Bruce Bisset: Bureaucratic maze mystifies

We're frequently told government is slimming down and becoming more efficient, yet taxes, rates, fees, charges - whatever they're labelled - are constantly going up, and bureaucrats seem to delight in finding inventive new ways to part citizens from their hard-earned dollars.

Either that, or to waste people's time repeating unnecessarily complex procedures every few months in order to gain and keep some small entitlement. Or a bit of both.

A couple of examples have particularly irked me of late, and because one contained a surprise I expect very few folk would see coming, I thought I'd share them with you.

First, the Community Services Card, designed to help lower-income families pay for some of the basic health-care services a truly efficient democracy might provide citizens for free.

To gain one of these bits of plastic you must accompany the appropriate forms with three forms of identification. Fine. But the card is only valid for six months, and when it expires you have to go through the whole application process again, including ID documentation, though all your details are already on file and your eligibility known thanks to inter-departmental checks.

This means you either have to bother a JP to get copies of your documents verified, or stand in line at Work and Income - a drearily depressing business at the best of times - for one of their staff to sight your originals.

Not that there appears much consistency with this. A friend of mine, who is at university, received a card she had not asked for out of the blue, apparently because several months before she had been approved for a student loan.

The same rigmarole occurs if you happen to lose your driver's licence, which my son recently did. Despite it being the second time he'd lost it and dealing with the same person - who already knew his details - both times, he still had to furnish the three types of ID.

But here's the kicker: when he did as asked and presented his birth certificate, he was told it was no longer valid.

Pardon? He (and I) said. But it was true: in December a law change came into effect that invalidates all birth certificates for people born before 1998.

Or at least, invalidates them for things like photo ID (driver's licences, passports), and maybe more besides; neither the woman at the licensing counter nor a man at Internal Affairs could say exactly what was or was not affected.

Nor could either explain why most of the populace, no longer having valid proof of their birth, were now technically neither dead nor alive; nor what made certificates post-1998 (before the so-called War on Terror started, note) so distinct.

But, the Internal Affairs chap opined, perhaps the new certificates had more information than the old.

Well, that made a smidgen of sense - until the new certificate arrived and proved to have less detail (such as no occupation for either parent) than the old one. The only addition was small-font translations of the standard text in Maori.

One can only conclude the real reason for the requirement to renew birth certificates is the cost: $26. Times that by three million or more and that's quite a tidy windfall sum some bureaucrat has managed to accrue for the department's coffers.

I'll just note that beneficiaries and others on low incomes, needing to prove who they are when applying for Community Services Cards, may now face paying that fee in order to get their "free" card.

And then we're told we're better off.

That's the right of it.

-Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.