TransTasman on Govt Departments
May 8th, 2008 at 7:21 pm by David FarrarThe excellent weekly newsletter, trans-Tasman, has some reviews of issues around Government agencies which I found interesting. You have to pay to subscribe, but here are some extracts so you can see the sort of stuff they have:
Ministry For The Environment
Govts which have been in power for a long time have a nasty tendency to view the public service as an extension of themselves. It is not a good thing, and when Govt’s change it can take a while for things to adjust, But what is worse is when the public service itself starts to make the same assumption. It has started to look a bit like this with the Ministry for the Environment.
More than a bit!
Department Of Conservation
After several years of fiscal malnourishment, “Doc” got a lot more money after the Cave Creek tragedy in 1995. Labour has continued this run of fiscal largesse. The department runs the country’s growing number of National Parks and Conservation Parks. The expansion has been such even a recent edition of one of the country’s tramping and outdoor magazines queried whether the expansion has been too far and too fast. The past four years has seen an additional 400,000 hectares of new Department of Conservation land in the South Island.
Energy Efficiency And Conservation Authority
The Authority’s main focus is getting people to use more energy efficient methods for heating and the like. One of the main planks of this is the solar water heating imitative, which was launched with great fanfare in late 2006, backed by a budget of $15.5m over three years. The aim was 15,000-20,000 installations in the first three years but this now looks a bit ambitious. In fact, the year after the strategy was launched the number of new installations dropped to the lowest level since 2000 – when the Authority began recording such installations. There is also a grant scheme offering $500 loans for installations, but in the 2006/07 year no grants were issued.
Not a single grant. Is there any other term for this except total failure. A great example of how good intentions are not enough.
Transit NZ/Land Transport NZ
At the moment, the budget allocation is for $7.5bn for each of the first three years. This is part of what Finance Minister Michael Cullen dubbed, in last year’s Budget, the biggest road building campaign for a generation.
The Greens must hate that level of spending being mainly on roads!
Ministry Of Transport
With Auckland being the key electoral battleground, and with transport hold-ups being such an issue in there, this will be even more so for this year. The Ministry has also increased its staff numbers, partly due to reorganisation of the sector and partly because it has a group of new policy people dealing with environmental issues and Climate Change.
Department Of Building And Housing
New Minister Shane Jones – one of the Govt’s high fliers, and tipped as a possible Labour leader – is also investigating changes to property law to allow investors to put up a “shell” property and allow low income people to buy a long term occupancy right and invest some of their own money. A model is the retirement village arrangement. Jones argues the change to more long-term renters creates a niche for this sort of property right. Less well noticed has been the change in profile of landlords. The popularity of investment properties means, according to a survey at the time the Department was formed, nearly a quarter of all landlords had been in the business for less than a year.
Housing New Zealand
On the one hand one of the major delivery agencies for social services, it is also the country’s largest property developer. So much so the Corporation, under after taking advice from its tax advisers, set up a separate property development company several years ago. The reason for this was to minimise the amount of tax the Corporation would have to pay for its property development activities.
So even Housing NZ avoids tax. Hilarious.
Related posts:
- The difference a change of Govt makes
- Rating the Departments
- Accepting govt spin on numbers
- Why not just have the Govt build and own all the homes?
May 8th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
“The Greens must hate that level of spending being mainly on roads!”
Yes indeed they do. Silly stuff really. In ten years time most of us will barely be able to afford to drive on the bloody things.
yeah yeah, electronic cars and all that, but it takes around 10 years to replace half a vehicle fleet. Think about that.
Vote:May 8th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
I don’t know if the money DOC got post cave creek was fiscal largesse…its actually quite nice to walk on bridges and things that won’t kill you. There is a valid point there though. DOC has got 400,000 ha of new land in the last 4 years while basically receiving no additional funding to manage it. This is on top of an $8 million deficit. Something will have to give somewhere…I wonder if we’ll be seeing a lot of gorse and wilding pines growing on that land in the future or if they’ll fund that at the expense of something else.
