National MP Chester Borrows is getting his mouth washed out with soap by Labour's Iain Lees-Galloway.
Whanganui MP Borrows told his local paper that "d***head bureaucrats" had adopted an unbending stance to enforcing health and safety rules, which had led to growing concern about the regulations.
A farmer had been issued an infringement notice because five quad bikes helmets had each been hanging on a wall behind a bike, not on the bikes themselves.
Borrows described health and safety inspectors as enforcing sometimes "bull**** rules", at a Parliamentary select committee last week, the Wanganui Chronicle reported.
His comments have incited the wrath of Labour's spokesman for workplace relations.I'm imagining Question Period:
Hon Iain Lees-Galloway: To Whanganui MP Chester Borrows: Mister Borrows is said to have stated that the inspectors undertaking on-farm safety inspections are d*ckheads. Question for Mister Borrows: is this true?
Hon. Chester Borrows: Yes, it is true. The inspectors have d*cks for heads.More seriously, though, MPs might want to keep the d*ckhead constraint in mind when writing legislation and regulation. Regulation and legislation can look very different when there are no officious little tyrants in any of the agencies. In the real world, regulation has to be robust to the chance that it might just get enforced and interpreted by d*ckheads, as small a minority as they may be in any particular agency.
[pandemonium]
Note too that helmets on quad-bikes are hardly panacea.
I leave you with Peter Venkman. Is there any movie that better illustrates the perils of regulatory agencies gone mad?
And the EconPop review:
