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Decision Reversal

Entry 1398, on 2012-06-08 at 16:34:20 (Rating 4, Politics)

So the New Zealand National government has been forced to reverse it's decision to increase class sizes in New Zealand schools. Depending on how you look at it this could be a point in favour or against the government. Some people say it's good because they listened to the people and acted accordingly, while others say they failed to follow their policies and acted on a more populist agenda rather than what they thought was really the right thing to do.

Of course, all governments have to act on a balance between carrying out their policies and maintaining a certain degree of popularity with the voting public so I'm not really surprised that they made this change.

But it does reveal an interesting question: if the original idea was really a good one surely they should have continued with it anyway, and if it wasn't good why did they try to implement it to start with? Either way they are doing something bad. They either tried to implement a bad policy and only abandoned it due to pressure or they tried to implement a good policy and did the wrong thing by abandoning it.

And while we're on the subject of abandoning bad policies why not take this a bit further? There's an overwhelming dislike of the asset sales policy. Why not back away from that one as well? Actually, why not back away from almost everything this government has done because it's difficult to find much that is any good!

Why not do the country a real favour and reverse the tax handouts to the rich that were implemented shortly after the current government took power here? Now that would really be a good idea. We could fund much better education then without having to increase class sizes.

National always seems to make a complete mess of education and every minister of education has been hopeless. I guess the current incumbent is a bit better than the abomination that she replaced, but she's still fairly terrible. You do have to wonder why they always choose someone who knows nothing about the subject they are supposed to be in charge of. Maybe that's a deliberate move so that the minister won't question the shady decisions that come from behind the scenes.

It was pitiful to watch the minister repeat verbatim the mantra about wanting greater quality in education as if people would think that was what they really wanted. It was always clear what they wanted: to cut costs because they are short of cash thanks to the tax cuts. The idea of reversing the tax cuts would never have crossed their ideologically controlled minds!

Sure, we all want better education. We also want better politicians and better business leaders and better cops. Let's get rid of some of them as well! What, that won't help? Well what a surprise!

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