Pattrick Smellie: The government's culture of indecision

New Zealand First's Winston Peters, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw from the Green Party. Photo / File

COMMENT:

One of the clearest messages from this year's Herald Mood of the Boardroom survey of executive sentiment was frustration with the government's ability to execute policy.

It's a theme heard repeatedly from senior business leaders: that for all the honeyed words and excuses about the challenges of coalition management, this is not a government that's good at getting stuff done.

As if on cue, it emerged yesterday that another key element of climate change policy – how to bring farmers into the emissions trading scheme – is bogged down in a Cabinet committee.

Decisions that had been expected to go to Cabinet this week never made it.

"This happens quite a lot where you've got a difficult issue that ministers will continue to talk about it until you get a resolution," Climate Change Minister James Shaw.

You don't say.

The most evenly balanced coalition government since MMP elections began in 1996 is testing to the limits the decision-making processes that have developed since then.

These processes are not just creatures of each government, but also of the bureaucracy that serves them. Protocols for consultation among coalition partners have produced a small army of people whose job it is to make sure that when a Labour minister says one thing, a NZ First minister doesn't get a surprise.

While it often seems the Greens' main job is to be either surprised or disappointed by whatever Labour and NZ First have cooked up, they are also part of this often ungainly and self-perpetuating decision-making loop.

Where governments would rather look out to their impact on the public, these processes require them to spend serious resource looking inward at their own internal relationships.

Apologists will call it the price of coalition government, and of course they're right. We voted for this precisely because small executives in the previous generation had implemented so much policy, so fast, with the permission of so few.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern can probably recite in her sleep her speech about how this government is determined to take people with it, rather than trample them with a rush of unanticipated reform as happened under Labour in the 1980s.

Dealing with housing unaffordability and traffic congestion have proven no easier for this government than the last. Photo / File

Under the National Party-led coalitions of the 2010s, the partner parties were too small to wield significant influence outside a few key areas. And the Labour-led coalitions of the Helen Clark era benefited from the leadership of a determined technocrat who inspired fear and respect in equal measure.

Whatever Ardern inspires, it's not fear. In the real world, that is to her personal credit and is part of her political appeal. But there's no sense that her personable leadership style helps when the policy going gets tough.

Government supporters will also justifiably point to the scale of this administration's ambitions. Rhetorically, it is a government of transformational change and practically, it has inherited some big messes.

Actually doing something about climate change is hard.

Dealing with housing unaffordability and traffic congestion have proven no easier for this government than the last and Phil Twyford has his shredded warrant for the housing portfolio to show for it.

As to the legislation to fast-track urban regeneration, it's arriving by the parliamentary equivalent of a bullock cart. The fast track powers will barely be inked before Labour is back on the campaign trail.

However, the glacial decision-making processes in the Beehive have an impact that radiates into the public service.

Risk-averse at the best of times and already the 'no-surprises' edict as a licence for caution, public servants can be forgiven for having limited insight into what might emerge from the coalition Cabinet.

Since organisational culture starts at the top, it's no surprise if a culture of indecision flows back down into the ranks of the bureaucracy where there is ample evidence that continuous consultation is rewarded over decision-making and its resulting accountability.

The result is the enemy of all the things the government says it wants for the economy, social outcomes, and the environment: a bias for risk-taking, innovation and action.

A Cabinet that regularly stalls while Labour, Green and NZ First ministers duke it out on policy detail sends a message to the bureaucracy that its advice, never more than an input to political decisions at the best of times, is already of a lower order of significance than in a more decisive administration.

The career-minded public servant cannot be blamed for sitting back and waiting, while letting someone else carry the can if their advice creates blowback.

However, the likelihood of this being an attractive career choice for New Zealand's smartest millennials, however, must surely be very low.