Margaret Bazley: Rattler of finely balanced teacups

The powerhouse behind the public service is to step down, as the Government signals a shakeup in its structure. PETER CALDER meets Dame Margaret Bazley.

Some time in the late 1970s, Margaret Bazley was sitting on a high-powered Government committee in Wellington when it broke for lunch.

We may be sure that discretion, rather than a failing of memory, makes her non-specific about which committee it was, but it's safe to assume that it was something to do with health since she was the Director of Nursing at the time.

The other members - all men - headed for a club on The Terrace and, as Bazley made to follow them, one turned and said: "Sorry, Margaret," in a tone that probably wasn't very sorry at all, "but it's men only."

They toddled on. Bazley lunched elsewhere and was waiting in the committee room when they returned.

"I gave them," she says, in a tone so matter-of-fact you can just tell it is a masterpiece of understatement, "chapter and verse."

It is, on several levels, an illustrative story about the woman who will draw the curtain on 45 years of public service on June 30.

For a start, she was unfazed by the snub. "I suppose a lot of women might have got a bit weepy," she says. "I just had them on. That's what I've always done."

Second, she didn't make a scene on the spot. She waited until the time was right and dealt with the matter vigorously, unambiguously, utterly.

Third, she clearly felt - and feels - no malice towards them.

"They didn't know any better," she explains. "They hadn't had to cope with a woman before. When I had them on they were quite embarrassed and they made arrangements to have lunch at the Public Service Club, where women were allowed."

And finally, most tellingly, she protects the men's reputation - even though she thinks they're all dead - by declining to name the committee. A problem confronted is a problem solved, she seems to say. Let's talk no more about it.

If those men had not had to cope with a woman before, they certainly had to before they took turns to shuffle off this mortal coil.

In September 1984, weeks after the Lange Labour Government swept to power, Bazley - who became Dame Margaret in the Queen's Birthday Honours in 1999 - was the first woman appointed to the State Services Commission, the employing authority for public servants.

It might have been the crowning achievement in a career which took her from teenage psychiatric nurse at what was then called the Auckland Mental Hospital through executive nursing positions in Auckland and the Waikato to the country's top nursing job. Indeed in the late 80s, she could have started drawing on her super and settled into comfortable retirement.

But she had bigger challenges to answer. Since then she has taken on the chief executive roles in the commission, and in the Departments of Transport (that appointment made her the first woman to head a major department), Social Welfare and the Fire Service Commission, before finishing up as the head of the Orwellian-sounding Ministry of Social Policy.

The idea was even floated, in 1989, that she might become the police's first civilian commissioner, which must have rattled the teacups at stations up and down the country.

In that time she has developed a reputation as a ruthless and single-minded administrator - the massive job losses that flowed from public service restructuring in her time at the top saw her often described as the Government's chief hatchet woman.

Others call her "hard-faced" or "the Iron Lady" - while allowing that such terms express a grudging admiration (and interestingly, the public service reforms don't seem to have produced any male CEOs who were "hard-faced bastards" or "Iron Men").

Yet equally there are the stories of a chief executive who baked scones for the whole office ("Usually when we'd been working hard and we got a cabinet decision. I had it down to a fine art - scones or pikelets for 100").

But Dame Margaret is prepared - quite literally - to be reminded of the charge when she shows me to a seat in her office in a building behind the Beehive. It's sparsely furnished; the sofa, salmon pink, is fraying on the piping, a widely-known symbol of her legendary abstemiousness. And on the table, she's spread out a variety of publications which document what she's been doing when she hasn't been axing staff.

"I think that journalists like calling me a hatchet woman when they can't think of anything else to write about," she says, throwing down a none-too-subtle challenge. "I've managed a lot of change all through my career. There were job losses in the 80s but now we go to great trouble to see that everybody gets a job somehow."

As early as 1987, she was speaking out about the responsibility of the State Services Commission to help staff through the trauma of constant change - one of the booklets she shows me is a manual on change management which, she says, has been widely copied overseas. But I wonder if the trauma of which she was, at least in part, the cause, kept her awake.

"If you let yourself suffer personal grief and trauma you'd never survive in this job. I think you have concern always for what you are doing. But I don't think that the public service is undergoing any more change than any other part of the world. When I started my nursing training, you went to a new ward and you asked the person who had been there the day before you what they did and you did that. That meant nothing ever changed."

Dame Margaret allows that she was always the managing sort. "I must have been a trial to my parents, I suppose," she says. "I was always a bit forceful and forward."

And she says, without a trace of irony, that working in psychiatric nursing taught her how to manage people.

"It was absolutely dependent on your personal skill - we had a ward of 150 very disturbed people and this was in the days before drugs when psychiatric nursing was very custodial. You could have them in uproar or it could all be orderly.

"And that's basically how I have always done things - in a very orderly and low-key way. You have to be very tolerant. I've probably lost a bit of that over the years. It's part of the mellowing process in reverse.

Dame Margaret says she is proudest of what she calls "the small things" she has achieved - setting up workplace creches which liberated staff who were also parents. But she is happy to use the term "ruthless" to describe herself.

"I am quite ruthless in achieving the objectives that have to be achieved. You can be all over the place and not do anything and I am quite single-minded. Everybody knows what we have to do and the timetable we're working to and if people dither around they hear about it. But the thing that motivates me is that all this is being paid for by the taxpayer. If public servants muck about that's taxpayers' money wasted."

A survey of Dame Margaret's career reveals a woman who has always shouldered the tough jobs, I tell her.

"They've always been challenging," she agrees, "but I like a challenge. I've turned a few down, usually because I hadn't finished what I was doing or because I was being headhunted from overseas. I have a great love affair with this country [she has a beach place in the Wairarapa and adores tramping in Fiordland] and I couldn't imagine living anywhere else."

I falter for a moment, fishing for the next question. Dame Margaret looks at her watch.

"I guess that's basically it," she says. "Unless you've got anything else."

It is an invitation to finish, not to continue. Taxpayers' money is being wasted.