Taro Patch Joe faced with bureaucratic tsunami
The Government may have taken a new approach to developing next year’s budget but the process is flawed and convoluted with an overload of information. To kick start the new process – which has been promoted by government spin doctors as a first time effort – the public has been invited to participate in consultations by going to an internet website and downloading a 60 page document to comment on.
As a mechanism to reach the broader community the website approach is far too narrow. And as a document, the available information is too much for most to digest. The budget consultation document for example, is essentially three distinct and sizeable bodies of policy all brought together in one giant block of cheese. The extended National Sustainable Development Plan; the outcomes of the Economic Task Force; and the principles of the Public Sector Functional Review, have all been collapsed into a bureaucratic tsunami, which provides little in the way of how ‘Taro Patch Joe’ is supposed to wade through this ‘policy maximum overload’. And in keeping with the metaphoric comparison, it will take an extraordinarily large number of mice to nibble away at what’s been put on the table.
In order for the broader community to buy into the first-time process, the government has failed to sell the products on offer in an easy-to-understand way. Soaring high above those in our smaller communities, the budget consultation document remains the perfect example of how a narrow, educated elite will again be the only source of input as to how the budget should be shaped. Unless the government rolls out a strategy to better inform people, an opportunity to educate ‘the great unwashed’ will have been missed to secure grassroots support.

Headlines : Times 290 02 March 2009
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