Over at NBR

My weekly column is online, titled “Much ado about Little”.

I cover the Government’s spending cuts, Phil Goff on charity and Colin Espiner’s comments on Andrew Little’s dual role.

As usual, comments and feedback can be made over at NBR.

Matthew Hooton’s column (not online you have to buy the paper) is also on the Government’s spending cuts. Matthew does a fascinating case study of the bureaucracy in the tourism portfolio (Labour set up a new Ministry of Tourism that now costs 10% of the budget of Tourism NZ that does the actual marketing) and concludes entire agencies need to be cut, not just programmes. His conclusion I’ve typed up:

The Ministry of Tourism is far from being the worst case. Take the masakari to the corporate welfare programmes of the Ministry for Economic Development and NZ Trade and Enterprise; abolish the pointless Tertiary Education, Families and Electricity commissions; simplify the Emissions Trading Scheme so it won’t cost tens of millions to administer; slash the “policy advice streams” of TPK, Youth Development, Women’s Affairs and so forth, and you’ve saved a billion dollars before breakfast.

I like the word masakari. It’s an ancient Japanese battle axe used by warrior monks.