Subjecting government regulation to cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is important and a long-held crusade of ours here at this Blog. However, given how technical it is, the best way to implement CBA is through a dedicated office within the NZ Treasury. Our Treasury already has staffers assigned to this task. That group should simply be greatly expanded. As for Seymour's new Ministry, which was created out of the defunct Productivity Commission, it should be re-purposed, re-tooled and called something like, "The Commission for Government Efficiency", a name that Elon Musk has been promoting in the US (which he may now lead). Its purpose will be to "conduct a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and make recommendations for drastic reforms.” That's just what we need in NZ. The problem with Seymour's slow Regulation Ministry start-up is that regulation usually only refers to government rules that constrain private businesses.
Sure there is too much of that kind of "red tape" in NZ - and Treasury should be tasked with identifying it so Parliament can strike it out when its costs to business are greater than its societal benefits. But who's going to address the problem that there are thousands of people working in the likes of the Department of Education, and none of us have any idea what they do? They're not passing regulations - they are not interfering with private business - the problem is that they're just not doing much of anything. For example, the Education Department has had several hundred employees working on the NZ Curriculum for many years. I read those documents. They typically amount to nothing more than a few dozen pages for each subjects. A small handful of people could have done that job in less than a week. Instead the Education Department spent several hundred millions on it. The ACT Leader would be best suited to sorting out this kind of government waste - and it aligns closely with PM Luxon's corporate background of trying to find efficiencies in organizations. My fear is that going down the regulation path - and getting drawn into very technical cost-benefit debates - may have been a mistake for ACT and David Seymour. It is very important, but it should have been sorted out using existing structures & expertise within the Treasury.
Sources: