The pause is the point

One of the things I enjoy most about an election campaign is how calm ordinary government becomes. Parliament has risen. Ministers put off big decisions. Once the votes are counted, the caretaker convention applies until a new government is formed. Officials keep the services running. Nothing falls over. Without the bickering and the theatre of daily politics, the world keeps turning, things work, people get by.

Politicians and the news media treat this period as an irritating delay before the ‘real’ business resumes. When Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith pushed to end election-day enrolment, a great part of the motivation was his own impatience. He wanted to get the results counted faster so the new government can get back to work.

But what if this calm is closer to good government than the frenzy on either side of it?

You wouldn’t know it from watching the frantic pace of New Zealand politics today, but progress does not depend on a constant stream of new work, initiatives, policies, expenditure or legislation. Much of it comes from tweaking and refining what we already have, maintaining systems before replacing them. Big transformations can be saved for when the evidence truly demands them.

Too often a policy or piece of legislation being pursued today is only because a political party happened to put it on its campaign platform hoping to win a few extra votes. Or because it appeared in a 100-day plan – a gimmick designed to make a new government look decisive and make Ministers conform to a target no voter ever demanded.

The habit goes all the way back to when New Zealand’s first Parliament met in 1854, and it had to make new laws for absolutely everything. The pace has never really slowed. In the 1930s Michael Joseph Savage’s Labour government championed the expert state, planning its way to a better society. Although the idea of an all-in state came from the progressive left, by the time National party took office in 1949, it had signed up too, promising itself as the answer to the country’s post-war economic woes.

From then on, elections became contests over which major party had the better plan to fix everything. Each published a manifesto with its answers. Few citizens queried how a grouping of ordinary people who happened to have the self-confidence to stand for parliament, most of whom who had never seen inside the system, knew what it needed before they took office.

This is the flaw in manifesto politics. It forces parties to commit to detailed solutions before they have learned anything in government. Once elected, they are judged on delivering the list, not on whether the list still makes sense. Fifty years ago, the American thinker Donald Schön argued that governments should behave as learning systems, adapting as they discover what works. Our electoral system rewards the opposite. Arrive confident, execute fast and save any learning about why reforms might have failed for academics, not political parties, to decipher years down the track.

MMP has spawned an even larger industry of pre-election policy production. Today all parties churn out policy trying to set themselves apart from their competitors in a crowded electoral market. Coalition building adds a further incentive. Every party needs something to trade for power, and a policy is now a bargaining chip as much as a necessary addition. Even ACT, which consistently advocates for a smaller state, is campaigning on a large, interventionist list of things it wants the next government to do, undo, or redo.

There is no slowdown once a government is formed, which each promise translating to make-work: new legislation, new agencies, new portfolios, restructures, redundancies, consultants, and transition teams, everything needing to be done at break-neck speed in order to be completed within the three-year electoral cycle window.

Some will say this is what voters want; that governments that dither get punished, and some problems, like housing and infrastructure, need urgent action. But the argument here is against churn and speed, not reform. Moving fast on a handful of well-chosen, well evidenced priorities is good government. Doing everything at once as if every platform is burning at the same time, is not. Is it any wonder why the costs of administering the state continue to rise?

There are cheap fixes.

Instead of the news media asking parties for their bottom lines, ask for their top five. Which five policies would they implement first, over three years? And what would they stop doing to pay for them? That last question would cut most shopping lists down to size. Coalition agreements could include a published timetable, with each partner’s priorities sequenced across the term rather than crammed into the first and last years. The rules on urgency could be tightened at the same time. If a bill cannot survive the normal timetable, it is probably not ready. And there could be a convention that no new government restructures agencies in its first year. Ministers would have to learn what they have before tearing it apart.

The point is – government doesn’t have to be as frantic as our political parties have made it. But we also, as citizens, have to ask better questions of our politicians. Who and what is government actually for? Which core tasks strictly require active state intervention, and which are better served by political restraint? These are not ideological questions of left versus right. They are pragmatic questions about how much institutional churn a small economy can absorb, and who pays the bill.

In these few weeks when politics pauses, the country does not stop. Things run smoothly because the political machinery is idling, not despite it. It would be helpful if the next government could take the hint.