Stupid Rules

Author: admin

  • Unlocking Auckland: More authority, fewer stupid rules, please

    This article was first published by the Sunday Star Times on 17 May 2026.

    Like many, I am looking forward to riding on Auckland’s soon-to-be-opened City Rail Link, the underground rail connector that will finally move Auckland rail out of the dark ages.

    Why has it taken so long and cost so much?

    At $5.5 billion for 3.5km of tunnel and two new stations, a 2023 study found it was the world’s most expensive underground rail project on a per kilometre basis. It cost more than four times as much as tunnelled rail in places like Denmark. It also took a really long time to deliver. The planning began in 2013. Construction started in 2018. Over those thirteen years, Singapore added more than 71km of track and 22 stations to its rail network.

    Why are so many of the Auckland’s public infrastructure projects late, fiendishly expensive or missing altogether?

    Whatever governing failures Auckland suffers from, they are not specific to Auckland Council and its council-controlled entities. The country generally is poor at efficient delivery of infrastructure and coherent, strategic decision-making. Reports by the Infrastructure Commission show our infrastructure costs a lot, and not just because of our geographic vulnerabilities. The government  spends vastly more responding to natural hazards and disasters than developing resilience.

    Local government suffers from the same failings. It has a particularly bad case of too many stupid rules and not enough authority.  Stupid rules, I argue in a recent book, are complex rules that would be more efficiently replaced by giving decision-makers more authority: more scope to exercise discretionary judgement. Stupid rules create “accountability sinks” where nobody is accountable because they are reduced to following rules and prescribed procedures.

    On the surface, this looks like too much bureaucracy creating too many rules. Local government elected representatives are not in control of much of what the council bureaucracy does – witness Wellington’s spectacular failures. More persistently across local government, there is a democratic void.

    But it turns out you can have a democratic deficit while also robbing the council bureaucracy itself of meaningful authority. If someone wanted to design a rule-bound system in which real accountability vanishes and capacity for strategic action withers, they would come up with something like New Zealand’s Local Government Act. The Act is a mash-up of aspirational goals and suffocating rules. Rules of procedure, onerous requirements for consultation, rules for reorganization, and even rules for making decisions. Taken together with many other duties and restrictions placed on local government, it’s a wonder our councils manage to deliver anything.

    As plenty of others have argued, councils in New Zealand lack power and resources. Local government spending has remained relatively static as a percentage of GDP for decades, even as the burdens imposed on councils by  central government have spiralled.

    The quagmire of rules, procedures and compliance requirements that local councils are effectively forced to produce create organizations lacking in command capacity: the capacity to get stuff done. The adept council bureaucrat may be a master of navigating and producing paperwork, and in this sense has a kind of power. But the bureaucrat is also tied down by the paperwork. Talk to any council official, and they are equally frustrated by burdensome contract-management, consultation and compliance requirements.

    Take the bizarre case of the housing development built in Auckland’s west without actually being connected to the sewerage system. For all the planning rules, hundreds of households were, as of 2024, forced to live with sewage literally piling up to be trucked out.

    Or take the Westmere helipad that finally gained consent after a protracted legal process. The council bureaucracy, elected councillors, the local MP and the overwhelming majority of public submitters opposing the helipad all lacked the authority to prevent a couple of billionaires getting permission to land their helicopter on their waterfront lawn. Stupid rules moved ultimate decision-making power to unaccountable independent commissioners.

    The lack of authority at the local government level is pervasive. Instead of clear authority exercised by a hierarchically-organized council, subject to democratic accountability, complex stupid rules open up opportunities for litigation and arbitrary interventions by central government. We see both problems in a proposed major development to Auckland’s south, which council agencies warn poses flood risks – but may be powerless to prevent.

    The government’s recent “deal” with Auckland will not fix these problems. It does not deliver either the funding or the authority to unlock Auckland as an economic powerhouse. An economist concluded the deal cannot work: “Devolving responsibility without power or funding is a recipe for failure.” He could have been echoing the philosopher Edmund Burke, who decried the lack of command capacity left by the French Revolution more than 200 years ago: “They are to execute, without power; they to be responsible, without discretion”, he wrote of the people’s supposed representatives. But, he might have added, they will get to write some really long policy frameworks, procedural rules and consultation requirements.

  • Too many ‘stupid rules’, too little authority: how organisations create their own red tape

    This piece was published by The Conversation on 12 March 2026

    “Dress appropriately.”

