Pick Me..

It is election time here in three months and the billboards and campaigning have already started. I spotted a Labour Party billboard at the weekend which beside the shining face of the candidate had “Vote Labour” (naturally) “Minimum Wage $15” (For anyone who is interested this is an increase from $13) So I have rubbished the idea of a legislated minimum wage before and if this was the answer to a low wage economy why don’t they suggest $25 or $45 an hour? Any way the over arching thought I had was that this sort of blatant electioneering nonsense is what needs legislative change. Therefore here is my answer to a change of governance structure.


Firstly as a society we have limited difficulty coming up with collective desired outcomes or “policy” if you will where the debate starts is the best way about achieving the required outcome. The increase in the minimum wage is an example the policy requirement is a liveable wage for all employed persons. Just about everyone will agree that sounds ok (I am going to walk past the definitional issues for the moment) It is the how we get there where it all goes wrong. In this instance the best people to answer this question are probably economic researchers and potential social analysts. Not well meaning, slogan wielding, power hungry, ego driven, vested interest politicians. (some or all of the list normally applies to all of them)

So first it is clear that we need to arms of governance, we need the policy arm and the implementation arm. The Policy arm, let’s call that the Peoples Parliament (PP) would have the same elections, party politics etc that we know and love now but no power to pass any legislation, only the power to pass Policy in the form of Legislative Requirements. These Requirements would be passed to the Governing Parliament (GP) for implementation.

The GP would propose the method for enacting the Policy and design the legislation to give effect to the Policy, this would be referred back to the PP Passing into Law or Veto. If they Vetoed they could offer comment of course but there would be no requirement on the GP to do anything further. The PP would have no right to alter the legislation.

Contained within the GP would be the Prime Minister character and Ministers as we know them now and the various Department Heads would answer to this group.

So the obvious question how do you get into the GP? Answer the PM would be appointed by an Electoral College and they (the PM) in turn would appoint Ministers. The PP would have the power of Veto over any given Ministerial Appointment but not the PM.

Who is this mysterious Electoral College? These would be people elected by the citizens to appoint the PM and after they had completed this task they would go into recess only to reappear between elections if the PM needed removed for some reason (governed by a constitution). To be able to stand for the Electoral College you would have to have no political affiliations, have a suitable level of education and passed a simple test on the constitution. Anyone could stand for Electoral College if they qualified.

What’s the point? Well that way hopefully we get a legislative and implementation arm of government less effected by political influence (no one is totally unaffected but hopefully better than now). You get people in the GP who are suitably qualified for the roles they hold without having to pander to vested interest groups etc.

This is unashamedly designed to put a buffer between the masses and the leadership of the country, hopefully allowing a rational consideration of the facts to dictate government decisions in pursuit of an agreed vision provided by the people.

The opportunity for such a radical experiment seems remote but that’s my idea for what its worth.

Rome Wasn't Built in a Day...

And certainly not by a committee.

I have been listening to the radio and in quick succession I heard two articles about a failure of leadership, or at least that is what I took from the articles.

The first one was about the Australian Navy having made some bad decisions about what ships to buy or what design to use or from whom. The upshot of this is that because ships take a long time to build they are now short of the needed equipment as the old ships are now end of life and the new ones are yet to be built due to some or all of the reasons above. The Australian Navy’s issues with its ships isn’t that interesting it is what the Minister said in response to this, he said “we must ensure we have a more rigorous process when it comes to these decisions” and he will be “insisting that officials review all of their process” In other words he was going to have a stern word to the committee that stuffed things up. I mean give me a break in times past if the Navy ran out of ships the minister would have resigned and several admirals would have been keel hauled or shot. There would not have been a discussion about any process or committee, the leaders would have been held accountable.

So the next one was closer to home where there have been complaints from Principals about the quality of recently graduated teachers, specifically they do not have adequate literacy or numeracy skills to teach at a primary school level. (begs the question if they can’t read write or do arithmetic what can they do but we shall ignore that for today) When the head of the teachers college in Christchurch was asked about this, she responded that if this was the case then these individuals would have their practicing certificates tagged accordingly and this would reduce their employment chances. (note for any parents out there she didn't say eliminate) The interviewer asked the obvious question, why were these people graduating at all and why wasn’t the college teaching them this stuff to bring them up to standard. Response “we don’t teach literacy and numeracy because all our students have University Entrance which shows that they have reached the required standard in these subjects.”

So here we go again, the answer to a problem is more process, i.e. we will tag the practice certificates rather than actually fix the problem. And when challenged on the fundamental issue we get more process, i.e. "well they have UE so how is this my issue", was essentially what she said. In other words I followed the process. It is at this point where I have the urge to track this person down and say to them (very slowly no doubt so that they get it) “never mind the process you failed to achieve the outcome”

These are just two examples of how the world seems to work these days, we no longer care about outcomes we just care about following the process. I believe that this is because we no longer allow strong leaders to lead, everyone wants to have a say and nothing of any consequence was every achieved by a committee.
We need to retreat from attempting to systematise everything and begin to place a bit more trust in leaders.

The big objection to a leadership / outcome focused model is that sometimes leaders get it wrong and you get failure. (which seems unacceptable these days as well)  Well to me a few more failed student teachers wouldn’t seem to hurt (rather than the stupid PC rubbish of no one failing) and as the Australian Navy will tell you lots of process doesn’t guarantee success either.