While I'm on the topic of Treasury, the first half of their Briefing to the Incoming Minister [PDF] released before the holidays included this lovely little graph:
You get that? According to Treasury, passing laws is bad. But its sillier than that, becuse they don't care about the content of those laws - only their page count. It's a perfect example of a metric which completely misses the point, and if taken to its logical conclusion would see us in a state with no laws at all - a state adequetely summarised by Thomas Hobbes as
continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.It would be nice if the government had advisors who approached their task with a trace of intellectual seriousness, rather than peddling this sort of Friedmanite garbage.
(Oh, and for the curious, what's that spike in 2007? The Income Tax Act - all 3151 pages of it. And if you ask Treasury whether we should periodicly review and update our tax laws and close loopholes, they'll say "yes". So not even they believe the stuff they're shovelling...)