John MacDonald: Less government ministers and departments? Easier said than done

Isn’t David Seymour the guy who got himself into government at the last election and then went and set up a new government department?

But, despite the irony, I agree with him that we need fewer government departments and fewer Cabinet ministers.

Previously, the ACT leader has described the public sector as "a big, complicated bureaucratic beast".

There are the numbers to back that up. We have 82 cabinet portfolios, 28 ministers and 41 separate government departments and agencies.

David Seymour thinks that’s crazy and says ACT will campaign in this year’s election on changing that. And, instead of having 41 government departments and agencies, he wants us to have no more than 30.

As for cabinet ministers - at the moment there are 28, David Seymour thinks we need no more than 20.

I remember Oliver Hartwich from the NZ Initiative think tank saying last year that we could get away with having as few as 15 cabinet ministers, instead of the 28 we have at the moment.

But he thought that 20 was more realistic.

As for government departments, they are monsters. They operate in silos. They compete with each other for funding. They don’t talk to each other. That’s why there’s so much duplication.

For example, do we need a Ministry of Education and an Education Review Office? I don’t think so.

Do we need a Ministry of Justice and a Department of Corrections? Possibly not.

As for cabinet positions, do we need a mental health minister? Could that all be part of the health minister’s job?

And don’t get me started on things like the Minister for the South Island or the Minister for Auckland that Labour brought in.

So, I’m with David Seymour and I think we could do with fewer government departments and agencies.

But it will never happen.

Talking about having less government departments and less cabinet ministers is easy and politicians talk about it because they know it tends to go down well with people.

But it will never happen. Because, whether people admit it or not, they still expect the government and its departments to fix everything.

And, unless that changes, the government isn’t going to get any smaller. And its list of departments isn’t going to get any shorter.

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