The Public Service Commissioner is considering a major shakeup of several government agencies, including the Ministries for Women and Pacific Peoples.To point out the obvious - which the white men running this government don't seem to have noticed - these ministries exist for a reason. They exist to give a formal voice in government to people that the power structure systematically ignores. Like women, who are ignored distressingly often, despite being a majority of the population.Sir Brian Roche is refusing to rule out that they would be absorbed into larger ministries and said "all options are on the table" and he was "not going to get into ruling things in or out".
Abolishing them wil remove those perspectives. It will mean that women, Pasifikia and the disabled will not be heard in government, and policy about them will be made without them. This isn't just misogynist, racist and ableist - it is also a mistake. The lack of those perspectives will lead to worse policy and expensive but unexpected (to the bland white econodudes in the regime) outcomes.
The fundamental problem here is that said bland white econodudes do not recognise that they do not know everything - that there are entire worlds outside their experience, which they don't bother to model because they're "not important" (to them and the things they care about). We've known this for decades - Marilyn Waring literally wrote the book on it - but they prefer their models of perfectly spherical people in a vacuum, and if reality doesn't match, well, it is reality, and the annoying reminders of it, which must change. This is not a recipe for good policy. It is not a recipe for good governance. And it is certainly not a recipe for happy politics. And this regime needs to have that rammed home when we vote them out at the next election.
(Meanwhile, as for Rimmer and his cries that we shouldn't have ministries for specific types of people, that's rather rich, coming from a guy who had a whole ministry for weirdo libertarians created just for him. He should just smeg off back to the far-right thinktank which spawned him and stop fucking up our country).