BLOG: National Standards - A Good Idea, but....
Karl Marx wrote once that the thing to learn from history is the people do not.
That is almost a metaphor for the way we make major policy changes in this country.
From the advent of the Resource Management Act, through to NCEA, and now it seems National Standards, we make the same mistake. And we never seem to learn.
Bold ideas – often containing far-sighted reforms – founder because we fail to put in the proper effort to launch these initiatives in a way that takes people with us, deals with all the implementation issues, and makes the effort to inform people why the changes are being made and how they will benefit from it.
If people understood the Resource Management Act streamlined planning procedures by overturning 54 different pieces of old legislation and consolidating our planning law in one place, they would likely feel more kindly disposed to it than they do. Instead, they see a monolithic piece of legislation that slows things down and stifles development, the very opposite of what it was intended to achieve... Read the full text of this blog post.
