Opinion: With the Government releasing its new quarterly plan for New Zealand this week, Liam Hehir examines Christopher Luxon's corporate approach to governing.
Confession: The idea that government should be run like a business leaves me completely cold.
Government is not like a business and certainly nothing like a small or medium sized business. Those entities operate in competitive environments. The government, on the other hand, usually operates like a monopoly.
So when a government run likes a business, it generally runs like a corporate monopoly. And monopoly corporations are not generally known for efficiency and innovation.
Devoid of competition, such corporations rarely epitomise the dynamism and responsiveness celebrated in the private sector and function more like private bureaucracies themselves (but with higher executive pay).
In the same way, I cannot stand management speak.
It feels like an alien language to me, filled with jargon and buzzwords that seem designed to obscure meaning rather than clarify it.
The types of business books you buy in airport bookstores are often the worst culprits. They're filled with grand promises of secret recipes for success, yet they largely regurgitate the same tired clichés masquerading as profound insight.
But then again, my own background is steeped in the humanities and the type of thinking those pursuits encourage. And that way of thinking, though the stuff of life in my view, does not always get results. And that’s probably why I am not — and almost certainly never will be — rich.
If government should not be run like a business, nor should it be run like a dysfunctional university. That’s what the previous six years felt like. The last government’s endless talking shops and conversations and lack of decisive action reflected an environment where saying the right things often meant more than actually doing the right things.
We really are overdue for a correction to a more structured, purposeful governance.
The New Zealand government may not be a business but there’s no reason the business of the New Zealand government cannot be managed in a more businesslike manner. Expectations of discipline, efficiency, accountability and clear benchmarks should not be seen as the enemy.
You can be businesslike in your rigour and pragmatism without reducing government to profit and loss calculations.
I suspect that if I were a minister I would chafe under Christopher Luxon’s commercial mindset and rhetoric. They would make government less fun. But that’s because accountability is rarely a fun thing to experience.
A quarterly plan seems like a good thing for a government to have. It seems like a sensible measure to ensure that government initiatives do not stagnate or get lost in bureaucratic inertia. The over-commercialisation of state functions is something to be careful about but so is the lethargic governmental apparatus Luxon has inherited.
Christopher Luxon may never be the Pericles of New Zealand political rhetoric. His language may be filled with business jargon and his approach may be steeped in his background as a company man. But we don't really have a use for a Pericles right now.
In this moment, what we need is not poetic statesmen but practical, purposeful leadership.
If it requires adopting a few business clichés, if it requires speaking the language of “laddering up” then that’s the price we pretentious snobs need to be willing to pay.
Liam Hehir is a lawyer and political commentator. He is a National Party member.
This article has been republished from The Blue Review.
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