How come the new Ministry of Regulation has been taken over by Career Regulators, Mr Seymour?

America is super excited about the new Department of Government Efficiency that is being set up, headed by Elon Musk and Vivak Ramaswamy. We all know Musk - his achievement was launching a space program at about 1% the cost of NASA's space program. What had gone wrong at NASA? It had turned into a gigantic bureaucracy. As for Ramaswamy, he worked as an investment partner at a hedge fund before founding Roivant Sciences and Investment firm, Strive Asset Management. His net worth is $960 million. These guys clearly know how to work efficiently and minimize overheads. They know the cost of red-tape.

Meanwhile in NZ, we always thought that ACT was the party to do the same kind of stuff - to cut red-tape and make government work efficiently - to hand power back to the people. So let's take a look at ACT Leader David Seymour's new Ministry of Regulation. Its "senior leadership team" is made up of Wellington insiders - public administrators who've spent their careers regulating. It starts with Gráinne Moss, the new Chief Executive of Regulation. Previously she was System Lead Pay Equity at the Public Service Commission, worked at Ministry for Children, and at the UK's National Health Service, the most regulated outfit on the planet. It gets worse. Her Deputy, Andrew Royle, worked for "the Ministry for the Environment, Crown Law, State Services Commission & Department of Internal Affairs". He's a lawyer. Then there's the new Ministry's Head of Organizational Enablement (what's that?) called Paula Knaap. She's from the Environmental Protection Authority and has "led large regulatory & social policy functions at WorkSafe NZ, Ministry of Education & IRD". Another lawyer. To top off the Senior Leadership Team is Paul Delahunty, from the Social Investment Agency and Tertiary Education Commission, and Department of Conservation.

This group sounds like the first types of folks who Musk and Ramaswamy will be firing. The four members of ACT's Ministry of Regulation have between themselves created more of a mountain of red-tape than 5 million privately employed and small business-owning Kiwis combined. We wont be advising our economics students to go work there.

Sources

https://www.regulation.govt.nz/who-we-are

Next Time you Buy Mainland Cheese, don't think the "Mainland" is the South Island - it will be Mainland China.

For decades Kiwis have lamented about not getting into higher end manufacturing and branding of market leading products. Its even blamed for our low productivity. The old joke is that we export logs to China and they sent them back to us, but in the form of card-board and wooden boxes full of imports, where the price they charge us for the boxes is five times what we charged them for the logs. Sir Paul Callaghan even wrote a whole book about it, called, "Get off the Grass: Kickstarting NZ's Innovation Economy". He was a NZ physicist, founding director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials & Nanotechnology at Victoria University, a Professor of Physical Sciences & President of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance. The government's Callaghan Innovation was named after him.

Now Fonterra is determined to get NZ back into the grass. The dairy giant has confirmed plans to sell its consumer arm, including brands like Anchor, Mainland Cheese, and Kapiti Ice Cream. It could be a trade sale, whereby a foreign company buys the products & brands. For Fonterra not to be able to make a success out of such brands, in a world desperate for organic, free range, environmentally products, which many folks do associate with NZ, is a national disgrace. To be clear, its looking like it won't be long before the symbolic heart of our nation - the "Mainland" - the South Island - will cease to exist in the sense our iconic Mainland Cheese will become Mainland China. Aside from its interest in these products, some have touted Nestle of Switzerland as a buyer. What's that saying? That the Swiss can do high end and the Kiwis stay in the grass and do low end, because the Fonterra Execs don't know how to do high end? Sir Paul Callaghan would be horrified at their ineptitude.