In 2023, there were 63,117 full-time public servants earning, on average, $97,200 a year each. All up, that is a cost to the Government of $6.1 billion a year.
It’s little wonder, then, that the public service has become a political whipping boy castigated by the Prime Minister and members of his Government for being bloated, wasteful and out of touch.
Otherwise, the public service is staffed by ideological activists, influenced by lobbyists and can’t cope with change.
Those myths are hard to bury.
So, when the right-wing New Zealand Initiative announced it was launching a series of reports on the public service, it was reasonable to assume they would continue in the same vein as Luxon and his Ministers.
That may have been the hope for some associated with the Initiative, but the first report yesterday and the webinar that launched it offered a much more nuanced view of the public service at the same time as it addressed some of the big issues it faces.
Understandably, most of the issues faced by public service centres on its relationship with the Government.
One such issue is the so-called “no surprises” policy, which the Cabinet Manual says means that officials should be guided by the “no surprises” principle in their relationships with ministers.
“As a general rule, they should inform Ministers promptly of matters of significance within their portfolio responsibilities, particularly where these matters may be controversial or may become the subject of public debate,” it says.
It is a controversial policy unique to New Zealand among Westminster jurisdictions, to New Zealand.
In 2017, the Chief Executives of the State Services Commission and the Ministry of Social Development informed their Ministers, Paula Bennett and Anne Tolley, that there had been a number of months of overpayment of New Zealand super to NZ First Leader Winston Peters.
That information was then leaked to the media.
Only a private individual’s tax information may not be divulged to a Minister; otherwise, it’s more or less open slather across the whole public service. The public service, generally a departmental CEO, can brief their Minister about any private information they may think the Minister would like to know.
Speaking at the Initiative’s webinar yesterday, Andrea Black, a former top Inland Revenue official and Ministerial adviser, said she could not understand why the Minister had been briefed.
“I guess because I have an Inland Revenue background, and Inland Revenue has special files where judges, MPs and anyone who might be politically interesting go so it never leaks out, then the more I think about that example, the more I just cannot understand it,” she said.
“Winston Peters, at the time, was the leader of New Zealand First, which was not even really an opposition small party.
“The idea that a minister needed to know about that kind of appals me.
“It was pushed up into the Beehive at a time leading up to an election.
“And my experience of senior public servants is they understand that period of time in the Beehive which someone described as when normal, nice ministers become politicians.
“Normal rules don’t apply. And the idea that Crown law and the Public Service Commission thought that someone’s private affairs were worthy of going into the Beehive at that time just astounds me.”
Black said the danger with this use of “No Surprises” was that it threatened the political neutrality of the public service.
Whether the public service should be politically neutral is a theme in the Initiative’s study.
The author of the paper presented yesterday, Dr Tony Burton, a former Treasury and Ministry of Social Development economist, argued that in some situations, it could pay to rebalance the relationship between the political appointees in a Ministerial office or on advisory boards and the department.
This was particularly relevant for entities undertaking fundamental change, such as the Climate Change Commission or the new Ministry for Regulation.
“One of the challenges that government officials always face is gaining the confidence of the minister,” he said.
“When you’re trying to make the kinds of change that were attempted through the Climate Change Commission, or that’s currently being attempted through the Ministry of Regulation, there is a suspicion that the shift is going to be quite big for the individuals already in the system.”
Because of that, the Minister needs confidence that any problems they find in their reform process are real problems and not problems caused by the conservatism of the existing system, he said.
Black was not so keen on an extension of political appointments.
“I would not be in Favor of the top public servants being political appointments,” she said.
“There is a different way of thinking from the private sector to the public sector. I spent ten years of my career in the private sector before I joined.
All too often, crown entities behave very commercially.
“All their boards think very commercially, but they don’t fully understand the constraints that ministers operate on.
“Neutrality, I feel, is at risk.”
Asked if a perception that activists had gained a much greater presence and influence in the public service, Burton referred to the French economist and political scientist Thomas Piketty and his argument that the universities had been overtaken by what he calls “the Brahmin left”.
“Parties promoting “progressive” policies (green and traditional left-wing parties) have seen their electorate become increasingly restricted to higher-educated voters, while parties upholding more “conservative” views on sociocultural issues (anti-immigration and traditional right-wing parties) have concentrated a growing share of the lower-educated electorate,” Piketty wrote in 2022.
Burton said that was being reflected in the public service.
“My guess is that the people who are most hostile to activists coming through at a younger level are the chief executives of the department,” he said.
“The easiest way to lose all credibility with your Minister is to have a million and one leaks coming from your department.
“I think it is a symptom of something much, much bigger than just governments and government departments.”
But if the public service was not being subverted from within, what about external influence such as lobby groups?
“Yes, they have a role,” said Black.
“Often officials, spend quite a bit of time with them because Ministers come and go and stakeholders are forever.
“So officials have to keep good relationships with stakeholders.
“I just see them as influences. I see them as very strong influences of the public servants.
“And part of the basis of officials’ advice will be what stakeholders want.
“Similarly, all those groups are pretty good at, lobbying ministers, although, I would say under this Government there was a set of groups that, don’t have Ministers ears.
“So yes, they’re in there. They are important and probably more for officials almost than for the Ministers.”
If there was an underlying theme yesterday it was the public service has placed too much emphasis on generalists and not enough on specialists.
“The other thing with the public service is that there is almost an implicit hierarchy and policy people are considered higher status than operational people,” said Black.
“That’s not necessarily the individuals themselves behaving like that.
“But I find there are two tiers in the public service.
“And yet, ironically, the generalist public servant advisers can only really do their job properly with specialist expertise and most of the time that comes from the operational side.”
The head of the public service, the Public Service Commissioner, has not yet been appointed by the coalition government despite the role being vacant since the beginning of the year.
But that may be because the role will subtly change and, with it, the public service.
Last month, State Services Minister Nicola Willis outlined a proposal for what she called “Crown Agency Performance Plans”.
Whilst these are primarily fiscal tools, they will cover all of an agency’s activities, and there will be a direct reporting line from the agency through the Minister to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and thus the Prime Minister himself.
One senior official involved in implementing the proposal told POLITIK that the idea is that the agencies will ultimately report to the DPMC while the PSC will be responsible for their staff.
Alongside that the new public service legislation makes it much easier to set up joint operations involving multiple departments.
What is clear from all this is that the public service is evolving and that the traditional linear hierarchy from the Minister to the CEO is changing to a more multi-polar collaborative public service.
Consequently, we can expect more of the kind of debates that the New Zealand Initiative stimulated yesterday.
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