Recent social media from National suggests that there is a business confidence problem and that the solution is to incinerate regulations, lots and lots of regulations.
Is there a business confidence problem? Sure there is. I am pretty cautious and my confidence for the future of my business is low. There is this madman in charge of the United States who is that inept he managed to give Turkey the greenlight to attack the Kurds and undermine the fragile peace that existed in Syria and the Middle East. And by doing so he managed to free lots and lots of ISIS terrorists. That takes a lot of skill.
There is this other idiot in the UK who thinks that the unnegotiated withdraw from the EU will somehow be a good thing. It will if you are a venture capitalist. There will be lots and lots of failing businesses going cheap. For the ordinary Brit the Government is promising there will be enough food and medicine. That is not very assuring.
And there is this third idiot who is the ruler of the country across the ditch. His Government is that bereft of humanity that it torments refugees for political gain. And he and his government have this strange obsession with coal.
Something else they have in common with the acting leader of the opposition in New Zealand? They all have pyrotechnic obsessions with regulations, including the leaky home avoiding sort.
It is something that Trump campaigned on:
One of Trump’s campaign pledges was to cut 75pc of regulation in a bonfire of red tape to help small businesses. This first step of this was his executive order, which mandated that for every new rule brought in by a government agency, two must be cut. The cost of any additional regulation must be completely offset by by undoing these existing rules.
And the British conservatives have been engaged in a similar rhetorical battle. From the New Statesman:
The Daily Telegraph has launched a campaign to cut EU red tape. Its editorial they decried the “vexatious regulations” that “hinder business and depress growth”, demanding that we ‘throw regulations on the Brexit bonfire’.
Such demands are not new. Beyond immigration, regulation in general and employment protection in particular has long been one of the key drivers of frustration and fury among eurosceptics. Three years ago, Boris Johnson, decried the “back breaking” weight of EU employment regulation that is helping to “fur the arteries to the point of sclerosis”. While the prospect of slashing employment rights was played down during the campaign, it has started to raise its head again. Michael Gove and John Whittingdale have called on the CBI to draw up a list of regulations that should be abolished after leaving the EU. Ian Duncan Smith has backed the Daily Telegraph’s campaign, calling for a ‘root and branch review’ of the costs of regulatory burdens.
And Australia is also getting in on the rhetoric although Scomo does not know whether to use fire or digestive metaphors. From the Newcastle Herald:
Here we go again. Red tape, one of politic’s softest targets, faces a new bonfire.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has promised to “bust regulatory congestion” – congestion being his favourite hate word.
The Institute of Public Affairs greeted the news enthusiastically, saying red tape cut economic output by an estimated $176 billion a year.
It was as if no one, except Donald Trump, had ever thought of attacking red tape before.
Have they forgotten Tony Abbott already?
A bit over five years ago the then PM held the first of a series of Repeal Days in which, amid much chest-thumping, 12 bills repealing 9500 regulations and 1000 acts of parliament were introduced.
This Savonarola of the statutes spoke with relish about measures, mainly from Labor’s time in office, facing extinction.
So what is a poor conservative party in Aotearoa to do? What else but plaigarise?
Conservatives are so simplistic. The use of inappropriate metaphors and the blaming of some really important laws on their own inability to run things properly is clear evidence of this.
But this serves a political purpose and gets sections of the public frothing with hatred for laws that in many cases actually serve a purpose. Which is why the conservatives use it.
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