Ha, Hahah, hahahahaha

Some jokes just about tell themselves. On this of all days, this story has to be the worst timed ever: Libraries, pools, zoo eyed as businesses.

Auckland City officers are floating the idea of replacing elected councillors with businessmen to run the city's parks, swimming pools, libraries and zoo along commercial lines.

In a surprise move, officers have expanded the proposal for a "holding company" to manage the council's interests in Auckland Airport and Westhaven Marina to include a vast range of community services.

Officers acknowledge the plan would be a sensitive issue with the public and create a perception of maximising profits and a step towards privatisation.

But they are firmly of the view that professional, business-focused directors would bring improved governance and increased commercial focus, lacking from the likes of Mayor John Banks and councillors.

They are firmly of the view are they. Does their view extend as far as Wall street? Does it even extend as far as the 25 New Zealand finance companies that have failed in the last couple of years?

Does it extend to the failed PPP roading projects in Sydney or the equally flawed management of London Underground or British water?

They use the words "increased commercial focus" as if this is somehow an unarguable good, but as we are noticing, the most intense commercial foci on the planet are busy melting down the global financial system and, in a breathtaking show of hypocrisy, begging for the biggest handouts ever from the public purse to rescue their corrupt, incompetent, FAILING business models.

These same people who scream bloody murder about some poor woman with 2 kids trying to survive in their concrete bloody jungles just maybe getting a few bucks more than she is entitled to? These same people who invented the term "welfare queen".

And governance? They want our public enterprises run with the same kind of governance that gave the world Enron and WorldCom? That kind of governance? What the hell are these people smoking?

OK, I give up, where the hell IS Alice?

As a ratepayer in this city I have only one request at the moment, fire these idiots, let them go and work in the private sector where they are so obviously better suited than to running a public good.

Comments

[Branedy]

I've blogged about this before, Government is NOT a Business. If these 'officers' are elected, time to vote in new ones! If they are hired employees, time to show them how business deals with irresponsible behavior, fire them!

[Earl Mardle]

Zaccly Brane

What gets measured gets done. When you adopt a "commercial focus" you start to measure money and things that impact on the cashflow, surplus or deficit become the only things that are done.

Waitakere City on the outskirts of Auckland went through this a while ago when they contracted out their solid waste management to a private company and within (I think) a year, had to seize back the operation because, although it was no doubt profitable for the company, the entire waste collection and disposal process had broken down.

Paradoxically, by focusing on environmentally sound waste handling they have cut their costs from hundreds of thousands a year to the point where they not only contribute to the Council coffers, they provide free education programmes and subsidised composting bins to the community.

Their waste transfer station is a great sight, from composting green waste to recycling computers, tyres and steel to refurbishing lawn mowers [a released prisoners training scheme] and re-using timber [their carpenter/joiner on staff makes beautiful furniture out of waste wood] the place is a hive of industry and a huge community resource.

The search for profit is an attempt to get out more than you put in, and that is bad enough at a commercial level, but at a public good level it is an actual crime against the community.

And they are employees acting as a fifth column, they should be fired.

[Robert Paterson]

Stunning - it is now becoming clear that business is not government - but this idea of having business run the Commons has legs

My push back would be to ask when has this been better?

[Earl Mardle]

Ah Rob, its the old problem you see.

The theory is perfect, its just that nobody has ever allowed the commercial gene its full expression.

Its only when every last molecule of matter and every last twitch of the lapislevator superiora can be expressed as a financial transaction that we will see the glorious flower unfold.

In the meantime, we will continue to have crashes such as we are currently riding driven by people so dim that they can't contemplate any but the simplest, most binary relationships which, so fortunately, can be expressed as money.

[Saltation]

pools, libraries, etc are social services in the true sense of the term.

social services' goal is quality of life for the society that pays for them in aggregate.

business's goal is the maximisation of profit in its purist sense, and unfortunately in practice, due to human society's very weak defences against parasitic behaviour, the maximisation of personal wealth by an actively elitist parasite class (you typically refer to them as "management", earl).

as and when quality of life can be measured quantitatively, running social services as business would STILL fail unless QoL was explicitly factored in (by regulatory fiat) to their bottom line.

and in the absence of the handydandy Qualitometer, of course, it fails bathetically.

the UK's libraries have been run as profit centres for quite a while now. a few years ago, they reached the tipping point of the old guard effectively not existing any more within the libraries' staffs' ranks, and the new culture took full rein.
it is noticeable now (and increasingly commented upon), that UK libraries typically offer a wide range of "services", but provide extraordinarily little access to books.