Source: ACT Party
The Haps
We’ve had tremendous feedback on last week’s Free Press, which was a cook’s tour of ACT’s progress in Government.
Now Parliament goes into recess for a week, so your property is safe. The country keeps grappling with the problem of wanting first world energy without making the choices needed to have it. Most of all we need political consensus so people will want to invest.
ACT has challenged Labour and the Greens to ‘show us ya stack’ because they say they want a cross party energy accord but they won’t include gas. Right now gas and coal are 20 per cent of energy in New Zealand (mostly gas), so there’s no credible energy stack without gas in it. Labour and the Greens need to come back to earth for all our sakes.
Stable Policy
There are recurring themes in the questions people send to Free Press. One of them is, roughly, ‘why can’t politicians just put aside their differences and work for the good of the country?’ It’s a fair question, and this week we take our best shot at answering it.
The cheeky answer is that politicians disagree because the people they represent disagree. Our political system is really just a way for people to work out their differences without hitting each other (hence Julie Anne Genter’s tantrum was such a big deal). When all the voters agree, so will all the politicians.
Besides politics being less annoying, we’d also be richer if politicians agreed more. For the most part, countries get rich depending on whether it’s safe to make a sacrifice today and get paid back tomorrow.
If any digger you buy will be stolen, you might as well use a spade. There’s not much point earning a PhD in Physics if you get hacked with a machete. There’s no point investing in something like gas exploration if it might be banned after the next election.
ACT knows the politicians will never agree because the voters don’t agree, so a lot of the party’s policies are designed to make the political system more predictable. Here are four.
David Seymour’s four-year term bill was drafted in opposition, now it’s coalition policy to get it up for first reading in the first fifteen months of Government. The bill gives a four-year term, with a twist.
The Bill only allows a Government to go four years if they effectively turn the select committees over to the Opposition. Hearings would be led by opponents of the Government. Imagine Adrian Orr or Ashley Bloomfield fronting a Select Committee dominated by MPs who don’t support the Government of the day (we saw a glimpse of this during the COVID committee in 2020).
For lawmaking the implications are stronger. The Government would have more time to think about its policies and build consensus. It would also have to get its laws past hostile Select Committees, who would be much more likely to listen to public submitters and make changes.
The elected Government would have the ultimate say, because all bills come back to the full Parliament in the end, but both sides would have to work so much harder to justify their positions. The whole dynamic of lawmaking would turn from rubber stamps to a real political contest.
The Regulatory Standards Bill was another David Seymour bill in opposition. It will require lawmakers to ask and answer basic questions like ‘what problem are we solving?’ ‘What are the costs and benefits, and who’s paying/benefiting?’ Putting some basic discipline around lawmaking will go a long way to making the regulatory environment lighter-touch and more stable.
The city and regional partnerships, or deals, are another policy designed to make policy more predictable. Under the deals, an incoming Government would find it has a deal with every region. Free Press predicts incoming Governments will be afraid to break them. The same goes for councils who have a deal with the Government. Infrastructure investment will be more predictable now there’s a framework for local and central Government to work together on it.
Teachers tell us they’d love nothing more than ten years without any political meddling. Charter Schools will give educators a deal where they are immune to the fads and interference that emanate from the Ministry of Education, just so long as they achieve their attendance and academic progress results. In fact, Charter Contracts are ten years twice-renewable, so really it’s thirty years.
Politicians disagree because voters disagree, but they can disagree more predictably with better rules, and that’s good for investment. One of the less reported, but highly important things ACT is doing in Government is introducing laws and policies that will make investment in the future more attractive.
