Michael Reid: Effective emergency service relies on community trust

The first and most important duty of the state is to provide for the safety of its citizens. It is a basic idea but one of which we seem to be losing sight.

To meet the challenge of external attack the state needs a defence force (with more than pacifist intent), while internally it needs a workable system of law and order to protect citizens' lives and their property.

If the Government is not attending to these twin concerns, whatever else it does is, potentially at least, in jeopardy. Defence issues warrant separate comment, but I want to focus on law and order and, more specifically, the report into the police emergency response system.

The safety of the public and frontline police was at risk, the independent reviewers concluded, from an inadequate 111 system.

Set against the ongoing Doone affair, allegations that serious crime is being overlooked at the expense of traffic policing, and the incompetence of Police Minister George Hawkins, it is hardly a good look for the Government.

But more important than the media spin, the political ramifications and the claim and counter-claim is the critical issue of confidence; or rather, a lack of it.

The $45 million the Government has pledged to fix the fiasco may deal with technical glitches but regaining citizen confidence is altogether more difficult and is not a function of more money.

The degree of centralisation we see across the public services creates both real and psychological distance and related problems between those providing the services and those requesting them.

It is simply not good enough that if I live in a rural area and ring 111, the call is answered by a centralised controller hundreds of kilometres away. Local knowledge is essential if I am to receive appropriate help and promptly.

Sure, computer maps can locate specific reference points quickly, but there is no substitute for on-the-ground local knowledge, which, for instance, knows which roads are best under certain conditions and the time needed to traverse them.

In many instances the people staffing the services will be volunteers and may know the person concerned and their medical needs.

The mere thought that someone so far away is trying to help is disconcerting enough but, as in the Iraena Asher case, to be told that a taxi is being dispatched - to the wrong address - is totally unacceptable.

In a civil society, trust should be both essential and seen as the norm. We rely on it in relationships, business dealings and in the public service.

Citizens are people who have entered into a social contract with the state. They pledge to live by the laws of the land and pay taxes and, for its part, the state works to maintain their democratic freedoms and deliver effective services of law and order.

This is in everyone's interest because the state can then go about its everyday business of making laws and justly enforcing them, and citizens can live their lives in reasonable assurance that their person and property will, as much as is reasonably possible, be protected.

When an ethic of trust and responsibility is present in local communities, they by and large work to maintain good order with minimal help from state agencies.

The 18th-century statesman and writer, Edmund Burke, realised this when he spoke of the "little platoons" that underpin social order; they were the glue that kept people honest and accountable to each other. And they did this precisely because those in small communities have to interact with each other all the time.

The problem with centralisation and an ever-expanding state is that the dynamic of local communities is either diminished or usurped completely. This is what we've seen with the 111 service.

Centralisation undermines the confidence and self-reliance of local communities by embracing a more bureaucratic-minded service delivery ethos. This might satisfy bean-counters sitting in a Wellington high-rise as being more efficient, but the reality is that the state is failing in one of its main duties.

The other inevitability is that direct accountability becomes diffuse and ill-defined. The systems and structures are far removed from local communities and so no one is prepared to honourably fall on their sword when things go wrong.

Mr Hawkins blames a lack of resourcing and money, while the Police Commissioner, Rob Robinson, is forced to eat humble pie, but that will be the end of it. Centralisation of state services makes it easy to either blame someone else or, more usually, the system.

The situation facing the 111 emergency system represents the worst of both right and left-wing philosophies of government.

The market rhetoric that first underpinned the state-sector reforms in the late 1980s remains all too convenient in allowing bureaucrats to blame someone else or a system error, while the present left-wing Administration's love affair with centralisation and unbridled state control of just about everything have combined to make even the concept of public service laughable.

Its solution? More money and better systems.

But all most of us want is a public service worthy of the name, real accountability and, most of all, an effective emergency service - one rooted in local communities and trust.

* Dr Michael Reid is a researcher and writer for the Maxim Institute, a social policy research organisation.