Some of the new land has come with existing huts and tracks and elsewhere people will want other facilities developed so they can actually access these places that they now own. Unfortunately DOC doesn’t have enough money to maintain what it has already. Buying new land makes a great headline and photo op for politicians and I’m sure they’ve secured some pretty special places (I don’t know if public ownership was the only way to acheive this) but when you look at the maths its a pretty ugly equation.
At the same time we could actually see the Maui Dolphin go extinct in the very near future. Given the flack that nasty, dirty China got when the Yangtze (?) river dolphin went extinct recently this will almost certainly damage our clean green reputation. Normally conservation of endangered species is pretty airy fairy but this will have an actual economic impact. You really have to question the government’s priorities.
Vote:May 8th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
“Not a single grant. Is there any other term for this except total failure. A great example of how good intentions are not enough.”
Absolutely. The way to reduce energy demand is to provide efficiency/tax incentives and disincentives to both producers and consumers on the macro-scale. This is part of the Green’s policy, but watch the National Party jump up and down if you slap a european-style waste tax on SUV purchases, and decrease tax on the purchase of more economical vehicles (even if any increase in tax was offset by a reduction in personal income tax) – the tortured screams would be deafeningly painful to hear, and it would kill Labour and the Greens in the polls.
Thus the ‘feel good’ solar energy for the home initiative. Very annoying.
Vote:May 8th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
A Trans Tasman newsletter indeed….. it may be prescient.
The increasingly irrational behaviour of the NZ Labour govt in pusuit of its dogmas is eventually going to be a worry to our largest investors.
The Aust Banks have been quiet so far….but they have a reputation of not tolerating fools lightly.
The economic immaturity of the NZ Labour govt re dysfunctional Kyoto dreaming must be getting their attention.
This stuff is all over Aust’s near biggest blogs. (Bolta and Blair)
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/comments/kiwis_doomed/
Vote:May 8th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
What about the Ministry of Economic Development – a huge amount of money has been poured into it with very little to show in many areas?
Vote:May 8th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
From Penguin at Blair’s….
KUM-ATEH KUM-ATEH,
Vote:POORER POORER!
May 8th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Innocent bystander, Doc seem to be their own masters of their own misfortune. Their PR is appalling, they appear to be so short of cash that they try to introduce charges on anything the can pin their name to. This usually seems to backfire on them and ends up with DOC on the back foot. As far as I’m concerned they are an organisation hell bent on building their own little kingdom under the guise of conservation. They are socialist with a very naive view on how to manage the land brought by tax payer dollars, most land like you say will return to grose. They seem to have the belief that if you have possison of land it will look after it’s self without the need for lots of capital and work.
You also mention the Maui Dolphin. Doc has been trying to stop set netting in our local waters because they say the dolphin is endangered, which it is but the bloody thing dosen’t live in our local waters. I’m not in favour of set netting but doc are trying to use the dolphin in an excuse to further extend marine parks down the west coast of the NI.
Vote:May 8th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Oh, I do love a good quango hunt.
Vote:May 8th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
That’s a rare beast…you mean qango.
Vote:May 8th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
I’m wrong…you do mean quango.
Vote:May 8th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
There is a good case for increasing the number of marine reserves but that won’t help the dolphins and you can’t just impose them on communities without their support. I like what has been done in Fiordland where a bunch of fishermen and the local communty actually drove the establishment of the things and chose the places and the government came in later with a legal framework to make it all work.
The PR aspect is interesting, Al Morrison always seems to be able to call in a lot of favourable media coverage and flood the six o’clock news with fluffy, cutsy, mediapathic images of wildlife when the going gets tough.
Vote:May 8th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
IB – Al Morrison was an excellent (if somewhat lefty on occasion) political reporter. What credentials he has to run this department are beyond me. There’s a huge difference between sitting in the Press Gallery for X number of years to be being the PR man for DOC, to leap into the top job after Hugh Logan took the MfE role.
Vote:May 9th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Thats a lot of cash been pumped into those dysfunctional gummint depts over the last 10 years….
