The National Party is planning to start a bonfire of regulations? Yes please! In fact, what day?  Because I’m happy to take some time off work and help them light that fire.

This news couldn’t have come through on a better day for me because I hate regulations today even more than I normally do.

Today, I got an email from the roof painter. Now a year ago he quoted me for a roof paint. But the problem is it’s a two story place with high stud and a funny contour on one side, so we needed scaffolding. Lots of scaffolding.

Because of health and safety regulations.

Get this: roof paint, $2100. Scaffolding for roof paint, $8500 at least - longer the job goes, higher the price.

But basically, what should cost me $2100 is costing me $10,600 just because of health and safety.It’s literally increasing the cost five times.

Begrudgingly, I actually thought I got a good price. Not anymore. He just emailed me to say the quote doesn’t stand anymore, the authorities are getting too tough.

He wrote: ”Even though we have never had an accident in over 20 years of painting around Wellington, OSH have made things exceptionally difficult for us, to the point where we can’t paint your roof using the safety equipment we originally planned to use.”

Which means for me, the job just got a whole lot more expensive.  

And that’s why I hate regulation, because it’s making everything so much more expensive than it needs to be.

So I’m on board with national and its bonfire idea, but I really hope that they’ve got better ideas than what they’ve announced today. Because so far I like their general idea, but it’s a bit light on the good stuff. 

They’ve announced they have 100 regulations they want to torch and they’ve announced 29 of those today. But  honestly it looks like a bit of a rush job - I think only about seven of them are actually regulations worth removing. 

The rest of them either don’t exist yet, like forcing landlords ot allow tenants ot have pets, or don’t matter anymore, like tram driver reguatlions, or are things they’ve already announced like getting rid of the Auckland regional fuel tax but now it’s dressed up as getting rid of the regulation creating the auciland regional fuel tax. 

I applaud these changes, don’t get me wrong, but these are tinkering at the edges. These 29 aren’t going to bring down the cost of house building or renovating or running your business.

I’m hanging out for the next 71 ideas. One word I want to see in there: scaffolding.