Ele Ludemann: Bureaucratic sabotage

Alan Eggers, chief executive of Trans Tasman Resources (TTR) in conversation with Leighton Smith:

. . . This is a major commercial project where we have invested over ninety million. I’m sorry, over eighty five million, nearly ninety million dollars and we are now being frustrated by a bunch of bureaucrats. . .

I think bureaucrats and the bureaucracy here and particularly the civil service around Wellington, are like road cones.

When you come across them, there’s a hell of a lot of them. They’re not

doing anything, and you could remove four out of five and still have the same effect without any any danger to anybody or the environment.

And if you look behind them, there’s generally no work happening at all, and it’s just burning consuming money and delaying progress and productive enterprises from getting on with what they need to do. . .

I think it’s obvious they have very comfortable lifestyles, are assured if they’re pay cheques next week. They don’t know what risk means. They just sit there and invent committees to talk to each other, if you got rid of four out of five bureaucrats, you’d have a more efficient system because they’d have less committee meetings that it might get on and do something, and the four that have been dispensed with could actually have shovels and beworking behind those road cones filling potholes. . .

He was discussing the long and torturous process his company has been going through since 2013 in trying to get environmental consents to operate and extract heavy mineral sands from the South Taranaki Byte Bight.

The application is now in the Fast Track system.

But part of it is that we have consulted with Iwi and the three main Iwi groups in South Taranaki.

We’ve consulted with and engaged with, albeit we’ve been rebuffed. . .We lodged a brand new application in 2025, everything updated, and we wrote to twelve Iwi groups, including the Iwi Fishing Forum in South Taranaki and asked them, told them what we were doing, gave them the information and asked them what at what it is that if they have any concerns, what are they so that we can address them. We had no response.

However, the bureaucrats invited 36 Iwi and Hapu groups to our conference the other day with the conference panel conveners to decide on the panel membership makeup and a time frame for a decision. . .

The Act says that we’ve got to pay each one of those for showing up ten thousand dollars. That’s three hundred and sixty thousand dollars of non productive money that I have got to find and pay for these people to turn up to oppose us in a process of approving a mining project of which they don’t care about or know little about and won’t read about it. It’s appalling.. .

It’s appalling and is it also brownmail?

Whether or not it is it looks like bureaucratic sabotage – bureacrats going way beyond what is necessary to add costs and time.

A lot of companies would have given up long before the 12 years and millions of dollars TTR has spent getting to this point.

We will never know how many, but the bureaucratic sabotage is not confined to this company and this application.

We have far too many bureaucrats who put hurdles in the way instead of clearing the route; and too many with the power to say no, lack the courage to say yes and take far too long about it.

Peter Cresswell gives an example of the slow, slow process for approving imported building products :

. . . I attended a webinar run by MoBIE dicks recently outlining how they intend to run it. They called it ‘Removing Barriers to Overseas Building Products.’ Try not to laugh as I relate their intentions.

First of all, they’ve started a committee. And several working groups. Large ones. Large enough, I imagine, to fill at least one floor. It will be these newly-appointed bureaucrats that will decide which standards/regulation of which similar jurisdictions will be considered for approval by these bureaucrats. And this will of course take some time.

First of all, of course, they have to meet to define regulatory criteria. And to issue new acronyms (things like BPS, BPIR, etc.)

This is how bureaucracies work.

That is how bureaucracies work – with too many people, taking too much time, having too many meetings.

The committee/working groups will then make recommendations to the CEO of MoBie which standards/regulations he may recognise. May. Those deemed unobjectionable are then added to something called Building Product Specifications — a “new regulatory instrument.” [UPDATE: The inaugural Building Product Specifications document has just dropped today, but dn’t get excited, it’s simply a compilation of standards/regulations already cited in the NZ Building Code. Enjoy.]

Following which, MoBIE’s dicks will then publish a “Recognition Notice” detailing which new standard/regulations have been recognised. Once a standard/regulation has been so recognised, it will then be added to the Building Product Specifications document.

