Kerre Woodham: This coalition government is fond of a list

Well, you know, I'm an old-fashioned girl, let's face it, but I do love a list. They're especially helpful if you have much to do and you feel slightly overwhelmed. Writing things down, and I'm a Luddite and I use pen and paper (if your list is on an app, I'm not going to judge), it's the writing down that counts.  

Writing down what you need to do helps you understand that it's manageable. If you can fit everything you need to do done onto a piece of paper, even if you're using both sides, it shows it can be done. There is an end. You can see where your priorities lie when they're all laid out like that. You can see the easy things you can do.  

I have been known to put in things I've already done just so I've got the satisfaction of crossing them off. That gives you a positive boost. Some people see that as cheating. So, I'll do two easy things and then I'll do the hard one and then come back and do another easy one, do a hard one, and before you know it what you thought was overwhelming has been achieved. Done efficiently, done well and you can start the next day with nothing carrying over from the day before.   

Now this coalition government is fond of a list.  

We had the 100 Day Action Plan. To be fair, other governments are fond of lists too, and there's a good reason for that. It makes it very clear what the government's course of action is going to be, what they're prioritising in the first instance, you and I can see what their intentions are, and they can be held accountable if they don't achieve their targets. It's quite bold putting it out there. You know, there's no “Well within 100 days we'd like to see a return to well-being.” Well no, they're not airy-fairy, non-tangible kind of targets, they are specific things. Some of it is easy. Some of the easy stuff has been put on the first list. If you think back to the government's first 100 days, much of that was rolling back the previous government’s programme, like repealing Three Waters, stopping blanket speed limit reductions, repealing the Ute Tax, withdrawing central government from Let's Get Wellington Moving, putting an end to the bottomless pit that is the Auckland light rail. So, some of that was easy, just stopping stuff the other government had done.  

You had the banning of cell phones in schools. You had health workers having 200 additional security personnel to reduce violent incidents and hospital emergency departments, and by all accounts that worked. Now it's just a matter of keeping on ensuring that ED's are safe spaces for the staff and for the patients.  

So, you know, you could see, how did that go? Even the most overworked or laziest of journo’s, all they have to do after three months is pull up the action plan and go through, give them a pass mark or a fail mark because it's all written out there for you.  

So, the next list the government has drawn up is going to have tougher To Do’s. Establishing a $1.2 billion capital infrastructure fund for the regions. And that too will have a list of things that must check off. This is not just money going hither and dither to the regions, being strewn like so much corn before hungry geese with no way of quantifying or qualifying whether it's been a worthwhile investment. Growing housing stock alongside councils and of course, coming up with a budget that can pay for the shifting of the tax brackets, while not reducing front line services across government departments, that will be a tough test.  

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon says there will be some tough discussions around the cabinet table about how the government's targets can be achieved when there's little money to spare, but he says that's why it's important to have an action plan. 

And I think he's right. RMA is just so vast, so huge. It's like when we climbed Kilimanjaro. They said you don't think about climbing the mountain in the same way that you don't think about eating an elephant in one bite. You start with the tail, you know, and you take it chunk by chunk, and he's right about that, these big, meaty, grunty reforms need to be done bit by bit, but there has to be a clear plan about how you're going to do that, not just sitting around having meetings for the sake of them. 

When it comes to the list, when it comes to setting out a clear plan of action, does this give you confidence that this is a government that will be accountable not just for the money it spends, but for the time it spends? Because that is a valuable, valuable commodity and resource in this day and age, you and I know that, especially after a holiday weekend, to be able to spend time is so precious. And the time that has been wasted on hot air fests and meetings where people talk at each other and nothing happens at the end of them, despite the enormous expense, meetings where nothing happens. 

After six years where people have been paid by the public purse, still nothing has happened. Things have not improved. In fact, they've gone backwards. You need to be held accountable for that. So, if you're doing it bit by bit, if every hundred days there's another right, this is how far we've come, this is what we've achieved, this is where we need to work harder. That makes me in my little list obsessed fashion, I find it really comforting. And I also find it a hell of a lot easier to decide whether a government is doing a good job or a bad.  

I mean, ultimately when I was asking the different government departments over the last six years, well, is it working? They couldn't tell us. Nobody knew. And the only way we found out was that the crime stats and the social disruption stats were all going in the wrong direction. That was an indication that you know what? no, it hasn't worked.  

So you need to have a list that will let you know whether you're going in the right direction, and you need to have clear targets, you need to have accountability so that if a plan's not working, you can pull out a whole lot earlier and try something different.  

I find it comforting. I think it's an organised way to go about trying to improve all areas of this country. I know there are some intangibles, feeling positive, feeling good about feeling proud of your country and that's fine. But I think you're only going to get that intangible sense of well-being provided it's underpinned by some clear targets and achieving of those targets. 

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