On a Tuesday evening, when John Key was National Prime Minister, a small group of ministers would regularly traipse into Steven Joyce's Beehive office at 9 pm, be given a glass of wine, and talk about a prickly issue of the day, future priorities and private polling.
It was the group every Prime Minister forms, known as the kitchen cabinet, and as well as Key's trusted ministers, his chief of staff, Wayne Eagleson would often attend.
Such informal groupings are not part of the recognised public-policy process but as the people most trusted by the Prime Minister, they have immense influence on which problems will be given top priority and how they will be handled.
"From time to time a minister from outside this small leadership group would ask for a few minutes to come in and tease out particular issues," Eagleson writes in a new book on public policy making.
Eagleson's proximity to politics, power and the policy process makes his one of the most fascinating of 20 contributors to the book, Policy-Making Under Pressure: Rethinking the policy process in Aotearoa New Zealand (Canterbury University Press).
Its editors, adjunct professors Sonia Mazey and Jeremy Richardson of Canterbury University, offer a series of recommendations for better quality public policy including allowing ministers to be appointed from outside Parliament, establishing policy commissions, and a four-year term.
"We are worried about the quality of ministers because the pool of talent from which the Prime Minister has to choose his or her Government is very, very small indeed," says Richardson.
"No multinational company, no big company would be run along those lines."
"It is time for some radical change."
Eagleson, as well, points out the limitations.
"Unlike in a corporate environment where there is a wide talent pool, or in the United Kingdom where a new minister can be brought from the outside world into the House of Lords, in New Zealand the prime minister has to select around 20 to 24 ministers from a caucus compris ing little more than 50 people.
"This is not easy, especially when factors such as regional spread, diversity and party-political considerations are taken into account. We regard this as normal, yet, on reflection, it is an odd way to run New Zealand Inc."
It is clear from Eagleson's experience that political management of major policy changes is crucial to their success, especially in coalition Governments.
As Key's trusted gatekeeper, Eagleson met with the deputy secretary of cabinet each Thursday afternoon to go over the draft agenda of the Monday cabinet meeting.
He would be looking for three things: papers that Key had not been adequately consulted on, papers that had significant political management issues that the Prime Minister's Office had not been alerted to, and papers that might be of interest to National's partner parties (Act, United Future and the Maori Party), that they hadn't been adequately consulted on.
"If there were papers that met one or more of these criteria, I would have them pulled from the agenda."
Eagleson also revealed other secrets to Key's political management, following advice from former Australian Prime Minister John Howard to make catching up with backbench MPs a priority.
Every Wednesday when Parliament was sitting, he would set aside 9 pm to 10.30 pm for meetings with individual MPs, who typically got to spend 15 to 20 minutes with him.
And according to Eagleson, because they knew they could meet their leader to discuss any issue with him, they rarely raised difficult issues in the wider forum of the weekly caucus.
He says the toughest issue he encountered was asking the Maori Party to support the increase of gst in the 2009 Budget (a confidence and supply issue which also lowered some tax) when it had campaigned on abolishing gst on fruit and vegetables.
"This could have been a breaking point in the relationship," he writes.
But the mutual respect between the two parties' leadership kept it on track – and funding for Whanau Ora.
The process was best described as "mutually beneficial trading."
Eagleson was a political appointee but another valuable insider's voice in the book is senior public servant Anneliese Parkin.
As the current deputy chief executive of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet responsible for policy she has had a wealth of experience in seeing how policy is developed between the political system and the public service.
She is very temperate in her expression but relates the tension that sometimes sits between policy advisers, for whom evidence is king, and ministers who necessarily have to consider the voter.
She also says that there can be big differences between Government and within Governments about how policy should be made, and who should be let into the decision-making tent.
Parkin does not expect ministers to simply fall in behind advisers, in fact quite the opposite.
"In my experience the best ministers are those who are comfortable playing a different part in the system than their officials do. Policy practitioners long for ministers who are confident in making decisions - including, if necessary, for political reasons - and who are willing to defend the political elements of those decisions."
Parkin identifies a major weakness in how the public service has developed – too few policy analysts with technical expertise in one area and systems that encourage experts to hop around rather than staying put.
"The remuneration and progression structures in agencies reward the choice of management pathways over the ongoing development of technical expertise.
"Remuneration practices encourage analysts to hop from agency to agency rather than mature in one place."
Neither Eagleson nor Parkin have dished the dirt on what might be called "policy stuff-ups" or incompetents in either the political system or public service.
But there are some widely accepted examples of "stuff-ups" if one includes "public policy" as running the gamut from defining a problem, to developing and implementing solutions for them.
The Kiwibuild policy to build 100,000 houses in 10 years is the obvious poster-child of failures in the current Government. Labour would probably argue that the previous National Government saw failures in climate and environment policy with degradation of waterways and increasing emissions.
And then there are the "wicked problems," entrenched issues such poverty, housing affordability and inequality that successive Government face.
Former Prime Minister Bill English has chapter on what he calls "feedback thinking," which sums up his experience in trying to tackle some of the "wicked problems."
He says "feedback thinking" is the re-working of policies in response to hard evidence measured during their implementation – which sounds like a better way of describing his "social investment" approach.
He also sets out the case for setting targets in the public service focused on results - while keeping an eye on perverse results or unintended consequences.
"Results subvert the deep urge of monopoly providers to restructure as a substitute for better performance."
Former Labour minister and outgoing Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel is one of the contributors, as is former cabinet colleague David Cunliffe, and policy players outside politics such as Rod Carr, who heads the Climate Commission, Kirk Hope of Business NZ, David Smyth, chief of medicine at Christchurch Hospital, and Lisa Tumahai, the kaiwhakahaere of Ngai Tahu.
Mazy and Richardson acknowledge that they have a real-time example of public policy playing out around the world in terms of the response to Covid-19.
New Zealand fared well initially, they said.
New Zealand had been rightly lauded around the world for decisive leadership last year but it had failed to then leverage off the early advantage by planning ahead and anticipate Delta, said Mazey.
It was slow in getting vaccines, did not get groups such as GPs and iwi on board soon enough and was woefully under-prepared for their roll-out.
"It has been really a game of two halves," says Richardson. "The first half of the match, we played an absolute blinder but in the second half, the wheels have started falling off."
He cited the "daft" example of regulating when people could leave Auckland, which Covid-19 Response Minister had floated when neither Police not the NZ Transport Agency had been consulted.
"To get better public policy, you need a lot of consultation with affected interests, people who know where the shoe pinches."
• Policy-making Under Pressure: Rethinking the policy process in Aotearoa New Zealand Edited by Sonia Mazey and Jeremy Richardson, Canterbury University Press. $49.99
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