OPINION:
It was through careful choreography that Alan Sutherland arrived at the Auckland studio of TVNZ one Sunday morning last June to talk about New Zealand’s three waters reforms.
It took the work of four consultants and a Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) staffer to pitch the Scotsman to the producers of Q+A as an interview candidate, then to supply a suitable background briefing and a suggested line of questioning for their man, and finally to prep Sutherland and shape his thoughts into key messages along with a technique for getting them across in his 10 minutes with TVNZ’s host Jack Tame.
Sutherland is the head of WICS, Scotland’s economic regulator for water services, a public entity which has a profitable sideline in consulting internationally. Over the last two years, he’s led a substantial piece of Three Waters consulting work to New Zealand’s DIA. Two million dollars’ worth, in fact.
For much of that time, the DIA’s Three Waters communications meetings, salted with external consultants from PR firm SenateSHJ, consultancy MartinJenkins and others, repeatedly prioritised identifying “champions” - proponents of the Government’s contentious plan to centralise and reform the delivery of drinking, storm and waste water - and priming them to speak up.
In that vein Sutherland had already proved helpful. He authored an op-ed in 2021 which DIA’s communications team arranged to place in the Herald, and also, in shortened form, in various of Stuff’s city papers and on its website.
And when Sutherland made a trip to New Zealand in June 2022, primarily to contribute to Three Waters pricing and charging work, it was the idea of Nick Davis, partner at MartinJenkins, to “offer access to [Sutherland] to select media”, emails released by DIA under the provisions of the OIA show.
Sutherland’s views, as far as they go, are interesting. He’s had a decades-long involvement in his own country’s water services reforms, and he’s a proponent of economies of scale in the sector and of the professionalisation of management that scale can enable. New Zealand’s plan, informed by WICS modelling, also aims to achieve scale, through transferring the water assets of 67 different councils to just four Water Services Entities.
However, Sutherland avoids talking about the thorny question of Māori co-governance, a sharing of control between local councils and Māori at the board appointment level of the planned new water entities. And more importantly, what this complicated shared control and its competing priorities for management might mean for water entities that are highly leveraged and indebted to bond holders (the entities are anticipated to carry a minimum of 7x debt to Ebitda).
Though Sutherland and DIA don’t much mention it, this aspect of the New Zealand plan contrasts conspicuously with the path taken in Scotland, where Scottish Water (that country’s water services provider) is funded by the Scottish Treasury.
The problem for the New Zealand public is not that Sutherland is promoting Three Waters reform or describing the Scottish experience. It is, rather, the expensive publicly funded PR machine that is organising, amplifying and manoeuvring figures like Sutherland. And while that machine is forthcoming, even noisy, on the points around water reform that it wishes to underscore, it is often resoundingly silent on those that it wishes to avoid.
The manoeuvring around the Q+A interview is a small window on how the DIA communications budget - which in June had recently been topped up - was being spent.
Just two months before, in April, the Cabinet agreed to dip into the Covid Response and Recovery Fund and (not for the first time) use money that was originally appropriated for Three Waters infrastructure for, among other things, communications.
That decision flushed a further $21.242m for “policy advice, legislation, and ministerial services … and the most urgent communications activities” into DIA’s Three Waters coffers.
And at that point Senate had been paid some $616,000 for just eight months’ work to the end of February, 2022. And the value of MartinJenkins’ Three Waters contracts, from September 2020 through March 2022, topped $3m according to the Government’s GETS procurement system. The estimated tally for both firms has risen considerably since then.
Sutherland was accompanied to the TVNZ studio by “minder” and Senate partner Robert Mannion. And in his head, if not his hand, Sutherland carried with him a “Q&A message house”, also produced by Senate.
Mannion put the “message house” together a few days before the interview, following what appears to be direct work with Sutherland as well as a wider meeting within the communications group to prepare for the interview.
The wider meeting was attended by Davis, Raphael Hilbron and Mannion, both partners at Senate, Adam Bennett of DIA and Sutherland. At earlier points in the process Senate consultant Emma Ward was also involved.
The “message house” is a simple form: the top, or roof, sets out a main theme or idea. Below that sit the pillars, comprised of key messages to support that main theme. And below this are the foundations, made up of more detailed points and information to support the messages.
The message house Senate produced for Sutherland shows that the PR team hoped to keep the interview organised around one central idea: “Our experience of water reform in Scotland has been very positive”.
Its key messages were respectively: “you [New Zealand] look like you are where we were when we started”; “water reform in Scotland has brought big gains in water quality and costs savings”; and “there is a long way to go but we have found investing in the right things pays off”.
In emailing it out Mannion wrote: “It aims to provide a map of key points to steer by during an interview…
“If you are given a broad opening question, where you get to say whatever you want, you could use this to start with the point in the top pyramid and then work your way through the three main pillars from left to right. This means you set out your position clearly at the outset.
“In framing a reply to a question you can both address it and then ‘bridge’ to the key point you see as relevant in the message house.”
Now, none of this is remarkable in the marketing and communications world of pitching brands, shaping narratives and scripting messages and where “effective” communications are often aimed at avoiding the long weeds of difficult or contentious subjects.
That it is a good use of public money, however, and moreover of money originating in an emergency contingency fund for responding to and recovering from Covid-19, is certainly in doubt.
It is notable that co-governance was not a topic that Sutherland broached; this too was by design.
In email and phone exchanges with the TVNZ producer, Bennett provided both background on Sutherland and a suggested line of questioning. He also obtained potential question lines from TVNZ and shared them with Sutherland and the other consultants.
“The producers have also indicated they are very interested in co-governance - one of the hot issues around reform right now. I’ve told them you [Alan] are not best placed to comment on that, that it’s a matter for the Government. Nevertheless the interviewer Jack may ask questions anyway,” Bennett wrote to the group in the week before the interview.
In the event Tame stuck largely to Sutherland’s well-trodden account of the Scottish experience. He asked about criticism that had been levelled at WICS’ work by New Zealand-based consultants at Castalia, and made brief mention of co-governance, which was brushed aside by Sutherland as a matter for New Zealanders to decide.
Speaking to the Herald in late December Tame said that Q+A is very sceptical of everyone who comes on the show, and is always careful to get input from a range of voices, including dissenting views, on any issue before writing questions. Before the Sutherland interview, for example, he said producers spoke at length with a consultant from Castalia.
It’s also relevant that other Q+A interviews have asked pointed questions about co-governance of others, well placed to answer them, including Minister for Māori Development Willie Jackson and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Opposition National Party spokesman for Local Government and Three Waters critic Simon Watts has also been on the show recently.
Ultimately, Sutherland is not among Tame’s notable interviews, but the DIA team loved it. “A calm, credible and reassuring performance” Bennett enthused to the group. “It was excellent,” Davis responded, “Hamiora [Bowkett, executive director of the Three Waters reform programme] saw it and agreed. Nice work all.” The interview remains on the department’s website.
'I can imagine people being outraged that TVNZ signed a deal with me.'