National and the right wing lie of reducing bureaucracy ?

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A repost from reddit





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I've been tracking bills going through Parliament and I'm seeing some really distinctive patterns that are now blindingly obvious.

Here's the post with my latest data on the bills in parliament

So I've been doing this nerdy thing where I track all the bills going through Parliament and try to figure out what they actually do (because let's be honest, parliamentary language is designed to hide as much as it reveals and as for the media!!)

I have just finished the analysis of the last month or so - 38 changes total (21 bills changed stages, 10 new ones, 6 finalised or binned). This month there's 96 active bills.

Anyway, part of this tracking is analysing the impact of each bill (by Claude), and after doing this for a few months some stuff is really standing out and I wanted to express it here. I think these are things we've all noticed, but these are observations from the data from the bills.parliament.gove.nz website.

The efficiency thing

Literally almost every bill says it's going to "reduce red tape" and "improve efficiency." But then when you dig into what could actually go wrong, it's like... new compliance costs, more bureaucracy, just shuffled around differently. Starting to feel like efficiency is just the magic word you say to get anything through.

Everything's getting centralised

This one's harder to spot unless you're looking across heaps of bills, especially when this Government talks a lot about decentralised power. Decision-making is getting pulled up to Wellington constantly. Health decisions to the Minister, financial oversight to single supervisors, even local councils getting standardised codes they have to follow. Most obvious example is the Regulatory Services Bill - and all the bills around it.

Like, I get that consistency can be good, but when did we decide local communities can't be trusted to make decisions about their own stuff?

The wellbeing thing

This is the bit that's really getting to me. There's this pattern where anything to do with people's actual wellbeing is deliberately getting stripped out:

  • Local councils can't consider social/environmental/cultural wellbeing anymore

  • Early childhood education is dropping wellbeing focus for "productivity"

  • Worker protections getting gutted

  • Even voting access is being restricted (hundreds of thousands of people losing same-day enrollment)

  • Housing protections being weakened

And it's always justified the same way - this stuff is "red tape" or "bureaucratic burden." But... these protections didn't just appear randomly. They're there because people got screwed over without them. This leads me to the really uncomfortable place of what happens with our Judiciary's ability to take wellbeing factors into account once the RSB is passed.

What do you think?

I don't think I'm overthinking this because I've been staring at parliamentary documents for too long. I know quite a few of you will have already got to this conclusion. When you look at the big picture rather than individual bills, it feels like we're trading away a lot of protections that took ages to build, for efficiency gains that are extremely likely not to happen.

The people most likely to get hurt by these changes are the ones with the least power to fight back about it, but this is something that will hurt every single NZer for a long time to come.

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