There ought to be a law

The Prime Minister wants to hear which regulations you think are silly. Here’s hoping he’s got all day to listen.

DON’T COUNT your chickens before they hatch, as the saying goes. But Aucklanders are being asked to do exactly that.

Keeping more than six chickens on urban properties in the greater Auckland area will require a licence from the council under a proposal announced last week. City dwellers will also need to prove they are a fit and proper person to keep a rooster, a duck, a sheep, a goat or a goose.

Speaking of roosters, it’s apparently still against the law to fly with one in a hot air balloon.

There may well be an entirely sensible reason for this; along with the historic statute preventing cats in Central Otago being allowed outside without three bells on their collars and the rationale behind every New Zealand high school being permitted to hold one ‘‘pound’’ of uranium for conducting nuclear experiments (that’s about 500g in today’s money).

It’s pretty obvious a society needs rules. They are the structure that holds it together. Without them, it falls apart – much like a leaking, rotting building does when a government decides we don’t need treated timber in our building regulations.

Rules protect us from dodgy curries, drunk drivers, toddlers drowning in swimming pools, exploitative employers and that neighbour who wants to play his stereo full blast at 4am.

But you can have too much of a good thing. And having a few good rules is no reason to have thousands of bad ones. Not for nothing did former prime minister Geoffrey Palmer call New Zealand’s Parliament ‘‘the fastest lawmakers in the West’’. We’re world leaders in regulation.

Since then, though, things have got only worse. Twenty years ago Palmer launched his ‘‘Great Quango Hunt’’, vowing to track down and kill off quasiautonomous non-government organisations that were proliferating and handing out regulations left, right and centre.

But the blighters proliferated anyway. And while central government continues to blame councils, boards and other regulatory bodies for making too many rules, they continue to pass

The Productivity Commission’s latest report found that in the past five years, New Zealand passed four times as many laws as the United Kingdom.

laws like there’s no tomorrow.

The Productivity Commission’s latest report found that in the past five years, New Zealand passed four times as many laws as the United Kingdom – despite the massive difference in the size of the two nation’s populations. And half of the laws reviewed by the Law Commission were found to have significant problems.

The Productivity Commission found reviews of ancient legislation were inadequate or non-existent; staff charged with interpreting the rules poorly-trained and those who had to follow them believed them to be confusing, contradictory or not fit for purpose.

So now we’re to have a 21stcentury version of Palmer’s quango hunt: the Rules Witchhunt via Facebook. Prime Minister John Key announced last week that he planned to ‘‘crowdsource’’ (for non digital media-types, this means to ask you to help) ‘‘dumb’’ local and central government regulations that ought to be eradicated.

Key wants to use social media to encourage Kiwis to list their most hated rules. It may be an electionyear publicity stunt, but he’s opened Pandora’s Box. Almost 500 comments were logged on the Stuff website’s story announcing the plan before they were closed by moderators with better things to do than read through the litany of complaints that mostly centred on the Building Act.

Ironically, Key is also setting up a Rules Reduction Task Force to conduct the campaign. And so another quango is born.

If it is a stunt, it’s quite a good one. The ACT Party has long campaigned for a hatchet to be taken to regulation; so has the business community, home owners, and anyone else who has ever had to deal with inane council rules about the height of fences, how many windows one must have or where safety glass is required in wet areas.

Key knows this is a sore point. Perceived ‘‘nanny state’’ regulation was a factor in Labour’s loss in 2008, when it briefly proposed regulating the flow of shower heads, the size of hot water cylinders and the mandatory use of energy-efficient light bulbs.

Labour ran a mile from the policy once it discovered the public’s animosity but the damage had been done. The party remained associated with meddling interference.

It’s a fine line, of course. The trend toward self-regulation, so fashionable for a while, gave us unstable buildings that collapsed in the Christchurch earthquakes and the Pike River Mine tragedy.

But we have inherited a ‘‘jobs’ worth’’ mentality from our colonial ancestors that survives in the petty, nit-picking stance of too many of our elected officials: no sandwich boards on the street; how many cafe tables are allowed outside; the length of an awning.

And don’t even get me started on the Resource Management Act.

Personally I like the Chinese approach – just get it done.

That’s the approach Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee took last week when he took the back door past airport security to make his flight. We all know who he is. We all know he’s not a threat to anything besides perhaps the lolly basket.

Hopefully the minister can contribute to the Prime Minister’s crowdsourcing project. Getting rid of domestic passenger security screening would no doubt be high on his list.