Vote:May 9th, 2008 at 7:40 am
As a regular user of DOC facilities, they should take a more commercial approach and make some money to offset increased costs without burdening the tapayers more. For example, the Tongariro Crossing – about 2000 people a day, costs nothing. Charge $20 (which I would happily have paid) say 200 walking days per annum = $8M of revenue. Less some admin costs and you have quite a bit available for other areas. Could do the same for the other popular DOC huts – the Great Walks huts are always fully booked over summer – from memory $25 for a night – again they could increase and trampers would pay – bllody cheap compared to a motel!
Vote:May 9th, 2008 at 7:57 am
And 80% approx are overseas users for whom 20-25 notes is f-all and as you say about the same as a camp site of 1/4 of a motel price.
Pity user pays is against the Laybore creedo.
Vote:May 9th, 2008 at 7:58 am
unless your a rich prick. then they should pay 100 notes a nite, unless they are foreign guests who might take the wrong impression to the UN…
Vote:May 9th, 2008 at 8:35 am
The more I hear about this government, the more I believe there is going to have to be an accounting for their performance in office. Government is not about providing jobs or career choices but taking responsibility for the stewardship of the public assets and providing peace and tranquility for us to go about our lives.
The idea that the Housing Corp has set up an entity to avoid taxes makes me furious. This is endemic corruption of the body politic. Considering government to be units of business models is a recipe for anarchy not sovereignty.
Vote:May 9th, 2008 at 9:30 am
nome
the solar grants was done at the request of the Greens and Jeanette is responsible for EECA. How can its failure possibly be the nat’s fault?
Vote:May 9th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
DoC manages about half of New Zealand’s land area and the area which includes our best scenery and most of our mineral wealth.
Vote:Now if I managed that with a good board of directors (and operated under the RMA) I would earn so much money I would be able to pay the government taxes and carry out the conservation demands.
Of course I would sell off land which was of no use to me – something which DoC never does because it believes that salvation lies in having DoC actually own and manage the whole country.
DoC does not believe in trade or enterprise of any kind.
The US manages its park land more effectively because it has a Conservation department and a Parks and Reserves Dept.
One serves the needs of “nature” the other serves the needs of people. They transparently compete for the resources.
Doc has to make tradeoffs between tourism recreation and conservation and its legislation means the trade-offs always go one way.
DoC needs a thorough makeover.
Go to:http://www.rmastudies.org.nz/index.php/issues/39-rma-the-act-and-its-reforms/98-the-role-of-the-department-of-conservation-and-the-need-for-change
May 9th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
Funny you mention that…
There’s an ongoing rumour that management is going to be offerred to a group of preferred tenderers.
Alaskan Fish and Game apparently have the inside rail.
Vote:May 9th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
The national parks act prevents DOC charging joe public for access to parks and changing that is a vote loser for any government so that just isn’t going to happen. Given the nature of some of our parks its also completely impractical.
DOC can charge fees for huts but kiwis hate paying them because they already pay taxes. Apparently there is some dogma somewhere that prevents there being different fees for locals and overseas visitors. Clipping the ticket of any commercial activity that takes place on DOC land is currently the most effective means of funding conservation but this can create odd incentives…they aren’t going to want to rock the boat with companies that are giving them lots of dough.
GW hut fees are $40 a night from memory. Overseas visitors tend to compare this unfavourably with the cost of a night in a youth hostel…which is a little unfair given that building and running a facility in the middle of nowhere is damned expensive. I’m sure they’ll keep coming if the fees are higher, I’m not sure what kiwis would be willing to pay though.
There is an interesting treasury report on this issue http://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/research-policy/ppp/2006/06-07 which is worth a read although it looks at it from a very narrow angle.
Owen – I really can’t comment on what mineral wealth is under the DOC estate but most conservation land became part of the estate over the years because it was either scenic or because it was deemed to have little economic value. Regarding commercial activity, I’m not sure we are commenting on the same department, there is heaps of commercial activity on the DOC estate. Fiordland alone contributes about $200 million annually to the economy (plus hundreds of millions more from the power generated at Manapouri if I want to be pedantic). I agree that DOC should not be managing any land that it doesn’t need to.
As for the US NPS managing its land more effectively, what does that really mean? What is your measure of “effective” management?
Vote:May 9th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
Yeah, fucking oaff Owen.
Vote: