In all of the craziness that we are seeing right now, I’m taking some heart from the hints that the government is prepared to be flexible on rules.

We’ve had a couple of encouraging examples in the last few days. Firstly, the plan to bypass the RMA for a couple of years. And then plan to essentially break existing immigration rules if it’s necessary.

This is good, common-sense stuff.  It’s going to be extremely important to getting our country going again.

With the RMA, there’s no pointing dicking around consulting with communities for years on projects that need to be started now to save the economy.

With immigration rules, there’s no point kicking people out of the country – if they even can get out – simply because they’re working in a different job to the job on the visa.

Arguably these rules are unnecessarily cumbersome in normal economic times. In a Depression, they’re the difference between jobs and the dole queue.

Predictably, it’s got the critics jumping up and down, especially the greenies who demand to be consulted before the shovels hit the ground in any project.

But they need to wake up the scale of what’s happening right now.

If it was good enough to essentially abandon democracy over the health crisis, then it’s good enough to take an equally urgent approach to the resulting economic crisis.

I’d like to see more of this from the government, especially on rules planned for our farmers.

The government would win a lot of respect if it showed some flexibility around things like the Essential Freshwater package which will require farmers to fence off streams and change winter grazing practices.

We’ve said it on the show before: now’s not the time to force farmers to shell out more than they have to when some of them have much less coming in.

A practical approach would be to push pause on those regulations.

But if the government’s absolutely hell bent on doing it, then employ some of that new-found pragmatism. Help them pay for the fences.  It’ll get the job done, create jobs and fit nicely in that plan to spend billions on big projects.

As I say, it’s encouraging to see that flexibility.  More of it, please.