They hope (“always hoping, hope is vain”) to issue their first “Recognition Notice” by year’s end. That will be for one regulation/standard from one jurisdiction for one building material or system. For which the Notice will be once piece of “evidence of compliance with the New Zealand Building Code.”

Still, once that Notice is published, building importers may then decide to bring in a building material or system; builders and building designers may offer the imported product in plans and specifications based on it being “Recognised” as evidence it complies

Did you follow all that?

Note the process here: it’s MoBIE who decides to decide. Not builders, not building designers, not building materials scientists or building materials importers — all of whom have a large interest in the process — and nor is it the building minister. No. It’s MoBIE’s dicks who decide to initiate the process, and it’s they who will grind slowly through all the world’s standards, regulations, codes, guidelines, approval systems, benchmarks and norms, deciding which of them they might like to spend time taking through their process and (eventually) recognise.

Why are bureaucrats involved at all?

Why aren’t the people with the knowledge and practical experience in designing, building and using the materials making decisions?

They’d definitely do it faster and almost certainly do it better.

So we can see how this is good for bureaucrats employed within MoBIE.

But how does all this help builders, building materials importers, would-be building owners, and me as a building designer?

Well, nothing at all will help until at least the start of next year, when the first “Recognition Notice” might (might) have been issued for the Australian Watermark Scheme — so importers et al can start taking advantage of Australian plumbing and drainage products.

And after that, the committee/working group/bunch of overpaid bureaucrats will then begin to meet and consider whether or not the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM International) and the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN) may be considered for recognition.Don’t wait up.

They may be some time. . .

They will be some time and while they are whiling away the time in meetings and consultation, building materials that would be at least as safe and almost certainly less expensive than what we have now, won’t be able to be used here.

Another reason for the time taken could be because at least some of the meetings will be like those Ani O’Brien writes about:

I worked in the public service for a few years and I didn’t think twice about participating in karakia, waiata, and tikanga when interacting with Māori communities and iwi. Being culturally sensitive is good manners in my view. I took advantage of the taxpayer-funded te reolessons available to us and thoroughly enjoyed them.

Where I got frustrated was when we frequently had upwards of five meetings a day (always called hui) and in each of these meetings at least the first ten minutes (but usually longer) would be dedicated to ritualistic introductions and karakia. Most of these meetings were internal or with other public servants who we regularly interacted with. I tried once to figure out how much of my taxpayer-funded time was being dedicated to sitting through these performances. In a week I might attend around 25-30 hui (yes, that is a horrendous amount but it is how the public service operates) if we play it on the conservative side and say ten minutes of each meeting was karakiaand pepeha that is 250-300 minutes each week. Four or five hours each week. Now multiple that by the 600 people who worked in the same building as me.

That’s half a working day each week and not just for the 600 in that building. If these performances were happening in one building full of public servants it would have been, and still will be, happening in others.

On top of that, a few times a week there was a “non-compulsory” “lunch time” waiata practice in our unit. It was explicitly not mandatory, but socially suicidal to skip it. Led by the cabal of middle-class white women who were the most ferocious enforcers of all things Māori, they made sure that choosing not to attend was not worth the grief that came with it. Only racists and people not sufficiently aware of their own privileges wouldn’t attend. The half hour of singing was officially a lunch time activity so that if someone sent in an Official Information Act request they wouldn’t find that taxes were being spent paying the generous salaries of professionals to sing out-of-tune. But everyone took their full lunch break as well as attending practice.

I could write many essays on the waste and ridiculousness that goes on in the public service, but in my opinion the performative Māorification of all things bureaucratic has created a waste behemoth. It might feel good for university-educated white professionals to sing and speak in te reo, but it does nothing to ensure the provision of effective public services to Māori nor non-Māori. . .

That waste behemoth does nothing to improve the country’s productivity either, in fact it slows it down.

The public service is supposed to serve the public but too often bureaucrats work to their own agenda and instead of serving the public, get in the way of progress.

It’s not enough to reduce the number of bureaucrats, we need a culture change within the bureaucracy that stops the sabotage, puts the time and energy into getting to yes and gets rid of the delays and hurdles that too often lead to no.

Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.