Eye2theLongRun

Recent years have seen an increase in political involvement in large scale projects which essentially have little to do with politics. Why is that a problem?

Political decisionmaking is aimed, at bottom at producing votes. It matters little whether votes for left right or centre – the output is votes.

Problem is:

• votes do not produce health treatment
• votes do not produce plant and equipment
• votes do not produce roads, or bridges or infrastructure

Indeed they produce votes. Nothing else (more than a few nasty side effects as well).

And yet our politicians and their govts are donkey deep in decisions about these outputs yet we need them quite regardless of whose got the votes, they need to be financially sound, they need to match demonstrated needs of myriad groups and individuals, they need to be professionally designed and delivered and they need to work.

Votes and those who hold them have little or no expertise in any of these domains – they are politicians ever bound by aspirations of gaining and maintaining power.

Their better contribution would be to:

• stay out of pretending they have expertise. Simple truth is – they don’t
• stick to setting and maintaining rules for independent professionals who do know what they are doing
• holding such independents to account by rewarding success and penalising failure (heavily) promptly
• growing some expertise in supervising contracts (of all kinds) that will produce the outcomes needed regardless of votes.