That’s a lot of work just to fuck the environment over
Why do they need to specify cities and regions? Literally everything could be considered a city or a region (in the outside of the city sense, not the political unit sense)
They mean Urban Development and Regional Development functions.
There’s that laser focus on the cost of living! More money thrown at shit that no one asked for
They really are just trying to squeeze as many public service cuts as possible into their one term government aren't they?
We've seen what current public sector changes have done and guarantee this will cost much more than $30 Mil.
I have seen first hand the issue within a certain government agency, the absolute shit show with multiple people using 2 laptops to access 2 separate domains to get their job done, 3 weeks to get atlassian accounts for new starters, then backtracking and getting the Internal IT people to manage it. If this goes through, and wild it should be able to just before an election year with no certainty on the outcome, it will be costly, it will be detrimental to Aotearoa New Zeland.
It will cost more public servant jobs, less spending in the capital (guess what can't spend money if you don't have a job) and cause a lot of people to leave the country or go private. Through the next 6 months it will be severely detrimental to a lot of people's mental health, with this uncertainty for the 2nd, 3rd or 4th time restructures have been pushed for. All citizens & residents, all with lives, all who contribute to our county.
While I'm angry at this completely illogical and unnecessary change, I'm even sadder that public servants are now going to go through more rounds of redundancies. And to have this possibility looming over you before Christmas? Fuck NACT1.
until the morale improvesAll three will be made so ineffective that they will have to privatise them.
Chris Bishop talks with authority about things only for it to become obvious that he knows nothing or has misled us.
Truly, he’s the Swish Swish Bish.
Remember this all at voting time, people, and tell anyone who will listen.
“But none of the parties represent me accurately” shut up. None of them ever will. Also wasps, splintery wooden spoons and weird biting ants exists. The world isn’t fair. Get the fuck out there and vote because I promise you the racist old chooks who don’t care if the world burns cuz they’ll be dead in a year will all be there for certain.
Yeah, another super organisation that will address and solve all the problems, just like MSD, or the Auckland Council.!! At least one lucky person, hopefully a Kiwi, will receive nearly a million dollars to head the entity.
Given housing in NZ combining housing and transport into one ministry should help with those Kiwis living in vehicles.
Why not merge environment with MPI given it's already subordinate to farming and mining in their opinion.
Ah yes, the Ministry of Things You Plebs Don’t Deserve according to the current government
Combining housing, transport and climate... Oh that's gonna be Fucken wonderful for that laser focus....
There's nothing more undemocratic than concentrating power in even fewer hands.
The big four consulting companies prayed to Bish that he would make their troubles go away for 2026
House trucks for all!
Ministry of Things.
Ministry of Stuff and Things.
Far more impressive.
One of these is not like the others. Sure, housing and transport are both forms of infrastructure, but managing the environment is a completely different task than building stuff for people to use.
But why?
All I'm seeing is a way to diminish environmental issues.
Should make it easier to rubberstamp land sales to his developer mates
Makes sense given how many people are living in their cars and "al fresco" these days.
It’s called the “Ministry of Things We Couldn’t Care Less About”
I fucking hate how they keep going on about how it’s regulation and too much care for the environment that is making housing costs high. Basically every county in the world is laughing at us for not implementing capital gains tax. We are literally the example given on the wiki page of what not to do.
While we are apparently at it, can we roll the Ministry for Regulation into that too? We can save a bunch of money there by letting go of that whole ministry please.
Three things that go really well together
So they can drive all 3 into the ground together?
A ministry of works? Interesting 🤔
The tech companies will be loving this. Ka-ching!
With a bit of layeral thinking we could easily group the lot of them into four large Ministries, especially with a population our size; Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Peace, Ministry of Love, Ministry of Plenty.
We love re-inventing the wheel don't we.....
While we are at it - might as well revive the Ministry of Works.
Seeing as people are living in their cars, two out of three ain't bad.
NZ is very ministry-heavy. Streamlining is often a good thing... as long as it is competently executed.
ask GPT about 'neoliberalism'. thats what we have here.
Hmmm, almost sounds like a Ministry of Works.
Nah, they're mostly policy shops. It's just the Ministry of Bishop. The service delivery functions are still elsewhere.
Idiots. What the fuck does housing have to do with transport? At best it’s maybe a series of discussions about how transport policy impacts zoning, but that doesn’t warrant collapsing Ministries that have totally different regulatory objectives.
Rather than combining Ministries to create hodge-podge ones like MBIE with multiple responsible ministers and Byzantine turf wars, just directly rationalise them by changing operating mandates and legislation, and get rid of shared Ministerial responsibility for agency level decisions.
If Sweden can operate with 23 ministries, we can get rid of 20 basically immediately.
Transport and housing are interwoven far beyond just simply fiddling with zoning. There’s a ton of work ongoing to build a better system of infrastructure provision that enables urban growth. Transport is a massive part of it.
Sure, but these are domains that aren’t inherently linked from a legislative point of view. They’re operational discussions.
Deciding vehicle safety policy on air, land and sea and traffic enforcement has zero to do with building standards or zoning.
Will it be pronounced Mic Ert?
We'll see how it goes, but it seems like a good idea to me.
Getting a balance between these 3 is critical and will be more efficient if it's done within a single ministry. They can all keep each other in check.
They're not going to start building cities and motorways in National Parks if that's what everyone is thinking. Better synchronising housing and transport will be a huge win for the environment.
What gives you the assurance that this is not going to happen? They have already sidelined the natural environment in their RMA reform
It is possible, just as the Greens could pull up all roads and plant them in native forest instead.
Is that going to happen? No.
One's thoughts can really go away with the fairies if they forget to take their political glasses off from time to time.
Are you some kind of bot? Every reply you give carries on about the glasses we wear.
It's fun to talk in hyperboles, however Shane Jones has already gone on record that he wouldn't let endangered endemic or native species stand in the way of a mine
Well no because Shane Jones is already mining there.
In National Parks?
Not true my friend. A nice reminder that people's political glasses often cloud critical thinking.
Hahahahhahaha do you think their care about balance when environment is in the mix? Like genuinely?
Yes, genuinely.
You'll understand one day when you take your political glasses off. None of our political parties are out to cause mass destruction.
I’m not implying they are Captain Planet villains polluting beaches for the lols. I am implying they do not give a shit at all about the environment and would allow business or private individuals to destroy anything at all if they could get away with it because they care about money for themselves and their donors.
Every single time the conflict is between the environment and moneyed interests the latter wins under this government. Maybe if you took of your own glasses you’d notice. It’s a shame too. When I moved here just before Key took over the Nats were not like this. But between giving Shane Jones everything he fuxking wants and their inability to stand up to any industry at all, this political term has been on Le environmental loss after another. The new RMA bill is more of the same.