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Speaker 1: Another crack at the size of government New Zealand initiative

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Speaker 1: calling for an overhaul of our systems. We've got They

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Speaker 1: argue one of the most complex cabinets in the developed world,

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Speaker 1: three times as many portfolios as similar countries. We need

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Speaker 1: a cabinet with about fifteen to twenty policy areas and

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Speaker 1: departments being cut from forty three to twenty. Roger Partridge

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Speaker 1: is the co author of the Reporters Back with It's

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Speaker 1: Roger Morning, Good morning, Mike. We've been here before, haven't we.

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Speaker 1: I mean, there's too much self interest in New Zealand

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Speaker 1: politics to ever make this happen. Oras.

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Speaker 2: I don't think it's so much. I didn't think it's

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Speaker 2: so much self interest. It's just a developed in a

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Speaker 2: haphazard way, and it's time to step back and have

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Speaker 2: a look at it. We've got eighty one ministerial portfolios

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Speaker 2: split across twenty eight ministers and forty three government departments.

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Speaker 2: Other countries have about twenty of each, and so when

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Speaker 2: you look at the organizational structure of executive government, it

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Speaker 2: looks more like a maze than an org chart, or

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Speaker 2: as we call it, spaghetti.

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Speaker 1: Yes it does. Brian Roche is sort of doing some

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Speaker 1: of the worky, you're hopeful in that.

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Speaker 2: I am hopeful and it's good as we've been working

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Speaker 2: on this over the last two years. We produced a

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Speaker 2: report in twenty twenty four Cabinet Congestion the Growth of

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Speaker 2: a Ministerial Maze, and then we started consulting on this

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Speaker 2: report earlier in the year and hand in hand with that,

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Speaker 2: Brian and Minister of Public Services Judith Collins have been

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Speaker 2: looking at how they could consolidate some of our fragmented

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Speaker 2: government departments. But it's more than that, it's ministerial positions.

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Speaker 2: What we've done is we've just kept slicing pieces off

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Speaker 2: portfolios and then giving them a new name. As a resultant,

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Speaker 2: important policy areas like housing split across multiple ministers. Housing

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Speaker 2: reports to up to twelve ministers. If you think about

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Speaker 2: the most important ones, the Minister for Housing, the Minister

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Speaker 2: for Building and Construction, the Minister for Local Government, the

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Speaker 2: Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Environment, and when you slice key

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Speaker 2: portfolio areas and splinter them across multiple ministers, you then

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Speaker 2: get fragmented decision making, a lack of accountability and higher costs.

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Speaker 2: One of the former Prime ministers we consulted with said,

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Speaker 2: if a proposal needs a sign off from six different ministers,

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Speaker 2: that's six opportunities for other ministers or their officials to

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Speaker 2: kill it. And we've got to do something about that.

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Speaker 1: Well, let's hope we do. Roger. Appreciate your work, Roger

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Speaker 1: Partridge with the New Zealand Initiative, of course.

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Speaker 2: For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen live to

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