Espiner on the Money?

An interesting blog post from TVNZ Political Editor Guyon Espiner today:

"Buzz goes flat at the Beehive"

Parliament is in session but the Press Gallery is unusually quiet.

In the white concrete annex to the Beehive, where the nation's political scribes reside, you'll find them, slunk down in their seats bemoaning the lack of real political news or skulking about the corridors perplexed at the paucity of policy being generated by the Beehive.

Normally the hacks would be saved at about 4pm on a Monday when John Key holds his post-Cabinet press conference, allowing journalists the opportunity to tackle the Prime Minister on the government's latest policy and pronouncements.

But Cabinet, I'm told, had a light agenda on Monday. And that's my point. Cabinet, it seems, has had a pretty light agenda for the last month.

...


I know too that this is a conservative government and that as the name suggests they tend to be about maintaining the status quo.

But surely I'm wrong? Surely the government isn't out of ideas? Surely, not after half a year in office?

I am not so sure about this. The Government seems to be good at getting other people to do things it thinks might not be popular, and thus what may look a bit like not doing much on the political news front may not be the case in substance.

You can think of a few examples - the deep reviews of regulation in many areas, with a bias towards restoring the primacy of Commerce Act approaches instead of sector specific regulation that can actually work; making CEs do the hard work of firing public servants instead of the government taking responsibility for it; cutting the guts out of public transport funding in Auckland but only trumpeting the increase in roading building funds.

There are probably more in your area. The line by line reviews were part of it too, allowing a "big saving" to be trumpeted at Budget time, but the effects of the real cuts (e.g. to support for gifted students) to be dribbled out later.

So from a news perspective Guyon could be right. But in substance I'm not sure he is. That implies more, but harder, work for the journos to do: hunting down stories and getting them out there. And given the state of commercial broadcasting including TVNZ and the pressure all across the media to cut costs, how likely is that sort of depth? That,  however, is a story for another day.

Comments

[steve]

a commerce act type approach is the right way to go about it. sector specific regulation is typically considerably more expensive and many of the results can be achieved with a better commerce act. but the act needs revising, more than just the information disclosure regulations put on airports and gas distribution. specifically section 36 needs beefing up so it can actually be used.

[GNZ]

It seems to me the commerce act approach is the right way to do it. There could also be some changes to how the commerce comission works to make them more effective.

Unless the argument is more realpolitik in that that the government may not be able to significantly change the commerce act for some sort of political reason.