The Post: The government promised to eliminate waste, but has piled it up instead

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For a bunch of people notionally committed to ending “waste”, our Government sure likes some low-quality spending.

Attacks on the previous government’s “wasteful” policies have provided the soundtrack to National’s assumption of power. And no-one sensible doubts that Labour, ill-prepared for office, sometimes spent unwisely: the senseless polytech mega-merger, Te Pūkenga, was a case in point.

But look at how much waste the new Government has served up in just the last week.

Exhibit A: the Cook Strait ferry debacle. While ministers were right to be wary of cost over-runs on the $3 billion-and-growing iRex project, their decision to scrap it could now prove immensely wasteful. There’s the likely $300 million spent just to break the contract. Then, thanks to cost inflation, a potential $900m bill for two non-rail-enabled ferries instead of the agreed $550m on two rail-enabled ones.

The costs pile up: $420m spent planning iRex, down the drain; hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain the old ferries until the new ones arrive at a much slower pace than Labour planned; and no upgrades to substandard ports at both ends. We could still spend $2b and get far worse outcomes: sounds like waste to me.

Then there’s Wednesday’s announcement that the Justice Minister, Paul Goldsmith, will force judges to impose longer prison sentences. Soon our jails will be bursting with prisoners incarcerated at an annual cost of $193,000 each, the sort of thing Bill English once denounced as a “moral and fiscal failure”. Given that half these prisoners, post-release, will re-offend within two years, this looks a lot like waste.

And it keeps piling up. Ministers confirmed this week that billions of dollars will be spent on what satirists call Roads of National Party Significance. On the list is Auckland’s East West Link, the costs of which were, in 2017, estimated to potentially outweigh its benefits.

“From an economic perspective,” consultant economist Donal Curtin noted, “the country would be better off if the [road] were not built.”

No more recent assessment is available, but construction inflation in the last seven years has been brutal, and National now insists these roads must be four lanes wide and grade-separated. Presumably the cost-to-benefit ratio has only worsened. And that’s without contemplating the carbon emissions the roads will induce, the more frequent storms and sea-level rises that result, and the spending required for clean-ups and managed retreat. Waste aplenty.

Still on the roading beat: the Government plans to force councils to reverse reductions in speed limits, even though in Auckland those lower speeds have been found to reduce serious injuries by 15% and deaths by nearly half. Abandoning these exceptional achievements will be – to put it mildly – wasteful.

This week also brought news of a Government-appointed panel to review “methane science”, even though the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has pointed out that the science here is settled.

More generally, the much-touted cuts to “back office” public servants are already hitting foodbanks and budgeting services. Which, considering the good work those organisations do, seems rather wasteful.

It’s striking that, despite the Government’s coalition agreements loudly proclaiming a commitment to “rigorous cost-benefit analysis”, scores of decisions have already been made with no – or indeed negative – assessments of their merits.

It’s almost as if the talk of eliminating “waste” was just ... talk. Decisions, it turns out, are determined not by what’s wasteful, but by what will play well with the Government’s base.

And it’s not just a matter of what such conservative governments do: it’s also what they don’t do.

Consider the issue of obesity, where the latest global obsession is the weight-loss drug Ozempic. It does, admittedly, show impressive results, and experts argue that making it widely available here could help reduce rates of diabetes, heart attacks and strokes.

But think about the equation that then unfolds. We continue to allow junk-food companies to spend millions of dollars, and indeed generate millions of dollars in revenue, by pushing deeply unhealthy food on consumers. And we then, as taxpayers, spend millions of dollars on drugs like Ozempic to clean up this mess.

The alternative, surely superior, would be to tackle the problem upstream. Label food products with clear information about their salt and sugar content, a move the industry has consistently thwarted. Ban junk-food advertising to children. Bring in sugar taxes or whatever else has been shown to work. Make it easier for people to walk and cycle and to exercise in local parks.

Conservatives fixate on the – often minimal – expense of such measures, while failing to spot that their own reluctance to properly regulate markets, and to confront big business, ends up costing far more in the long run. So too does ignoring the effects of climate change, locking people up for longer, and reflexively scrapping the transport projects of a previous administration.

Far from eliminating waste, this government spreads it around with gay abandon.