America is super excited about the new Department of Government Efficiency that is being set up, headed by Elon Musk and Vivak Ramaswamy. We all know Musk - his achievement was launching a space program at about 1% the cost of NASA's space program. What had gone wrong at NASA? It had turned into a gigantic bureaucracy. As for Ramaswamy, he worked as an investment partner at a hedge fund before founding Roivant Sciences and Investment firm, Strive Asset Management. His net worth is $960 million. These guys clearly know how to work efficiently and minimize overheads. They know the cost of red-tape.
Meanwhile in NZ, we always thought that ACT was the party to do the same kind of stuff - to cut red-tape and make government work efficiently - to hand power back to the people. So let's take a look at ACT Leader David Seymour's new Ministry of Regulation. Its "senior leadership team" is made up of Wellington insiders - public administrators who've spent their careers regulating. It starts with Gráinne Moss, the new Chief Executive of Regulation. Previously she was System Lead Pay Equity at the Public Service Commission, worked at Ministry for Children, and at the UK's National Health Service, the most regulated outfit on the planet. It gets worse. Her Deputy, Andrew Royle, worked for "the Ministry for the Environment, Crown Law, State Services Commission & Department of Internal Affairs". He's a lawyer. Then there's the new Ministry's Head of Organizational Enablement (what's that?) called Paula Knaap. She's from the Environmental Protection Authority and has "led large regulatory & social policy functions at WorkSafe NZ, Ministry of Education & IRD". Another lawyer. To top off the Senior Leadership Team is Paul Delahunty, from the Social Investment Agency and Tertiary Education Commission, and Department of Conservation.
This group sounds like the first types of folks who Musk and Ramaswamy will be firing. The four members of ACT's Ministry of Regulation have between themselves created more of a mountain of red-tape than 5 million privately employed and small business-owning Kiwis combined. We wont be advising our economics students to go work there.
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