OPINION
When oppositions demand that governments apologise or sack someone, they don’t really want it to happen. They hope the government will dither or dig in, so they can point to its moral vacuum.
Chris Hipkins’ biggest misstep since becoming Prime Minister was dismissing community claims of a crime wave in Hawke’s Bay after Cyclone Gabrielle. Foolishly for any elected official, he apparently took seriously the police bureaucracy’s immediate advice that the community was making it up.
Having learned they weren’t, Hipkins was not about to repeat his 2021 failure to apologise to Charlotte Bellis, the pregnant New Zealander forced to seek refuge with the Taliban.
Under the bus went Police Commissioner Andrew Coster, forced to apologise to Hipkins for the faulty advice and failure to apprehend the thugs who threatened roadworkers with guns, and to admit police hadn’t reassured the Hawke’s Bay community they would be safe.
To the delight of a public that can’t remember when a prime minister last said sorry for anything, Hipkins didn’t just apologise for the information he passed on to the public being wrong. More importantly, he apologised for himself dismissing what the people were saying by parroting the police bureaucracy’s inaccurate brief.
Siding with the people over the bureaucracy is not cheap populism. It is what democratic government is about. We elect ordinary citizens to Parliament and see them rise to Cabinet or the very top job not so they can become PR spokespeople for the Wellington mandarins. As elected officials, they are meant to be our eyes and ears overseeing the activities and performance of Wellington’s unelected elite.
The reason elected officials should spend at least half their time out in the community is not just to generate photo ops for the local media. They are meant to be inspecting how government policies and operations are being experienced on the ground.
When you tell, say, the Minister of Finance how some regulation is harming your business, the idea is not that he puts on his serious-concerned face and nods along for the cameras. A private secretary is meant to take notes, raise your experience with the bureaucracy and then try to reconcile the inevitable chasm between the initial fob-off and the correct account.
At the very least, governments should recognise that, if their market research indicates public anger about, say, mental health, this might mean something is wrong at the Ministry of Health, rather than that grassroots counsellors are incompetent or lazy and users of their services ungrateful or unreasonable.
Too many recent prime ministers, ministers and Beehive staff have been either unable or unwilling to carry out this role. Their own incompetence or laziness has led them to prefer the company of obsequious bureaucrats over what they have come to perceive as a whingeing public. At that point, they have become part of the blob they are meant to make more effective, efficient and accountable, and should be voted out.
Hipkins’ initial response to crime in Hawke’s Bay put him on the wrong side of that threshold. His apology returns him safely to the other.
Similarly, and almost certainly differently from Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister had no interest in defending Rob Campbell, the wayward chair of Health New Zealand and the Environmental Protection Agency, and also Chancellor of AUT.
His sackings were in the names of Health Minister Ayesha Verrall and Environment Minister David Parker, but few think they would have happened were Ardern still in charge.
Campbell’s sin seems minor. On social media, ordinary citizens have the right to call a senior political figure racist or ludicrously woke or whatever we want, whenever we feel like it. Sacking Campbell has no implications for what doctors, nurses, orderlies or other ordinary health workers are allowed to say on Facebook or Twitter. But heads of important government agencies can’t engage in political banter and keep their jobs.
To its credit, Hipkins’ Government moved against Campbell when his target was the Leader of the Opposition. The fact that Campbell then turned his sights on the Government underlined that it was the right decision.
Campbell should be safe at AUT. One of a university’s most important roles is critiquing society, especially its political leadership. More rather than less of that is welcome after the academic cheerleading for government over the past five years.
If Hipkins genuinely wants a bureaucracy that is politically neutral and able to maintain the confidence not just of governments but also oppositions and the public, Campbell’s swift despatch is only a first step.
The PM should get rid of the hordes of “ministerial advisers” who have taken over the Beehive during the past quarter-century and are usually just young party hacks. A handful are needed and the dark arts will always be part of politics, but ministers should mostly be able to take care of that themselves. The ministerial advisers should be replaced by genuine experts who can work on an equal footing with private secretaries and senior bureaucrats.
Hipkins should abolish the “no surprises” rule or at least restore its original purpose, for the Beehive to get a day or two’s notice of those decisions which Parliament has decided should be made elsewhere.
Successive governments have increasingly abused the rule, with ministers using it to delay or reverse decisions which the law, rightly or wrongly, requires be made independently from the Beehive.
If senior bureaucrats are not to be reflexively protected by prime ministers and be required to be genuinely political neutral — and rightly so — then the Beehive has a corresponding obligation not to interfere in matters that are properly the bureaucracy’s responsibility.
That includes the Official Information Act. Hipkins should order ministers and bureaucrats to start obeying the law, which requires information to be publicly released “as soon as reasonably practicable, and in any case not later than 20 working days after the day on which the request is received”.
This is routinely ignored, with officials waiting 20 days before denying the request or waiting for political staff to decide when information should be made public. If officials have collated the information sufficiently to send to their political masters, then it is “reasonably practicable” to send it to whoever asked for it at the same time.
None of this will be among even the top 50 issues that concern voters. But, after a quarter-century of falling standards, if Hipkins proves genuinely interested in restoring integrity to government — or even just basic respect for the law — then that alone would be enough to warrant his re-election.
- Matthew Hooton is an Auckland-based political and public affairs strategist. His clients have included the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland.
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