I love the way David Seymour is describing the size of cabinet and the number of government departments. 

He says the whole lot are "a big, complicated bureaucratic beast". And he is spot on. 

Here are the numbers that say it all: we have 82 portfolios, 28 ministers, and 41 separate government departments and agencies. If that doesn’t sound like a complicated beast, I don’t what does. 

So no argument from me. 

No argument also from Oliver Hartwich, who is Executive Director at the NZ Initiative think tank. He says part of the problem is that we have created all of these different outfits that, pretty much, look after similar things. 

Now Oliver Hartwich thinks we could get away with having as few as 15 cabinet ministers instead of the 28 we have at the moment. But he reckons maybe 20 is more realistic. 

Although, he also told Mike Hosking that he heard Ruth Richardson say recently that she thinks we should have no more than 12 cabinet ministers. 

Now, granted, I've never been a cabinet minister so I don’t have any inside expert knowledge, but I'm going to give it a go anyway. And I reckon we could go really hardcore and have a prime minister with two deputy prime ministers reporting to them. 

Those two deputies would have all the other ministers reporting to them. And I would streamline the total number of ministers, generally within the areas of law and order, finance, defence and security, health and social services, education, and the arts. 

That’s just a rough example of my streamlined cabinet. 

But Seymour's not just having a go at the number of cabinet ministers, he’s also got the number of government departments and agencies in his line of sight, and I know a thing or two about them. 

Because in previous lives I've worked at a few, and they are monsters. 

David Seymour is describing them as "bureaucratic beasts". I’d describe government departments and agencies as “beastly spaghetti junctions”. 

And that’s just what it’s like inside these departments, let alone what happens between them. Because, despite politicians talking about these departments being “all of government”, they’re not. 

That’s this theoretical idea that all government departments get on swimmingly, and talk to each other about everything, and they're all best mates, and because of that us taxpayers get the best bang for our buck. 

But it’s not like that at all. They work in silos. They compete with each other for funding. They don’t talk to each other. 

One great thing the government has done to try and sort out this shambles is in the area of weather forecasting. 

NIWA and MetService aren’t government departments exactly, but they are state-owned enterprises, and Simeon Brown announced a few weeks back that they’re going to be merged. 

Which makes perfect sense. And that’s what we need to see more of. 

Examples: do we need a Ministry of Education and an Education Review Office? I don’t think so. Do we need a Ministry of Justice and a Department of Corrections? Possibly not. Do we need a Department of Conservation and a Ministry for the Environment? 

See what I mean? 

So I'm right with David Seymour, and I think we would all be winners with less cabinet ministers and less government departments and agencies. 

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