Matthew Hooton: Bureaucracy needs shaking into action

Today’s Beehive is staffed more by cynical political strategists than earnest policy experts. Photo / Mark Mitchell

OPINION:

Ministers can make a difference.

After John Key’s Mr Fixit Steven Joyce was put in charge of Novopay in 2013, it wasn’t too long before it began paying most teachers broadly on time, roughly the right amount.

But the likes of Joyce, Helen Clark’s Michael Cullen, Jim Bolger’s Bill Birch and — to a much lesser extent — Jacinda Ardern’s Chris Hipkins are rare.

In a representative democracy, most MPs will always be a bit average and most ministers not much better. That’s something the structure, rules and personnel of the public service have to take into account.

The Ardern regime’s inability to deliver has become a national joke, with KiwiBuild the punchline.

But the endless failures, especially in sensitive areas of social policy, including mental health, have real-world consequences.

As Newshub’s Imogen Wells revealed this week, just short of a year ago no less than Ardern herself launched a National Strategy and Action Plan to Eliminate Family and Sexual Violence. “As Prime Minister, I take responsibility of lifting the wellbeing of our tamariki and their whānau,” Ardern told the assembled social workers, policy analysts, dignitaries and media called to Te Papa’s Rongomaraeroa for the historic event.

In support of the new strategy, the Government announced a $20 million fund to support victims of non-fatal strangulation. It was meant to fund 870 expert medical witnesses to help the Crown prosecute or secure early guilty pleas from sexual offenders.

In fact, it has been used in only 86 cases. Worse, more than half of those experts ended up being hired by defence lawyers to support not victims, but alleged offenders.

It is difficult to comprehend that any government could be so incompetent as to announce plans to help 870 victims of sexual crime and instead end up helping alleged perpetrators.

When asked about the debacle at an event promoting their hate speech legislation, the Prime Minister said that neither she nor former Justice Minister Andrew Little was responsible.

It seems the Prime Minister only regards herself as responsible for Government programmes when launching them before the TV cameras, not for whether they happen or, in this case, don’t.

Current Justice Minister Kiri Allan blamed Covid for the programme’s failure, cold comfort for the victims of near-fatal strangulation who were meant to be helped.

Another contributing factor is presumably that no one in the Beehive kept the pressure on the bureaucrats with weekly meetings to discuss progress, the way a Joyce, Cullen, Birch or Hipkins might have.

Yet even that explanation is insufficient when talking about a programme designed to help victims of sexual violence that turned out to be more help to alleged offenders.

The State Sector Act 1988 — which Ardern’s Government renamed to the apparently more woke Public Service Act 2020 — was meant to make clear that departmental chief executives were responsible for implementation of their minister’s policies.

If things went wrong, then they were personally accountable, either by missing out on their next pay rise or even being expected to resign.

Accountability has become muddied under this and the previous Government. Reporting lines in Wellington have been deliberately blurred. Inquiries into failed programmes or other misfortunes tend to find that no individual was to blame but that systems could have been better — and that is how the Wellington bureaucracy and political class like it.

In defence of officials, it may be that the original policy was stupid. Perhaps the very idea of 870 expert medical witnesses to help the Crown prosecute or secure early guilty pleas from sexual offenders was ill-advised. And perhaps it — like KiwiBuild — was dreamed up by politicians in the back of a taxi in response to bad polls rather than receiving proper scrutiny.

But if so, officials are meant to give free and frank advice to ministers, telling them their ideas are rubbish.

If they do but ministers still want to proceed, then fair enough — the responsibility lies with the politicians. But today’s bureaucrats aren’t the brave visionaries of the 1930s, 1940s, 1980s and 1990s.

Perhaps as a result of years of Beehive bullying, policy advice released under the Official Information Act reveals a cowed public service, unwilling to challenge their political masters even behind closed doors but more than happy to do whatever it takes to ensure the next announcement of an announcement comes across well on TV.

For all we know, some policy analysts could have wanted to advise ministers that the non-fatal strangulation programme was more likely to help offenders than victims, but were overruled by their superiors focused on not ruffling feathers with the Beehive.

The culture of the perpetual campaign, where the Beehive is staffed more by cynical political strategists than earnest policy experts; the much-abused no-surprises rule, where the Beehive steps in to ensure it is never formally told anything it doesn’t want to hear; and the gotcha culture in elements of the media all encourage cravenness over robust analysis.

The constant growth in the number of privileged middle-class Wellington policy analysts and communications staff seems not to have improved the quality of the public sector’s output.

There is no real reason to think a new National-Act Government would have many more competent ministers than the current hapless bunch, nor that it would be genuinely interested in improving public policy and outcomes as opposed to merely securing its own re-election.

Most likely, the permanent campaign would continue, the bloated bureaucracy would keep focusing on keeping its head down, and whatever equivalents of KiwiBuild, the $1.9 billion for mental health and the non-fatal strangulation programme that National dreams up will go similarly unchallenged and fail just as spectacularly.

Until a new Government takes office that is serious about its own policy agenda, prepared to be challenged by officials without rancour, and committed to holding both ministers and senior officials genuinely accountable, nothing will change. The public will keep paying taxes for programmes that either fail or — worse — do the opposite of what we are promised.

- Matthew Hooton is currently interim head of policy and communications for incoming Auckland mayor Wayne Brown’s office. These views are his own.