    Soon after becoming General Motors’ vice president of global human resources in 2009, Mary Barra used those two words to replace a clunky employee dress code that had grown to ten pages long.

    One might think that move by Barra, who now heads the company, simply signalled a return to “common sense” – meaning fewer rules and more freedom.

    But in practice, “dress appropriately” actually requires something else: authority.

    Employees gain more discretion, but inevitably some will get it wrong. When that happens, managers must step in and say so – a responsibility that, in General Motors’ case, some senior managers had been reportedly reluctant to exercise.

    This speaks to two deeper points.

    If we cede authority to people in a hierarchy – or empower them to decide what is appropriate – then we can make the rule book much shorter. And if the prospect of exercising that discretion feels uncomfortable, it suggests how unused to authority we have become.

    Contemporary society, particularly in the Anglo-American world, produces rules in abundance. In this era, bosses and bossing are viewed as something of an embarrassment.

    How stupid rules made for more ‘sludge’

    In my new book, Stupid Rules: Reducing Red Tape and Making Organisations More Effective and Accountable, I describe how a flight from authority in recent decades has stripped organisations of command capacity. This is the ability to tell others what to do without having to reference formal guidance, standards or legal rules.

    I’m far from the only observer to have identified problems with the rule-heavy approach we often see taken today.

    In their 2025 book Abundance, US journalists and podcasters Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson describe how land-use rules can prevent homes from being built and mire infrastructure projects in delays, rising costs and litigation.

    More broadly, people struggle with red tape and pervasive “sludge” – the term used by behavioural economists for obstructive paperwork and administrative burdens.

    And despite the proliferation of rules, the powerful have not been effectively restrained. Corporate lobbying has flourished and market competition has declined, as well-resourced actors have learned how to bend complex rules to their advantage.

    How did we get here?

    Dismantling authority was meant to make organisations more efficient and accountable. Over time, hierarchies were replaced with markets and market-like systems designed to incentivise the delivery of services such as healthcare, electricity and environmental protection.

    Paradoxically, the attempt to reduce hierarchy produced more red tape. Sometimes described as neoliberal, this shift ushered in what scholars call the regulatory state.

    Private markets providing services such as electricity, sewage treatment and drinking water now operate under complex rules and performance targets meant to guide their behaviour.

    Yet these systems have often failed spectacularly. Each failure – whether sewage leaks, leaky buildings, healthcare scandals or other disasters – tends to trigger another round of regulation: more rules, more detailed standards and ever more elaborate performance metrics.

    Is more authority the antidote?

    In many cases, more detailed rules are not the answer. Organisations would often function better if they made more space for the logic of hierarchy.

    Nearly a century ago, pioneering British American economist Ronald Coase explained why: firms exist because it is often more efficient to organise work through authority than through contracts and rules.

    The same principle applies today. Giving decision-makers greater discretion could cut through the regulatory mire that can thwart democratically made decisions.

    In another American example from my book, I describe how a city government in Oregon was forced to stop construction for seven months on a water-treatment plant, even after years of planning and approvals. The city lacked authority to proceed in the face of legal objections, leading to another court hearing and increased costs.

    Similar problems have appeared in New Zealand. An environmental official in Christchurch described how a popular project to rewild the city’s earthquake-affected red zone ran into difficulty.

    He explained how situations like this are not uncommon, with planning mechanisms intended to protect the environment sometimes reducing the ecological benefits they are meant to achieve.

    Such “stupid rules” are not just a bureaucratic phenomenon.

    Many of the rules that companies work to are created by private bodies that create standards, accreditation requirements and auditing processes.

    Technology giant Apple’s sustainability rules, for example, set out a detailed code of conduct for its suppliers. But Apple’s own flight from authority makes these rules cumbersome and weak.

    Because Apple does not directly control the making of its products, its sustainability rules need to be imposed on suppliers outside the boundaries of Apple itself. Over the past 20 years, recurrent scandals saw Apple ratchet up these rules, while moving the cost of compliance onto its suppliers.

    Some things have improved, but the rules are in conflict with the basic structure of the supply chain set up by Apple to grind down costs. It replaced the direct control – and responsibility – of hierarchy with market exchange and contractual standards.

    Authority, of course, needs to be checked. But stupid rules can turn organisations into “accountability sinks” in which no one is truly responsible.

    Empowering decision makers – just as in that simple “dress appropriately” rule – helps restore clear lines of responsibility.