So in terms of New Zealand and local government, I do a lot of work in the local government sector, we have a thing we called the Local Government Act.
One of the questions Theuns put to me. He said, we have some amendments coming up, what do they mean? And I’ve taken the liberty to reinterpret that question.
There are some amendments coming up but what happens with legislation is those different sectors of the economy, so local government, national transportation, electricity, telecommunication, gas, all have different sets of regulations; government departments and different sets of empowering legislation.
So the key thing is if you are working in a particular sector, in terms of providing advice, or doing the analysis – is to know the legislation for the sector you’re working in because a lot of infrastructure prescribed or has prescribed boundaries with legislation.
So different areas in New Zealand, local government, electricity, government departments, tertiary education, primary education, and health all have different sets of regulations around the management of infrastructure.
The other is that nothing stays the same. So you learn things or there’s a disaster or problem.
So legislation and regulations change over time. It’s actually more often than you think.
In the local government sector, I don’t think there’s a year goes by where there isn’t either an amendment to the Local Government Act or amendment to the Health Act or amendment to the transportation or the government policy statement for transportation, or the regulations.
So what the thing about this is constantly changing. And you’ve got to stay on top of it if you can understand it.
And the other thing is that changes have fashion. In New Zealand, the western world, so there’ll be a fashion for outsourcing or there’ll be a fashion for doing it in a particular way.
And if you stay in the system long enough, they almost go around the full circle.
So you’ve got to sort of understand what the fashion is for that 5 year period because you’ll be required to present information in accordance with that and each fashion has its own set of buzzwords.
Say, something new comes along and oh that was the old way of doing it. We do it this way now, but nothing really changes that much. So the way you procure services has fashioned.
There’s been a really big move over the last two or three decades from, certainly in New Zealand, from in-house service delivery through to performance-based contracting of which Dr. Henning again is an international expert.
But that’s probably more than a fashion, but it’s been a trend and that’s getting applied to Developing Countries as well.
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