Former top bureaucrat Ian Fletcher examines the various types of public service in NZ, and identifies where improvements need to be made.
One of the things I say regularly is that the government system in New Zealand is too centralised, and that its default under pressure is to opt for even more centralisation. This month I thought I should unpack that a bit.
The challenges we face as a country include both a dysfunctional public service and serious dysfunction in what’s sometimes grandly called the ‘public realm’ – politics plus media plus academic debate. It’s the space where we collectively think about what’s going on and what we might do to chart out future. It’s a process now overwhelmingly dominated by social media, which is foreign-controlled, centralised, and driven by algorithms that prioritise both reinforcing prejudice, and serving up scandal and controversy. That’s for another day.
The public service first. The public service does three different things. One is to deliver routine services to the public, like birth certificates, driver’s licences, routine benefits, land transfers and so on. We can see from other countries that this can be largely digitised, and designed around the user. We’re not bad at that; we can surely do better. But it’s a process we can tackle incrementally.
The second is dealing with people who face situations that require individual attention. They might be involved in the justice system, or perhaps require social housing. But the big one is health. Everyone entering the health system wants to be special and to receive individual care (although no one wants to be a medical mystery). The same is true of the justice system, Oranga Tamariki’s systems, social housing and so on.
These are all case-based systems, requiring potentially life-changing judgements that combine real, professional expertise with attention to the individual, all done against the clock. These are necessarily complex systems, all depending on making rare expert skills available at the point of delivery. As we can see from health, they don’t respond to command very easily, and they have complex internal cultures that sometimes defy comprehension. Politicians are bad at manging them, because politicians don’t like thinking about systems where simple answers don’t work.
Education is a special case here, because schools impart values and culture as well as skills. Culture shapes future politics. So, the politics of education are very intense. Another topic for another day.
The third thing the public service does is grandly called ‘policy’. That’s thinking about what might be done, in the future, to achieve whatever changes in law or society the government wants.
Here we are especially bad. The senior public service culture is inward looking, complacent and resists new ideas. As I have said, senior officials are often not pushing up to the CEO level, and some of the CEO group have been around, perhaps, too long. The new public service Commissioner (Sir Brian Roche) has, it seems, turned to this older group for ideas, which are unlikely to be new, and which won’t challenge what I’m told is a culture of excessive intimacy, and reluctance to disagree. The top echelon has generally lived in Wellington for much of their careers, and so has limited real insight to life in a country that is actually big and diverse, although with a small population. The result is a lack of both imagination and empathy.
That’s at the top. Further down the system is just fundamentally wrong. The issue that no-one has tackled is the basis of employment. Ideally you want a service that is able to be re-shaped and redeployed as priorities change. It also should be one where investment in training and development is recouped through successive successful deployments as staff mature through a career. Finally, it should involve a balance - Wellington policy work matched with a stint running WINZ in Gore, for example.
However, the current system just doesn’t allow any of this. It attaches people rigidly to current jobs, and so to the current structure. This forces traumatic restructuring processes when all you want is a bit of downsizing and redeployment. The result is Ministers get time-servers, good people get badly handled, no-one gets the development they need, and the whole system is frustrating for everyone. Watching – as we all have – Ministry for Primary Industries staff resist feedback on their mistakes is frustrating, and damaging.
That means the results - both policy and delivery - are not very good. It’s hard to build and deploy the deep expertise we need if these rigidities mean skills get cut up into small packets, and people actively resist learning from mistakes. We need to be able to move people across departmental boundaries and between jobs if we want to keep them. And we need a fair but firm performance management system to shed the people who just don’t fit.
In short, we need a policy service, run as a service, giving great service to Ministers and thus consistently good service to the public. Sadly, I see no sign that this issue is part of any agenda. Once again we (and public servants themselves) wait for a crisis before things change. So, we have fatalism, complacency and a naïve hope that something will turn up. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Ian Fletcher is a former head of New Zealand’s security agency, the GCSB, chief executive of the UK Patents Office, free trade negotiator with the European Commission and biosecurity expert for the Queensland government. These days he is a commercial flower grower in the Wairarapa and consultant to the apiculture industry with NZ Beekeeping Inc.
Comments