By the time you read this a bottle of champagne and bouquet of seasonal blooms will have landed on Conservation Minister Maggie Barry’s desk. It is the least the Initiative could do for someone who has made our lives so easy.

You probably need some backstory to understand why we are also commissioning an oil painting of the famed gardener and National Party stalwart. About a fortnight ago the minister announced that the government was launching a policy to make New Zealand predator free by 2050. The only catch with this laudable programme is that “not all the technology to make New Zealand predator free yet exists”.

Do not scoff at this notion – it is a stroke of pure genius from a policy perspective. Our lives at the Initiative just got immensely easier.

For example, when trying to think through congestion problems in Auckland, just apply a dash of imaginary technology. In fact, the Initiative is about to pitch a teleportation policy brief to Transport Minister Simon Bridges, with the aim of eliminating all cars by 2047 (prime numbers are so Spock).

Sure, the technology is currently confined to television shows like Star Trek, but that is just detail best left to someone else.

We could also slash education spending if we used direct-to-brain information uploads like in the Matrix, and fire all those pesky teachers, principals and administrators.

Yet-to-be-invented technologies are also the solution to agricultural pollution. Minister for Primary Industries Nathan Guy should immediately get his team to draft a white paper on how we can put more cows on the land while simultaneously making all rivers swimmable, drinkable and perhaps even tonic flavoured. Okay, the last one is just ridiculous. We are talking about hypothetical inventions here, not miracles.

The only real downside for the Initiative is what to do with all the time we will have on our hands. It used to be spent delving into reports, interviewing knowledgeable sources, and writing thick but worthy tomes on public policy.

Then again, perhaps we could be constructively put to use inventing teleportation and a cow-poo-to-tonic-water-ray. Or perhaps we could ponder why we didn’t think of this brilliant policy tool in the first place.