KEY POINTS:
Cabinet Minister Jim Anderton spoke the truth this week in the wake of the Setchell affair. "The role of communications advisers has developed to be very different from what it might have been in the past because it increasingly involves communications strategy [and sometimes highly political strategy] rather
than mere reporting," he said.
What that means is that the public service (or an important chunk of it) is no longer neutral and is, by its nature, a political tool.
Government department spin doctors are highly political critters whose job is to do their masters' bidding. Once upon a time, in true Yes Minister fashion, press secretaries were regarded as being largely independent of the nasty grubby political motives that drove their ministers. Not anymore following the Setchell affair.
To quickly summarise the cock-up: Madeleine Setchell was sacked as communications manager at the Ministry for the Environment because the minister did not like the fact her partner was an adviser to Opposition Leader John Key.
Climate Change Minister David Parker then suggested Labour Party activist and now Labour Party Council member Clare Curran be hired on contract as a communications adviser.
Worse for Setchell, she then canvassed the idea of returning to her old job at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. Minister Jim Anderton said he would be "uncomfortable" with that and another departmental door was slammed in her face.
The Hunn report, which investigated the affair, found top public servants and ministers were colluding over who could and could not be hired as spin doctors.
For the past decade, public service communications roles have been anything but neutral. Ministerial and departmental communications people have become highly partisan mouthpieces for their bosses. Their role is to put the best possible gloss on anything the Government does and combat negative publicity generated by the Opposition and interest groups.
It's no accident that the number of press officers, communications advisers, and public relations consultants who work for the Government far outweighs the number of journalists in the country.
Back in the 90s Helen Clark learned quickly from Tony Blair's juggernaut of a prime ministerial media machine that the best way to stay in power was to ensure there was a tightly managed communications strategy flowing out of all of Government, exclusively designed to show her administration in the best possible light.
Her own staff co-ordinate not only all the press secretaries in the Beehive but manage the strategy for virtually every word that comes out of every department and agency of state.
The ministerial "No Surprises" policy ensures Government organisations give early warning of any nasty problem and the Beehive equivalent of a Swat team of spin doctors is assembled to contain the situation. Inter-departmental committees work below the surface coordinating the release of inform- ation to paint the Government in the best possible light. If the Opposition scores a hit and the Government is taking a battering on one front, it can drop some good news on an unrelated issue to take the heat off.
Also, it coordinates multi-million-dollar departmental publicity campaigns to portray the Government as taking action on virtually any issue worrying voters. Curiously, every election year, these advertising campaigns seem to increase.
If the public is concerned about health issues, the relevant department runs a "public education" campaign about the wonderful advances being made in the health sector.
Worried about your retirement? If the Government's constant polling picks up your concern you bet there will be a campaign to explain to you the glories of the KiwiSaver scheme and how you can benefit from it.
Under pressure from increased mortgage rates, married couples are worrying about how one partner can take time out of work to raise children. So the Government has a nifty early childhood education publicity campaign up its sleeve so it can demonstrate to struggling parents that not only can they offload the kids for several more hours a week but the little ankle-biters might even learn something while the parents are generating desperately needed cash for the household.
That does tend to make a mockery of the Electoral Finance Bill, which will severely restrict spending by Government critics in an election year while allowing Government departments a virtual free hand.
As long as a "public eduction" campaign doesn't blatantly say "Vote Labour" the chances are the Auditor-General will okay the department's publicity spending as non-political.
Isn't it nice how we give the Government hundreds of millions of tax dollars so it can hire publicists to tell us how well it is doing?