Rare praise

This blog is not always complimentary to the National Party. But when they do something they should do, we should have the integrity to recognise it.

This is a good thing to do, in principle: reviewing spending on low priority programmes and axing a few.

Progressives cede this ground to the right far too easily - because the right always claim to have a war on the size of government in the name of lower taxes. But Progressives shouldn;t cede this ground. There is nothing wrong with making spending as efficient and powerful as possible. 

The real right agenda is to cut services that are effectively redistributed - for example, to reduce health care provision, and free education, so that the taxes of the wealthy are not used to pay for the social services accessed by the rest of us. They don't really care about the efficiency of spending - it is redistribution and social equality they are worried about.  The right wants to use government to stop social mobility and to keep working families from rising above their station - progressives want to maximise mobility and equality.

Therefore Progressives should resist the right wing agenda to slash essential social services, but strongly support efforts to keep the public sector as lean and light weight as possible in the pursuit of better outcomes. The more bloat that gets stripped away, the more there is left to be spent where it is most needed - and the more we can expose the right wing agenda to cut essential services, which they disguise under their criticism of bloat.

Every government should have a programme of permanently reviewing lowest priority spending. Ministers should be required to offer up the lowest value thing they do every year. Otherwise, programmes that are set up with good intentions can lumber on without delivering results.

So, praise for John Key over this. But one reservation: The Nats have already shown nastiness runs in their blood. You just know they are going to cut programmes not because they are low priority, but because they have a vindictive agenda. They will cut anything that doesn't appeal to their bigotry. They will cut any programme they can that helps poor people.

And if they really wanted to get rid of waste in the public sector, they would get rid of ridiculous, old fashioned and insulting colonial titles like 'sir' and 'dame'.