Government Announces Plan to Get Off Your Roof, Pleased With the Pun

The Government has released a solar sector review promising to cut residential installation approval from $640 and three months to $200 and six days, achieved mainly by letting accredited installers self-certify instead of waiting on a mandatory inspector visit. Regulation Minister David Seymour and Energy Minister Simeon Brown announced the changes under the title “Getting Government off roofs, letting sun shine on Kiwi solar,” a pun that took longer to land than the inspector presumably did.

Small and medium scale solar gets a similar haircut, with approval costs cut from as much as $11,000 to $1,300 and timelines from six months to one month. The review estimates the changes are worth between $28 million and $50 million over ten years, a range wide enough to suggest the exact saving is, like the previous inspection regime, somewhat theoretical.

None of this required new solar panels, new subsidies, or a single additional watt of sunshine. It required the Government noticing it had spent years standing on people’s roofs asking to see paperwork, and stepping down. The pun remains available for reuse the next time a ministry discovers that doing less was also an option.