"Bureaucrats begone"

Ruapehu Bulletin, Volume 13, Issue 623, 13 February 1996, Page 16

"Bureaucrats begone"

Cockroaches, say the learned men of our society, are one of the few creatures of this planet that would survive the effects of a nuclear war. One of the others to survive would be bureaucrats. Let us for a moment ponder the history of bureaucracy throughout our fairly recent past: Dating back to the days of cavemen, when fearsome sabre-tooth tigers roamed the land and -enormous mammoths towered, there were creatures with tablets of stone, wandering about and recording population numbers, eating habits and, undoubtedly, who was watching TV3 news. These half-man, half-machines were the first recorded instances of bureaucracy on planet Earth. But the real push of the paper people began in earnest during the reign of the Roman Empire. In those times it was fashionable to walk about with papyrus scrolls, recording everyone elses' business and reporting to higher authorities should the numbers not add up. Nowadays, the bureaucrats have interbred, forming a new, hardier strain of interminable paper-pushers. It lays in evidence wherever one should look — a traffic warden here, a council officer there. Some centuries ago the powers that be got so fed up with the whole idea of bossing people around for self-gratification they gave up and gave the job to the lowest plebs society could produce — those of the bureaucracy. So what to do? Unfortunately we have let these industrious do-nothings, with control fetishes and a lust to hold up progress so they in turn can catch up, gain such a grip on society that it would be difficult to imagine a world without them. We rely so much on bureaucrats that we have become lazy, indeed indolent, to the point of becoming ignorant of our rights in today's civilised society. And this has led to a wide-spread acceptance that whatever the bureaucrats say, we should take as rote. I say no. I say it is time to stand up to people who hold up society and step into the 15th century. We are so far behind modern thinking in New Zealand that the other denizens of this world are laughing at us. And all that the more courageous of us can do is blame those who make the decisions. Let us simply stand up and voice our opposition to the red-tape barons, and say "bugger you, I'm going to do it anyway, even if I don't have a piece of paper giving me permission!".

Jarrod

Coburn