The swan politicians may be gliding on the water, occasionally snapping at one another. Meanwhile, as the Covid19 crisis illustrates, the officials are desperately paddling below providing the real locomotion.

One of the most fatuous recent grandstanding comments (of about a week ago), adding to the public’s anxieties, was that the government should get more ICU ventilators. True. A few days later, the government announced a couple of hundred more were coming, but it is only the superficial who thought the grandstander’s exhortation had any relevance. It takes weeks, if not months, to acquire such things from overseas suppliers.

Although, rarely recognised, the relevant officials have been working their butts off since when they came back from their summer holidays and got the first inklings of the .possibility of a pandemic – some may have been called back early. Getting one’s head around the issue and planning responses takes time.

By the end of January, long before it was on the public radar, officials’ committees were being set up. The lower ones – better think of them as working-groups – would have been primarily technical and included some experts from outside the Ministry of Health, for it is not possibly carry enough expertise in normal times to deal with a crisis of this magnitude. One of those working-groups would have identified the ventilator.  problem and taken action months before the grandstanders.

The working groups would report to the Chief Executive who would have advised the Minister of Health who would have alerted the Prime Minister and the rest of cabinet. Shortly after, every government agency would have had a team considering how Covid19 might impact on their activities. There would have also been a committee of high-level department officials reporting to cabinet. As well as the Director General of Health, there would have been someone from the Treasury (because of the financial implications) and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (to keep the politicians informed) together with the emergency services of Civil Defence, Defence and Police. Below the top, there were lower department committees doing the technical and coordinating work. This has been a whole-of-government effort.

All done quietly (rather than secretly) and efficiently (usually). One of the objectives was to avoid public panic, especially as there were so many uncertainties. The approach would have been cooperative. There would be mutual learnings (I doubt the Ministry of Health knows much about policing) and there would have been disagreements.

The main disagreement seems to have been the phasing in of the policies – some of it became public and, of course, grandstanders joined in. My guess is that the general feel was urgency, but the fear was that not only would half-cocked measures not work, but that would result in a loss of the public confidence that the relatively stringent New Zealand lockdown requires.

Probably – I know this has been true in previous crises – Opposition politicians were briefed by officials (with the agreement of the minister), a feature of our informal constitution which you wont find written anywhere. I am less sure about this in the initial stages of the Covid19 crisis, because some of their earlier contributions seemed uninformed. They have been doing better, especially on the Epidemic Response Committee, a select committee which is another interesting extension of our parliamentary constitution.

Final decisions are made by the Prime Minister and cabinet. Their judgements probably dominated the phasing-in of the measures. My experience is that Wellington-based officials are not good judges of the broader public’s mood; in any case it is the politicians who take ultimate responsibility.

But our politicians have deferred to official advice on the technical issues. That has not been true in many of the public statements of the political leaders of Australia, Britain and the US. I thought it was a judicious decision of the Prime Minister to have public officials, especially the Director General of Health, do so much of the fronting. Yes, she is in charge, but yes, she leaves the technical issues to the experts.

I tell this story for two reasons. The first is to alert you that this system is not going away for we have the implementation challenges of the lockdown (it is surprising how small the refinements have had to be). But it is also working on planning the next phases.

The second reason is that the column illustrates a major gap in the media’s reporting of our government. It focuses on the theatre of politics (which suits the politicians) including the swans snapping at one another. But they provide little sense of the frantic paddling below (which the public needs to know about). Following the cut back in journalists, too many of the media station their Wellington staff only in the theatre of parliament (the preference of politicians) with few having a bureaucracy beat (usually the preference of officials). The lack of journalists means that Aucklanders, and therefore most New Zealanders nationally, are particularly poorly served by Auckland-based Herald, the Listener, the newsblogs, and the television channels. Radio New Zealand does very well in contrast and the Dompost deserves a commendation. (A test is the use of Official Information Act; some requests are self-generated but many are the results of tipoffs or casual remarks – if you are not talking to public servants, you dont get them.)

With luck, on top of excellent management and a nationwide effort, we may be one of the most successful democracies to get through the Covid19 pandemic. A good number of today’s overworked officials will tell their grandchildren ‘this was my finest hour’.