Editorial: Inquiries can be a substitute for action

This Government must be setting some sort of record for inquiries. Every week it seems, another is announced. By National's count, the number now exceeds 200. Last week, two of the big ones produced their reports, one on mental health, the other on school management.

They represent the best and worst of these exercises.

The report on Tomorrow's Schools is a bundle of clear, concrete, radical recommendations. It proposes to do away with boards of trustees and school zoning and put schools in administrative groupings.

The report on Mental Health and Addiction, by contrast, is vague, incremental and inconclusive. It proposes a permanent commission on mental health to oversee more services for milder forms of mental illness and advocates less medication, more "talk therapies" and unspecified targets for treatment.

One presents the Government with decisions to make, the other kicks its can down the road.

The fault does not lie completely with those who conducted the inquiry. One panel was given a tightly focused task, the other was asked to consider anything that has a bearing on mental health.

One probably had a good idea of the Government's thinking before it set out, the other was sent into a field where the Government clearly has no idea what to do.

Mental illness comes in such a variety of forms and sufferers are so hard to monitor that even the experts do not sound sure of what to do. Yet New Zealand's youth suicide rate demands action. Maybe we need another commission dedicated to that subject.

National is right to criticise many of the Government's subjects of inquiry, but not all of them.

The inquiry into the abuse of children in state care will be hearing from former wards put into institutions that were closed last century.

It has spent most of this year expanding its brief, which now extends to include just about any form of child custody, possibly including schools, but it still looks likely to plough old ground for no practical purpose.

Inquiries are useful when there is something we need to know and it can be discovered. The 1986 royal commission on the electoral system was a classic example. It examined different electoral systems and devised one the country eventually adopted.

But, too often, inquiries are set up to give the appearance of doing something about an intractable problem. We appear to be getting too many of those.