Wednesday 10 March 2010

The Kiwis know how to get things done

This is quite frankly a remarkable piece by one Maurice P. McTigue who is an ex-minister of the New Zeeland government. The Devil has a much more comprehensive summary of McTigue's extremely interesting piece here, but let me just quote a paragraph:
When we started this process with the Department of Transportation, it had 5,600 employees. When we finished, it had 53. When we started with the Forest Service, it had 17,000 employees. When we finished, it had 17. When we applied it to the Ministry of Works, it had 28,000 employees. I used to be Minister of Works, and ended up being the only employee. In the latter case, most of what the department did was construction and engineering, and there are plenty of people who can do that without government involvement. And if you say to me, “But you killed all those jobs!”—well, that’s just not true. The government stopped employing people in those jobs, but the need for the jobs didn’t disappear. I visited some of the forestry workers some months after they’d lost their government jobs, and they were quite happy. They told me that they were now earning about three times what they used to earn—on top of which, they were surprised to learn that they could do about 60 percent more than they used to! The same lesson applies to the other jobs I mentioned.
He could be talking about Britain safe for the solution proposed and implemented by his government.

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