Why MoBIE will be a dick

Govt defends 'super ministry' merge of agencies
A new super ministry, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, will take effect this month and information on redundancies from the four agencies that have merged are yet to be announced.

It combines the ministries of Economic Development and Science and Innovation with the departments of Labour and Building and Housing.

Minister of Economic Development Steven Joyce told Newstalk ZB today the aim of the merger is to get better alignment across a range of small agencies, save money and speed up decision making.

Beyond the justification to cut more public service jobs, beyond the creepy 'business focus' for concepts that should be Government services (Housing, Science and Innovation, Labour and Economic Development), the reasons why MoBIE will be a screaming failure seems obvious.

The smaller, but more Ministry approach that we have in NZ allows for ideas to be counter scrutinized so that the advice given to the Minister is varied and forces the Minister to engage and ask questions for themselves.

You know, do the bloody job we pay them for.

By limiting the amount of Ministry advice you have on policy, you get the absolute fiasco that was the later classroom debacle.

Treasury and the IRD were the only ones who vetted that ridiculous political cancer. By limiting the voices of advice, the Minister (in that case Hekia), was left high and dry with no where to run.

If Collins or Joyce were trying to poison the challengers chalice that Hekia is trying to sup from, they couldn't have done a better job than the horror meltdown of policy that wasn't scrutinized well and internally challenged.

The problem MoBIE presents our first Tzar is that he's going to get exactly what he incompetently got with larger classroom sizes. Policy that has not be rigorously debated internally and the glaring holes highlighted.

MoBIE seems doomed to present Steven 'Hollow Brain' Joyce with ill thought out advice over 4 crucial sectors of the Government. Normally the thought of that helps me dream in color while this second term Government is in power, but as pleasing as watching Joyce disintegrate would be, the thought of how much damage he could cause trying to implement policy as poorly constructed as larger class room sizes means there would be little left to resurrect if they lost 2014.

We need counter Ministry criticism as an important counter weight in the decision making part of our Government, Joyce is tossing that model out the window so he can just get one report instead of four.

Lazy bludger. We should test him.

Oh and while we are talking Steven Joyce and trying to keep up with how many fingers he has in how many pies, if all roads lead to Rome, why do the roads Steven builds all seem to lead to Mitre 10?

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