Why was a broadsheet so big?

The change in the format of our daily newspapers, from broadsheet to compact, will have numerous advantages such as taking up less room on the dining room table at breakfast time. Whether the saying, today’s news, tomorrow’s fish and chips, will continue to be true remains to be seen.

The question is, why were newspapers such large sheets in the first place? The answer is found in tax history – who said tax was boring? In England in 1712 the government introduced a Stamp Tax which was levied on the publishers of newspapers based on the size of the sheet. However the size was not specified so the obvious answer was to use larger sheets – the broadsheet – which could be folded down into a number of pages depending on the size of the sheet thus reducing the tax payable. The Stamp Tax has long gone, but the broadsheet as we knew it lived on, until now.

Your editorial on Friday about Shane Jones and bureaucracies confuses because it mixes corruption in with risk aversion. Risk aversion is where a bureaucrat will not promote anything new due to the risk of being associated with failure whereas corruption is being unethical or exhibiting inappropriate loyal behaviour at the expense of the greater good.

I applaud Shane Jones for starting this conversation because we need to have it. We don’t handle failure well and in our top-down culture we sack coaches or captains of sports teams or pin blame on anyone where it might stick. It is only natural that a public servant won’t support innovation because failure in NZ will cost them their job and possibly their career.

We need to get away from this mindset and understand that in the process of finding sustainable and viable businesses (as happens elsewhere in the world) the community must allow and fund up to 90 per cent of failures to get 10 per cent successes. Anything else we are not testing our collective intelligence and capabilities enough.

This government seems prepared to support investigation into more ideas, and that provides the best chance for achieving ongoing innovative successes. However this will involve dealing with risk aversion within the bureaucracy.

Shane Jones is right on the money in his description of the public sector as ‘‘treacleridden’’. But as your editorial points out, this culture has not come about by mistake.

Capability abounds in the public sector but is misdirected. Ministers are unforgiving of even the most trivial error by a public servant and the media are even worse with their sensationalist pursuit of advertisers in their losing battle with social media.

Consequently, risk aversion dominates the public sector. The most capable public servants have elevated this to an art form whereby endless ‘‘due process’’ becomes the preferred outcome to avoid risk until Ministers and the media move on to the next hot topic.

So although Shane is right that ‘‘s..t-kickers’’ are needed to get things done, he first needs to reflect on the Ministerial direction and incentive structures that have given rise to the culture he condemns in such colourful terms.

I read in ‘‘Council drops bike-share pilot operator’’ (April 28) that our council is about to ‘‘dump’’ the current supplier of the trial bike-share scheme in favour of ‘‘another supplier’’. Where is the spirit of fair play? Robert Henderson has put a lot of his time and energy into getting the pilot scheme up and running only to have it snatched from under his feet by some council bureaucracy. Shame on you, Christchurch City Council. Perhaps this is a lesson for all future suppliers of innovative ideas to our council. Before supplying them with all your innovative ideas and technology you should tie them into some sort of contract so that you can reap some benefits from your innovation.