Today's satire post is by Ben Tan
New Zealand
has many issues that probably need to be addressed – housing, healthcare, and
education are often bandied about as things that “everyday New Zealanders” care
about. Things like the environment, infrastructure, and immigration are all key
areas in which most people generally agree are things. However, getting people
to generally agree on what to do about
such things is often quite messy, and messiness means that we give ourselves
too much opportunity to procrastinate by feeling compelled to first tidy up. As
such, political parties come up with “policies” that outline how they want to
behave in light of these issues (for example, a policy could be something like
charging people for water, or maybe granting all would-be immigrants New
Zealand citizenship, which would drastically reduce the increase in immigrants
on temporary resident visas).
And
actually, while politicians and the media like to talk to us about what
“everyday New Zealanders” want and think, we don’t seem to give much thought to
“yesterday” New Zealanders and “tomorrow” New Zealanders, who, arguably,
probably have a lot more to worry about (like why tomorrow is always only a day
away, or why people don’t like them around, even though they contribute to
society and work towards permanent residency). How do parties/politicians “come
up” with their policies? Do they need a policy on policy-making? (While policy
looks like the word police, police-making
is wholly different, and achieved as a result of organic biological processes
that are discussed in one of the areas of the “health and physical education
learning area of The New Zealand Curriculum”).
One of the
recent political contenders has started being quite explicit (more
moustache-prominent, as opposed to NSFW-explicit) about their policies being
“evidence-based”. In fact, there is a more general trend in the notion that we
should be using “evidence-based” policy to help us address the ills of society.
But what is “evidence-based” policy? What is “evidence”? Evidence is usually a set of numbers and
squiggly graph-things that come out of studies about the world around us.
Experts use things like “the scientific method”, which is all about observation
and logical reasoning, to better understand the links between actions and
reactions in the world. Science relies on a set of principles designed to
“significantly reduce subjectivity, bias and uncertainty in our understanding
of our natural, built, and social environments”. For some reason, some people
think that we should be able to use “knowledge” and “facts”, to inform how we
should do something, to give us the outcomes we desire. But of course, studies
have their limitations, and experts often have to be upfront about their
assumptions and contexts, and when policies need to take into account other
areas, such as the logistics of implementation, cultural/societal value
propositions, and will this thing get me votes, it’s probably more
worthwhile to consider “evidence-informed” or “evidence-influenced” policy
making.
But today’s
New Zealanders don’t have time to think about facts (after all, it’s much
easier to send things via email than to figure
out how to dial someone). Memes run rampant through the ultra-fast
broadband connections that make bushes espouse the benefits of
interconnectivity, and basing things on “evidence” seems like a tiresome
novelty. Fake news is more digestible, and pseudoscience means we can seem
fairly reasonable. As I suspect we’ll hear more of in the coming campaigns,
people understand “the single mum in Otara”, or the “small business owner in
Gore” much more than scientific jibber-jabber (read: studies) about the
efficacy of boot camps for reducing youth recidivism.
Hence, in an
effort to improve transparency about how and why the government makes the
decisions that it does on behalf of all everyday New Zealanders, yesterday New
Zealanders, tomorrow New Zealanders, and you-don’t-look-like-a New Zealanders,
here’s a proposal for a Ministry of Anecdotes and Stuff Comments (MASC). The ministry will come to embody a new yet old way of thinking, what we call "anecdote-based policy making".
MASC’s role
is to seek out and destroy gather public opinion about absolutely
everything, with a particular focus on the fathers, mothers, sons, daughters,
grandparents, beneficiaries, tradespeople, farmers, aunts, uncles, and other
such types of general human being, whereby anecdotes and “I’m not something-ist,
but…” ideas can be gathered to inform, outform,
perform… essentially, form policy in all areas of the government’s
domain. MASC will coordinate a network of departmental anecdote providers so
that decision making can take into account highly specific, incredibly
localised individual experiences that can be used as a smokescreen to push
forward a policy agenda on purely ideological grounds anyway. MASC will also be
in charge of identifying people who know people who know people because after all, it’s not “what you
know”, it’s “who you know that you can say you know too”.
MASC will
also aim to be a fully modernised hi-tech ministry. It will create a
centralised state-of-the-art digital database full of security holes and
overrun costs as “features, not bugs”, and use artificial intelligence to data
mine the comments section of Stuff, and websites that often have the wrong
headline match up with the wrong content.
A young old single mother who is a job-stealing house-buyer who is unemployed
and renting a damp house warmed by burning red-tape told us that this approach
would cut travel times by twenty minutes, so we are inclined to believe that
MASC will be a complete success, especially if we don’t establish any explicit
targets on performance outcomes. After all, more roads in a tool-kit will do us
just nicely once you’ve had enough.
At the end
of the day, let’s do this, and take a fresh approach where we deliver for New
Zealanders who are better together.
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