The Pus of Modern Governance

Putrescence in the Body Politic

When a body gets infected, white blood cells combat the bacteria. The result is oozing pus. Whilst not particularly pleasant, we are assured that it is a good sign. At least the body is sufficiently healthy that it can put up a fight against infection.

The phenomenon of pus is analogous to the modern body politic. We have seen its odious excrescence displayed in the case of the Auckland City Council signing off a budget of $3.4million per annum to fund a Maori advisory board. (The original budget was $300k). This outrage can be criticised on many fronts. Not the least is the distasteful and scandalous attitude of the Mayor and his councillors towards wasting public money.

This would be annoying at any time. But when households are having to watch and cherish every penny, it is noisome and repugnant. We now have a "think big" Mayor who appears to believe that he can celebrate and honour the importance and significance of Auckland City by spending its money flat out. We have seen the phenomenon many times in business. Nine times out of ten when a struggling business gets an injection of capital, management suddenly has an inordinate lust to display to the world just how important and significant the company really is. Spending money on the baubles of success becomes endemic. We believe this is exactly what Mayor Brown is doing. It remains distasteful, odious, and loathsome. It is a breach of trust.

But laying aside the wastrels currently in office, let us focus on the more systemic issues. We know exactly how the budget for the Maori advisory board blew out. It is the cost of governance in the modern body politic. We are not just talking about the gratuities and honorariums of the board members. We are talking about the host of measures and mechanisms required in our democracy to fight against infections--most largely imagined.

The new Board of course will be required to act (ahem, advise) with professional care, diligence and skill. This will, in turn, require a legion of lawyers to ensure that in everything the Board is acting lawfully, in compliance with all regulations, statutes, conventions and norms.

To give appropriate advice to Council and to all its fiefdoms, will also require a thorough understanding of council finances, budgets, and balance sheets of all council entities. Hence accounting advice will be required. Now most of these advisers will be external, and paid on a time and attendance basis. But the Board will require internal legal and accounting staff to co-ordinate and liaise with these external professional advisers: full time lawyers to deal with the lawyers; full time accounting staff to deal with the external accounting firms. To ward off the infection of non-compliance or sub-standard professionalism, pus rapidly congregates. And pus, let us assure our dear readers, does not come cheap.

Further, no professional advisory Board is worth its salt without thoroughly professional research into the issues upon which it will be required to give advice. To advise without being able to cite chapter and verse as rationale would be irresponsible. Therefore, a second legion of researchers (ahem, activists) is required to advise the Board members upon tribal sentiments and protocols, and legitimate or arguable extensions of general equity of the Treaty of Waitangi into areas such as, say, an intent to remove graffiti from inner city buildings. A large body of cultural advisers is mandatory.

Finally, no professional body would be worthy of respect as professional if it did not continue thoroughly to consult those whose interests it is charged to represent. A third legion of advisers is therefore required to study, research Maori opinions, aspirations, and desires on all things touching the business of the City Council. Not to represent one's representees faithfully and accurately would be a gangrenous infection: to nip it in the bud, as it were, white blood cells have to congregate and weeping pus is the outcome.

This is what professional governance means in our democracy. It is where we have come to. Consequently, the body politic is covered with weeping pustules of bloated expense and wasted money. The body is bloated with expensive efforts to prevent infections.

When government establishes a committee or an advisory board or a regulatory board, within a week an entire army of "support" and "advisory" services needs to be funded. And, of course, the more work these "advisory and support" services do, the more they are needed. If the advice of the lawyers is "x", advice will then be needed from the accountants upon the lawyers' advice; then it will be turn of the "cultural advisers" to opine upon the lawyers' advice as modified by the accountants. Then it will all need to go back to the lawyers again, just to confirm that no illegalities are being proposed in modified advice. And so, still another round of "advice" and consultation is required, once the lawyers perform their inevitable tweaks upon the tweaks.

This is why government and governing is so expensive and wasteful. And it is inevitable. There will be no solution to this problem as long as society looks to government to deliver the next-best-thing to paradise upon earth. The more intrusive and encompassing the purview of government (whether central or local), the more complexity, and the greater the advice and assistance required. Due diligence and fiduciary care to ensure that no-one's rights are violated, when applied to governmental minutia such as the annual programme of the city symphony orchestra, become costly indeed.

The sceptics of the proposal to turn Auckland into one super metropolis were right. Far from saving money, it is well on the way to becoming the biggest bloated pus-weeping sore yet seen outside of the Wellington beltway--and it is only four months old.