The Coster-McSkimming scandal raises a real question not just about the police, but the public service generally.
That is, have our public servants become so averse to any risk that when they are confronted with a crisis, they sit mesmerised, paranoid that the headlights of media and Parliamentary exposure might rattle their peaceful lives.
Commissioner Andrew Coster and his deputy, Javon McSkimming, were regarded by many police as peas out of the same progressive pod.
But Coster assured the IPCA inquiry that they were not mates.
They didn’t need to be.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of middle and senior public servants would have reacted exactly the same way.
The essence of the police response was that any external critic could not possibly be right.
Therefore, there was no need to take the allegations against McSkimming from his former girlfriend seriously.
There was a scene in that 1950s radio show, The Goons, where Neddy Seagoon was advised to stand behind a glass door and close his eyes. No one would see him.
A version of that is played out in almost every Government agency on a regular basis.
An army of highly paid “communications” staff, along with hundreds of in-house lawyers, is constantly on standby, ready to make sure that nothing negative leaks out of the fortress Ministry or Department.
It is a culture founded on and obsessed with taking no risks.
It is easy to see why, if that was the prevailing atmosphere, then the suggestion made in a series of lurid emails that the deputy commissioner was a sexual predator was easily discredited and then ignored.
That explains why the Minister was not told.
Any chance that the Minister might get wind of the scandal was nipped in the bud by having the Police staffer in his office forbidden to pass on any emails about McSkimming.
That raises an interesting question about the relative role of Ministers’ Political Advisors who come from outside the agencies and are appointed by and responsible to the Minister, and the embedded secretaries who remain employed by and responsible to their agency.
In effect (in this case), the Police staff in Mark Mitchell’s office were simply Police staff working away from headquarters. They owed their allegiance, not to the Minister, but to the Commissioner of Police (Coster).
This Public Service culture of turning a blind eye to unwelcome realities and then covering them up was presciently defined by the Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche in a speech in February at the University of Waikato Economic Forum.
What he portrayed was a public service that was saturated with inertia and was incapable of offering bold and innovative solutions to the challenges of the day.
“We have a concept of the whole of government, and we now, as a result, have very hardwired, elaborate systems and processes to ensure that a whole of government or system perspective is brought to bear,” he said.
“That is good, but I would suggest it’s at an enormous cost in terms of time and in terms of dollars.
“It’s generated a lot of internally focused work and multiple meetings, the value of which is questionable and often very frustrating to those who are trying to make change and lead initiatives.
“Whether we like it or not, the guise of collaboration has driven us towards a consensus-based model where we’re essentially held ransom by the slowest participant or the poorest performer, and that has to be addressed.”
That is a direct challenge to the whole ethos of the public service since the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, when the idea that the public service was better off considering itself as a whole rather than a series of parts began to emerge in the wake of the collaboration between agencies that appeared as they coped with the aftermath of the quake.
It was further cemented by the passage of the 2020 Public Service Act, which proposed new vehicles to enable inter-agency collaboration, and by the former Public Service Commissioner, Peter Hughes, who promoted the idea of a unified “public service”.
Roche sees these moves as the seedbed which has given birth to the prevailing risk-averse culture of the public service.
“There is a sense of consultation within the public sector becoming a mechanism to avoid decision making,” he said in Hamilton.
“The system is inherently inefficient.
“The public service has become weighted down, in my view, by risk considerations and gets lost in processes that don’t add value.
“Risk has become the overly dominant feature of discussion.”
That risk is first and foremost that the agency might somehow be responsible for a political embarrassment.
There is an argument that this can be traced back to 1988 and public sector reforms driven by the prevailing thinking in those Rogernomics days, by the not unreasonable proposition that the state sector was inefficient.
The consequence was, in the words of Simon Chapple, the Director of Victoria’s University’s Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, that managers replaced mandarins.
Chapple argues that as a result, the public service is increasingly functioning as a secretariat for the Government of the day rather than providing expert-informed free and frank advice, and public policy advice has become increasingly politicised in nature.
And because the public service sees itself as a unified entity, then where an individual agency might go, so the risk is that is where the whole Government might go.
Thus, Coster, with his advocacy of policing by consent, which he defined shortly after he was appointed in 2020 as having the support of the vast majority of the public, was entirely in synch with the politics of kindness then prevailing in the Beehive.
The first Coster appears to have known about the affair between his deputy, Javon McSkimming and the woman known as “Ms Z ” during his first year as Commissioner.
In that environment, the temptation to bury a scandal that could embarrass both him and his Beehive masters must have been enormous.
It is that point that Chapple has identified, the idea that the Beehive and the public service are the same thing; that they share an identity, which is behind the widespread culture of political risk avoidance across the public service.
Of all the political parties in Parliament, only New Zealand First seems to understand this.
Both Winston Peters and Shane Jones have frequently made it very clear that they do not see the public servants who report to them as being on the same side.
It was summed up by a statement issued on behalf of Peters on Friday.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade had released its advice to him on whether to recognise Palestine.
The advice said he should. He didn’t agree, and he responded with a classic definition of what the role of a Minister vis-à-vis an agency should be.
The Post reported that a spokesperson for Peters said the Government’s approach to recognition of Palestine was “careful, balanced and prudent”.
“The Minister receives advice on a broad range of foreign policy issues from government officials. As a deeply experienced foreign minister, he agrees with some of it and disagrees with some of it.”
Removing the public service’s obsession with risk avoidance is ultimately a matter for Ministers who need the confidence of Peters to say no to their agencies and then be prepared to defend that in public.
We need to get back to a culture of mandarins offering free and frank advice with the confidence to not only do that but to regard themselves as independent of the Government of the day.
That way, they might have the confidence to take risks and see no need to cover up potential political embarrassments.
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