Imagine you run a business as a “dag crusher”. For those unfamiliar with the term, a “dag” is a dirty bit of wool attached to a sheep’s rear end.
Every year you must fill out a form and pay your local council for the privilege of being allowed to continue to crush dags.
The Health Act 1956 lists nineteen jobs it calls “offensive trades”. Offensive in this case does not mean rude or obscene – it means highly unpleasant or, more colloquially, “gross”.
The list includes “fellmonger” (deals with animal skins), “tallow melter” (melts animal fat), “gut scraper” (please don’t ask), and my favourite “teasing of textile material for any purpose”, which presumably is not being mean to a sweater.
Registering and paying a fee every year has been required since around 1876, when New Zealand first adopted a similar requirement from the mother country.
Why has this list existed for so long? Because, prior to zoning (which only became universal in the 1950s), this was the way to prevent unpleasant trades from setting up anywhere they liked. “Nightsoil collection” made the cut because in the days before reticulated sewage systems, human waste was collected by cart from people’s properties. “Bone boiling or crushing” made the list because it also smells terrible.
The last time the list was revised was 1974. In the intervening years, New Zealand has established and continually reviewed and updated its resource management system and environmental protections, as well as laws for local government, workplace health and safety and food safety.
Yet businesses kept filling in forms, councils kept collecting fees and inspectors kept inspecting. Nobody asked why until someone sent an email to the Ministry for Regulation’s “Red Tape Tipline”, a suggestion box for annoying rules. That email did what fifty-two years of successive governments never managed.
Last week, the list was scrapped. Health Minister Simeon Brown said that one person's offensive trade is another person's livelihood. David Seymour called red tape a tax on productivity and growth.
But here’s the point of the story. Governments are great at making new rules. Yet they are not so good at going back to ask, “Wait, do we still need this?”.
Nineteen trades have been let off, and the tipline deserves credit for that. But it says something about the rest of the machine that a suggestion box got there first.