Government’s action plans might really be a good idea
On the surface, the plans are laughable. But there is some substance in them
prime Minister Christopher Luxon marked the release of his Government’s first official quarterly plan on Tuesday by getting his flu jab with Health Minister Shane Reti.
He spent his weekly morning media round marketing the plan, the successor to the Government’s 100-day plan, which it is modelled on. In pure Luxon style, he waxed in vertigo-inducing style on how “actions ladder up” and big topics get “chunked down” and how his completed agenda might emerge from this dizzying display of governance.
The nation covered its collective ears. Luxon’s phraseology is designed for political mass communication the way one’s fingers are designed for use on a blackboard: it’s not.
If only he could be inoculated against his own vocabulary, Luxon and his handlers might have pondered. If only those awkward turns of phrase could by Pfizered away.
Alas for Luxon, there is no cure. His deputy Nicola Willis handles it best, telling Newstalk ZB the language is just Luxon expressing himself naturally.
The action plan is dripping in Luxon’s corporatese.
Its first pledge is to deliver a Budget by June 30. This is a very good thing, considering the next fiscal year begins on July 1. Read uncharitably, this is merely a pledge that the Government will survive another three months. Governor-general Dame Cindy Kiro can book in some leave, knowing she won’t have to call fresh elections in the event of a Budget impasse. New Zealanders can wake up on July 1 knowing the state continues to exist.
But if half of the document is a risible cornucopia of low-hanging fruit and deserves to be pilloried as such, the other half is more serious and deserves to be treated seriously.
Behind the scenes of the 100-day plan, there was a real and measurable effort to make the Government move faster. Some of this, particularly the excess of urgency, was excessive and the Government has rightly said it will dial this back in the first action plan.
But other parts of the plan could prove more lasting. The Government established a 100-day Cabinet committee that met weekly and had delegated authority to progress 100-day plan items. The creation of this committee effectively doubled the weekly opportunities to get some items ticked off (the proverbial “big things” still, of course, go before Cabinet). The committee received “progress reports” on 100-day plan items, so ministers could quickly see if any were in danger of slipping.
The 100-day plan committee has been disbanded. The action plan progress reports will go to the Cabinet Strategy Committee instead. This committee meets just once a month, meaning each “plan” will have just three reports go to the committee for consideration.
This may not be enough. The Government should consider upping the frequency of meetings. Luxon’s fairly relentless focus on the 100-day plan had the effect of focusing the public service. The gossip in every corner of Wellington was that all resource not being shredded by the 6.5 per cent savings drive was to be directed into ticking off the items in the plan — and it worked.
Speaking to Newstalk ZB on Tuesday, Luxon said he wants this level of energy and direction to continue. He said larger projects like RMA reform can be broken up into discrete “gateways” so that each quarter, the Government knows what it needs to tick off. The previous Government, Luxon argues, not only bit off more than it could chew (even the man who led that Government agrees with that), but that it was poorly focused. Big reforms went back and forth like the tides, progressing and regressing until eventually, the tide went out and didn’t come back in. Publishing regular quarterly plans, and hanging ministers’ political fortunes upon them, is perhaps one way this Government and the public service will avoid the fate of the last lot.
The Government should be careful. The public is very aware that not only is it setting and marking its own homework, many of the items in each plan are far from ambitious (other items are more ambiguous — taking decisions on the Government’s housing strategy might be simple or difficult, depending on the nature of the decision that’s taken).
More plans like the current one risk turning the exercise into parody. The Government should also keep the plans in their lane. These are nakedly political documents that have no constitutional currency — and shouldn’t. Ministers were rightly given a digital tongue lashing from constitutional scholars for pretending the 100-day plan gave the Government an excuse to put Parliament in three months of urgency to pass 100-day plan items.
There’s also a risk the plans steal the attention of the public service from important but less exciting topics. It’s hard to see a pledge to get a scheme for the crucial but unsexy managed retreat into a quarterly plan, however much it deserves to be there. Politicians have long lamented the shortsightedness of our Government and Parliament. Victoria University Professor Jonathan Boston not long ago recommended Parliament create a whole select committee for the “future” as a push to break the blinkered present-ism of our politics — but so blinkerdly present-ist was our politics that the idea was never given any air.
These plans will only exacerbate that problem. Nevertheless, the present is not without its problems and these action plans might actually get the Government to solve some of them in a timely fashion.