Matthew Hooton has over 30 years’ experience in political and corporate communications and strategy for clients in Australasia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland.
OPINION
Even ministers who held senior roles during the Key-English andArdern-Peters Governments are shocked at how politicised, obsequious and intellectually timid the Wellington bureaucracy has become.
In mid-2018, the Ardern Government’s strategists said the same, but failed to fix it.
Returning fire, mandarins bleat that Luxon’s is the third consecutive Government elected with little more than bullet points written by focus groups and social media consultants.
Old-timers reminisce about previous prime ministers and finance ministers showing up and agreeing to read the briefing notes to the incoming government only after departments had finished advising on the implementation of their parties’ immediate post-election economic strategies.
Today’s ministers would be even more justified taking that approach, since those official briefing notes are now so dumbed-down they are barely worth reading anyway.
The bureaucracy must adjust to the new reality.
The days of Oppositions researching new policy rather than making TikTok videos are long gone. MMP means they have to compromise to win power anyway. Better just to get elected and work out a programme later. Ministers expect the public service to help, as it did after 1935 and 1984.
Instead, ministers say that asking senior officials for new ideas to lift productivity or anything else generates blank stares.
When junior officials blurt out something innovative in front of ministers, their superiors ensure they never again darken the Beehive’s door.
Worse, ministers say that when seeking advice on their own policy proposals or those from academic think-tanks or the private sector, the bureaucrats mainly assess political risks rather than analysing the proposal’s likely effects and how it might be implemented.
Exasperated ministers say they trust the political insights from their own polling operations over the reckons of Wellington officials.
Nor is it constitutionally wholesome for officials to focus on political risk, as opposed to recommending and analysing policy options freely, frankly, and fearlessly.
Treasury ministers with experience in National and Labour Governments say what was once the most respected and powerful department – known for pushing policy boundaries and sometimes making ministers’ lives a misery – now seems more Kaikohe bookkeeper than world-class think-tank.
That’s why the last three Governments have resorted to working groups. Senior mandarins should have got the message by now.
Ministers want Treasury and other top departments to return to telling them things they haven’t thought of and don’t necessarily want to hear – and leave political fretting to the Beehive.
This 2016 photo shows former Prime Minister John Key at the City Rail Link offices with former Auckland Transport chairman Lester Levy (left), former Auckland Central MP Nikki Kaye and then Rail Constructability Manager Rob French. Photo / Jason Oxenham
In parallel, officials focusing on political risks means spending-ministers are overwhelmed with reports about $10 million problems in schools, hospitals or housing projects. Massive multibillion-dollar challenges – let alone the productivity crisis – are apparently too overwhelming to think about.
Advice to deal with disasters like the health cost blowout tends to focus on the immediate political risks and moving desks around Wellington.
An unexpected $1.4 billion deficit is a worry, but ministers want to be challenged with ideas to address the system’s unsustainable cost trajectory from the ageing population and medical advances, which successive ministers and bureaucrats have known about for decades but ignored.
Bringing in has-beens or Key-era septuagenarians is hardly an answer. They’re responsible for not acting in the first place.
Ministers want blue-sky advice on tackling deep problems like the fast-approaching choice between fiscal or healthcare disaster. Sacking middle managers in Wellington – while welcome and a useful soundbite – ultimately makes no material difference.
At the least, officials should advise on the pros and cons of implementing something like Australia’s Medicare, so that health revenue rises automatically with wages and thus roughly tracks inflation and GDP.
More radically, what happened to “never waste a crisis”? The health blowout could be used to ask if we should have just two big advanced-care hospitals in New Zealand – in Auckland and Christchurch – with world-class 24/7 air-ambulance services from the regions.
Likewise, health, education and finance ministers should be able to rely on officials advising bluntly that Waikato University’s proposed start-up medical school is a waste of money and will deliver fewer doctors than more cheaply expanding the existing world-class schools. The worry is officials instead second-guessing how that would be received by National Party HQ.
Willis is fully aware she needs to finish this year’s initial subcutaneous cuts and then start freeing the healthier organs of the state from the visceral fat preventing them operating effectively
The wider fiscal crisis surely licenses Treasury to argue huge bureaucracies like the Tertiary Education Commission and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise offer no value and that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment is not just bloated and inefficient but has undermined the principle of ministers receiving contestable advice.
Vast overstaffing throughout the Wellington bureaucracy – of which only the most obvious fat has yet been cut – has slowed down policymaking and implementation rather than sped them up. As both Finance and Public Services Minister, Nicola Willis is fully aware she needs to finish this year’s initial subcutaneous cuts and then start freeing the healthier organs of the state from the visceral fat preventing them operating effectively.
With the top jobs at the Public Service Commission and Treasury vacant, Willis might also consider whether the former – responsible for the bureaucracy’s decline this century – should be abolished, and its functions moved to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, including the Cabinet Office, as in the United Kingdom.
Finance Minister Nicola Willis with (from left) Christopher Luxon, Chris Bishop, Shane Jones, David Seymour and Winston Peters, on the way to the House for the reading of Budget 2024. Photo / Mark Mitchell
That risks prime ministers being too powerful. But at least the head of the public service would work directly with the Prime Minister and sit around the Cabinet table, and so be better attuned to organising the bureaucracy to deliver governments’ goals.
Politicians and bureaucrats deserve most blame for the public service degenerating from lean world-class think-tank to bloated fourth-rate public-relations firm.
The no-surprises rule, which began requiring officials just to advise ministers of operational decisions, has been abused by successive governments to give the Beehive an only marginally legal veto over those decisions, one often exercised by ministerial advisers straight out of Young Labour or the Young Nats.
Some media deserve blame for no longer reporting “minister over-rules officials” as evidence ministers are doing their jobs and officials’ advice is truly free, frank, and fearless, but as somehow scandalous.
The young ministerial advisers thus feel incentivised to stop such advice reaching their political masters.
The median voter also deserves some blame, preferring parties offering the status quo with a $20-a-week cherry on top.
The good news is that the Beehive reports its polling now shows greater public demand or at least acceptance of radical change than since the early 1990s.
Luxon and Willis and their coalition partners have a chance to use it or lose it.
