Obituary: Peter Boag

Peter Boag

* Peter Boag, public servant. Died aged 76.

When Peter Boag retired as head of the Internal Affairs Department in 1990, he admitted to being the "last of a dying breed" - the career public servant at the top of his profession.

But his own arrival in the public service as director of secondary education in the Department of Education caused a stir - an outsider penetrating the civil service.

He arrived after being president and, from 1965, general secretary of the PPTA.

With a background of teaching at Mt Roskill Grammar and Kaitaia College, the union man arrived with a different perspective. On planting his feet under the employers' side of the desk, however, he observed diplomatically that any disagreement he had with the department as head of the PPTA in the past was about the speed with which things were done.

"The department and association were working towards the same goals," he said, "but it is not always possible for teachers to appreciate the slowness at which administrative machinery must sometimes work."

In his subsequent career he passed through several departments from education, State Devices and the Treasury, well involved with the issues of the time.

Some of his public utterances over the years, certainly while in education, suggested discontent with progress. Just before he moved across from the PPTA in 1973, he was advocating special staffing and financial allocations for Maori education, suggesting New Zealand seemed "content to continue to offer a system of education to Maori that seems to do no more than turn out first-class bulldozer drivers".

And in 1977 he suggested that the high proportions of Maori pupils who played truant, and of Maori in penal institutions, was a symptom of the failure in education.

He was keen for further education of mothers to help them work later in life. And in 1979 he criticised the then School Certificate examination for fifth formers:

"It is a very limited form of assessment. A mark out of 100 in four or five subjects shows nothing about a person except his or her ability to sit examinations. A prospective employer cannot tell whether a person is conscientious from a mark, or whether the mark was above or below expectations."

As State Services Commissioner in 1981 he pushed for better government multicultural employment.

"With only 4 to 5 per cent of people in the public service with a Maori or Pacific Islands background, better representation has a long way to go."

The public service experienced turbulent change during much of the last 17 years of his career to 1990. The shakeups included opening up more jobs for women and greater awareness of public needs. Traditionally the public service had been a male preserve.

"In many ways it still is, especially in the upper levels where you find a depressingly large number of males."

An officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, he is survived by his wife, Elisabeth, and three sons.