Bootleggers and Baptists - construction waste edition

Rochester political scientist William Riker celebrated great herestheticians - those adept at manipulating policy to serve their own interests. His book is classic and should be on every public policy syllabus. 

Newsroom reports on some superb herestheticians applying Bruce Yandle's lesson about bootleggers and baptists, and about the importance of raising rivals' costs in the construction sector.

If you're a construction behemoth, you can bear regulatory compliance costs a lot more easily than smaller competitors. If you're building at scale, you're probably already doing a better job in avoiding construction waste.

Construction waste going to landfill really isn't any kind of public policy problem. Tips can set tip fees that recover costs. 

That doesn't mean you can't make it a political problem. Lots of people don't understand how landfill pricing works and just hate the idea of waste - failing to realise that, sometimes, measures to reduce waste are more wasteful than bearing the waste. It's a combination of economic illiteracy and aesthetics. 

So here's what we then get:

In a rarely-seen consensus private and public players in the building industry are calling for greater government intervention on the vexing issue of construction waste

The Environment Select Committee will today hear its last submission on the topic it has been investigating for several months - how to deal with the three million tonnes of sector waste dumped in landfills annually.

About half of this is thought to be useable or recyclable.

Fletcher Building Residential and Development chief executive Steve Evans said as the country embarked on a massive bid to address the housing shortage, change was more than just a nice-to-have.

“I've been in this industry for a long time and regulations change behaviour. So you ask people to do things voluntarily and you will, of course, get those that are socially-minded or environmentally-minded, that will do it.

It would be excellent fodder as case study for any of the public policy schools - in a world in which they could recognise that this sort of thing is a problem. 

Not all of the push is crazy though. Updating the Building Act so that it's easier to re-use materials makes a lot of sense.  

But just think about the difference in cost that mandates like this would impose on small players as compared to the big guys. MBIE is helping to create another cartel, and simply doesn't care. 

Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment spokesperson Antonia Reid said a range of work was underway to encourage the reduction of waste, including investigating the barriers to reusing and recycling building materials and expanding the waste infrastructure network.

“MBIE is also progressing changes which would require reporting and measurement of new buildings’ whole-of-life embodied carbon emissions - from manufacturing building materials to disposing of them at the end of a building’s life.

“We expect this focus on embodied carbon reduction will encourage greater repair and retrofit of existing buildings, smarter building design to help minimise emissions and waste within new construction, and more deconstruction of buildings at the end of their lives if they cannot be made fit for purpose.”

For those unfamiliar with Yandle's Bootleggers & Baptists: 

Radio Games

It looks like RNZ's trick to fund both RNZ Concert and the new Youth station would also have worked on former Broadcasting Minister Steve Maharey, who writes:

For now, Concert FM is safe. When the news broke that Radio New Zealand (RNZ) was considering turning Concert FM into an automated station on an AM frequency so it could use the FM frequency to establish a ‘youth oriented’ station, discordant notes immediately emanated from classical music fans all over the nation.

For those new to the story, let me recap. Radio New Zealand has for some time, under the capable leadership of its CE Paul Thompson, been trying to make itself more interesting to 21st century audiences: particularly younger audiences who will, hopefully, turn into lifelong faithful listeners.

This is a reasonable objective but not easy to implement when you have no money (1).

As any good CE knows if you are looking for real money from a tight budget the place to go is people. Accordingly, RNZ made it known that Concert FM staff would be made redundant, a new automated classical music service would take its place and new staff would be employed to run youth programming.

That any of the folks at RNZ thought this would be an easy sell is difficult to understand. They might have realised their mistake if they had made it clear to their Minister and the wider Government. It is a fact of political life that to touch Concert FM is akin to peeing on an electric fence.

It appears that RNZ thought that they told their Minister, but they now say the communication might not have been clear enough.

(A note about communication at this point might be useful. Informing someone is not communication. At a minimum, communication requires feedback from the person being communicated with to be sure they both got the message and understood it).

Back to the story. As a former Broadcasting Minister (disclaimer!), I learnt about the need to tread carefully around Concert FM from the formidable Right Honourable Jonathan Hunt. Rt. Hon. Hunt was the Minister who oversaw the market based reforms to broadcasting during the heady days of the fourth Labour Government. Significantly, despite the preferences of the day for throwing everything open to the market, Concert FM survived unscathed. When I asked how this happened, I was informed that the audience for Concert FM made it political suicide to do anything other than leave it alone.

I really don't get how folks see this play and go "What was Radio NZ thinking, threatening to knife something that is politically untouchable in order to fund a daft youth thing? How could they think it would be easy to convince anyone they could do that?"

It looked, from the start, like an obvious play to extort funding for both programmes. No government would let them kill Concert FM. The government freaking out and funding both Concert FM and the new youth thing seems a daft response though. Or, at least, you'd think that the government could convey back to RNZ that its entire Board would be sacked for running this kind of game against the government if the Board allowed it to proceed. Operational independence is one thing. Creating hostage situations for the government is another.

But the play worked. It'll be interesting to watch to see what other government agencies learned from this episode.

I covered things in my column this week for Newsroom. You can get it here now, ungated; they're worth the subscription though. I conclude:

As Newsroom reported last week, RNZ’s chief executive Paul Thompson worried that going down normal channels to secure the use of the 102 FM band would “bog down our plans for five years and nothing would happen.” A game of chicken in an election year would be much quicker.

It has been a bit strange to see this episode reported as a “debacle” on RNZ’s part, and the reversal of the planned cuts at Concert FM as “embarrassing.” It would have been daft to vandalise Concert FM in favour of a new youth service. That now looks unlikely. But was it ever really the intended outcome?

Rochester University political scientist William Riker studied what he called ‘heresthetics’ – the manipulation of the context or structure of a political decision-making process to get the outcome one wants. Political entrepreneurs are attuned to seeing heresthetical moves, reshaping the political environment to make possible that which was previously impossible.

Rather than castigate RNZ’s boss for the “debacle,” we might instead recognise and even, perhaps, applaud his spectacular feat of political entrepreneurship. If getting everything one wants is a debacle, we might ponder just how wonderful a catastrophe might have been. Sir Humphrey would be proud.

The Government may now have a bit of a problem if other Crown agencies take the appropriate lesson from this little episode. Successful entrepreneurs often attract imitators.

Should the Government not wish this play to be repeated, it might need to find ways of demonstrating these kinds of moves do not pay off for those who choose to play them.

Heresthetics

Heresthetics is to politics as entrepreneurship is to markets. William Riker coined the term. In his wonderful short book, The Art of Political Manipulation, he notes the DePew amendment. In 1902, Chauncey DePew proved his heresthetical skills by killing the seventeenth amendment. Sufficient support existed for the passing of a constitutional amendment providing for the direct election of senators (who were otherwise selected by state legislatures); DePew didn't want that change. He recognized, however, that majority support existed for an amendment to the amendment that bundled direct election of senators with federal enforcement of voting rights, and that such an amended motion could never be supported by the southern states who otherwise would support the direct election of senators. It's the classic killer amendment.

Today I read David Frum on the Stupak Amendment, which forbids abortion coverage by Health Exchanges under Obamacare. I have little handle on the importance of Health Exchanges in the overall scheme of things, but I wonder if I'm seeing shades of DePew. Kos notes a good chunk of House Democrats have pledged to oppose any bill containing the Stupak amendment. Where DePew specifically intended to kill the amendment, though, Stupak's a Democrat from Michigan; seems unlikely he'd be intending this as a killer amendment. Hmm.