A bouquet and four brickbats for Wellington's bureaucrats

The New Zealand Herald recently devoted a page to a columnist criticising a government department, in this case, the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), but disappointingly it turned out to be an urban liberal vegan bleat complaining it had not stopped the killing of fish and animals for food.

Nevertheless putting the government and their departments under the spotlight is valuable as the business press mainly only looks at the Reserve Bank and the Treasury.

Given that my business interests cover commercial buildings, residential subdivisions, hospitality, food preparation and mineral prospecting, I thought I would share some thoughts based on actual interaction with our vast bureaucracy.

First, a bouquet, to show how fair I am. Recent Department of Internal Affairs (Oct 1) changes to the way taverns are recompensed for their pokies are entirely sensible and allow for a sustainable income to what are not dens of iniquity but are in fact the social connection sites for many of our communities. Thanks to someone, possibly Peter Dunne, believe it or not.

Now for some brickbats.

Recent changes to the fire regulations, presumably passed by a supine parliament under the influence of the safety drug, have doubled fire ratings for walls, etc, hence shoving up the costs of building without the saving of a single life. An example is a formerly safe 30-minute fire rating for the walls of a single floor office building, which gave those inside 30 minutes to walk 30m to safety outside (and in a fire they probably run), now needs 60 minutes. My fire consultant told me not to think about it, just suck it up, that’s the rule now. No cost-benefit analysis involved in these changes. Stupid!

I have mentioned this before but the introduction by the Ministry of the Environment of the need for soil tests on land that may have been contaminated wins the prize for the good idea gone terribly wrong category. In theory, if your land was a petrol station or a timber treatment plant then testing the soil for contaminants doesn’t seem such a bad idea. 

But the Wellington mob expanded that to include almost all rural land in case having had plant seedlings or kiwifruit growing there would cause a risk to health, never mind the fact that people ate the fruit quite happily. This has spawned an industry of fee extractors knowing there could never be any risk to them but dramatically increasing rural housing and building costs. An example is a site for a factory that will plonk a concrete slab over the ground which after $30,000 of tests discovered 72 parts per million of arsenic to the horror of the local council. Never mind that nearby mineral prospectors had found whole paddocks at 2600 parts per million of arsenic where the cows were happily munching the grass. Really stupid!

Central property procurement managed from Wellington. Given the recent blunders with Wellington housing so many bureaucrats in expensive buildings sited on the highest earthquake risk city and which didn’t perform all that well, setting up a department there to centrally manage government property procurement seems even madder than it is. Obviously, they missed the chance to rehouse bureaucrats into offices to be vacated by NZ Post, who coughed up millions to their landlord in order to leave early once they realised that NZ Post was a sunset industry. 

Then when regional offices attempt to shift to new premises they are subjected to Wellington rules designed for large cities. Examples being the central drive to house clusters of government departments in one building. OK for cities where land is expensive but silly in small towns where land is around $100/m2 but the costs of going up more than one floor are over $1000/m2. Dopey!

New connection rules for electricity and telecommunications. There was a time when we used to laugh at how long it took to get a new phone or power connection in places like Russia but that has all changed now with the rules created here by bureaucrats to foster a market that never really existed. Examples being if developers of a property seek to connect to local infrastructure first they need to select a retail service provider.

This seems almost justifiable but the developer who will own the building is not the customer who is the tenant, who thinks that the building automatically has a power and phone connection. Confusion ensues along with time wasted and an inevitable charge for changing retail providers as the one that the developer selects never turns out to be the one the tenant wants. Where is the regulator? In Wellington.