Let's have a real efficiency drive

The idea that Sunday wage loadings are the great burden on our national efficiency is simply laughable.

But the worst aspect of this nonsense is that it is being used to ignore huge areas of inefficiency in our economy. Here are three of them.

The curse of Human Resource management has spread over our entire society. HR has become a parasitical industry continually expanding as it steadily eats up the resources of its hosts. In business, universities, government agencies and social sector organisations HR operatives are busy making rules and instituting processes that create work for them and timewasting for everyone else.

Countering the horrific expansion of HR is difficult because the leaders of the push are clever and have used moral grounds to justify their power grab. Its all about ensuring 'ethical standards' or 'fair treatment of all employees' or one of the many other politically correct phrases.

It has only taken a few decades to expand from almost nothing to the current position of universal domination. If we are to address the challenge of Asian competition, which is in no way threatened by weekend penalty rates, we could ask how many HR people are employed in Asia.

The current government has apparently got rid of many bits of regulation that were a burden to business. It could now establish a group to get rid of pointless HR rules in government and to advise other sectors on eradication. Perhaps the easiest way would be to simply sack half of all HR staff, at random, and then tell the leftovers to cut the work to the time available. Then do it all again.

The second area of efficiency reform, and even more challenging, is the legal system. The law is another part of society where the inmates are running the asylum. We may as well admit that the legal system exists to make lawyers rich. It has absolutely nothing to do with justice, as some lawyers will proudly boast.

The most common way for lawyers to get rich is ensure that rich people get what-ever they want. So a general rule is that in any legal dispute the person able to give most money to lawyers will win. If you have very little money to give lawyers you can choose between giving up immediately and going bankrupt.

The costs of resolving even very simple matters are absurdly high and the time frames ridiculously long.

Even in criminal cases apparently simple matters such as whether a person bashed some other people to death or not can go on for months, and that is after many months of lawyers preparing for the case.

Various judges and other commentators have been making the case for reform for years but lawyers, in a united front that would have made the Painters and Dockers Union proud, have successfully fought off any threat to their incomes from improvements in efficiency.

The third area of potential efficiency reform is in the allocation of taxpayers' funds. Government expenditure should be allocated on the basis of best return to taxpayers for the money they have handed over. Welfare payments provide a return to taxpayers in that they help keep poorer people from begging and dying in the streets, making life more pleasant for us all. Payments are also recycled quickly by the recipients thereby stimulating the economy.

But what about huge government handouts to rich private schools? These institutions have gone beyond buying extra swimming pools and rowing boats and rifle ranges. They now are building recording studios and massive auditoria. Some apparently have millions of dollars in the bank.

Clearly the taxpayer would get a better return by having education funds invested in raising the standard of poorer schools. The marginal benefit from another dollar going to a very wealthy school is negligible. The idea that these grants keep fees low is nonsense. The point of high fees is to keep anyone but rich kids out. The more money they get, the higher fees go, not the other way round. They just have to find even more expensive things to spend the cash on.

The excuse for this inefficient use of public funds is that all kids deserve some government support for their education. That is a 'rights' argument. It should be refuted by the argument about marginal benefits to all taxpayers.

The same case applies to public funding of private health. The excuse for this massive expenditure of taxpayers' money is that people need a bit of encouragement from the government to outlay more of their own money for health care. The result is taxpayer support for fitness outlays, quack treatments and personal comfort. Where is the business case for all this?

More than half of all Australians do not have private health cover but they are being forced to prop up the richer half of the population. The recent ABC 4 Corners program on wasteful health procedures made the point, rather too gently, that the worst abuses take place in private hospitals. So now we know taxpayers are also being forced to finance wasteful and dangerous health care.

The efficiency gains that could be achieved from tackling just these three problems are immense. Getting rid of HR nonsense and creating an efficient legal system would deliver immediate cost benefits across business and save many tax dollars. Better allocation of government spending would make society more productive.

It is symptomatic of the depths to which political debate has sunk that these more serious efficiency arguments have no place in mainstream discourse. It is so much easier to worry about the hourly rate for serving coffee on a Sunday.