It would be great to have some evidence to justify the proposed changes.

Why did the Rogernomics government drop the word ‘service’ from the title of the 1988 State Sector Act. Previously it had been in the 1962 State Services Act and earlier in the 1912 Public Service Act. They did not have to; the 1976 Public Finance Act was succeeded by the 1989 Public Finance Act.

I have wondered whether it was because the Rogernomes were not happy with the notion of the state bureaucracy providing services to the public. A characteristic stance of a neoliberal is antagonism to the state. At best they recognise the need for a minimalist state so a bureaucracy focused on servicing the public, as distinct from providing military and justice services, is an anathema to them. Shortly after 1988 they mounted an attack which aimed to markedly reduce the scope of state provision of education, health, science and social insurance. (That they broadly failed, although they did a lot of damage, in part reflected community resistance but also because the neoliberal thinking was more pious than coherent.)

Such ponderings become especially relevant today because the government has before Parliament a replacement to the State Sector Act, to be called the Public Service Act. One welcomes that the principle that the state sector is meant to be providing services to the public seems once more to be enshrined in legislation,

Or is it? Are we, once more, getting the public relations sizzle but not much nutrition in the sausage? The government claims that the proposed legislation

... provides a modern legislative framework for achieving a more adaptive and collaborative Public Service by expanding the types of agencies that comprise the Public Service, unified by a common purpose, ethos, and strengthened leadership arrangements.

But that might be sizzle too; certainly no evidence is provided for the claim.  

What I have been unable to find is any working papers which indicate how the thinking of the State Services Commission developed to this stage. (There are plenty released to go with the legislation.)

I was greatly surprised that there seemed to have been no working papers following up Alan Schick’s 1996 report The Spirit of the Reform and there is no evidence, I could find, of it having influenced the new legislation. Yet it is the most penetrating critique of the State Sector Act I know.

I am not saying that there has been no thinking going into the proposed legislation but that there is no evidence of it, no micro-experiments to see whether the new directions work, nor any careful reviews of past failures. Once more policy seems to have little evidence-based analysis. Instead it seems to be ad hoc and a priori. Coming to think of it, that was true for the 1988 legislation which is now judged as having failed.

How to evaluate the proposed legislation? One way would be to look at some of the recent failures and ask whether the changes would make any difference.

A major example involves the story of the Census, a state sector failure sufficient for the chief executive to resign. If she had not, and had the Opposition been a bit sharper, both the Minister of Statistics and the Chairman of the State Services Commission could have been under severe public pressure to resign. The relevant bits of the story for this column’s purposes are as follows.

In March 2018 Statistics New Zealand administered a quinquennial Census of Population and Dwellings very badly, seriously compromising the usefulness of the data. .

By May 2018, there was widespread knowledge among many informed people of the census failure, although it took time to realise how substantial the failure was. Meanwhile, the minister was giving public assurances that the consequences could be remedied and the government was pouring vast quantities of money to facilitate the remediation.

Despite any misgivings, the State Services Commissioner, presumably with the agreement of the Minister of Statistics, reappointed the Government Statistician in June 2018.

In August 2019, she resigned following an independent expert report which described an exceptional bungle.

My guess is that the term of the resigned head of SNZ will be remembered for sizzle rather than sausage. She was a generic manager who evidently knew little about statistics (despite being given the title of Government Statistician; the next thing they will be making a generic manager the Chief Justice).

It would be easy to dismiss this incident as an exception. But there are other chief executives who have not done much better, perhaps not as grievously as the SNZ one, but sufficient to find their tenure was not rolled over or, in some cases, discreetly terminated.

The 1988 State Sector Act strengthened the power of the state sector chief executives. But the SSC has not always appointed chief executives of the quality required. As far as I can see, the proposed PSA legislation does nothing to address this failure.

It is not sufficient for the SSC to say it will do better in the future. Even were it to abandon its strategy of routinely appointing generic managers and instead give greater focus to professionalism (the Schick report comes to mind) that will not resolve the problem of what happens when they appoint someone who is not up to the job.

A troubling sequel arises from the appointment of the next Government Statistician. He was a member of the SNZ Senior Leadership Team during the census debacle with responsibilities for customer strategy and delivery. (That is, he is not a statistician despite his new title; people talk very well of him though.) The implication of the appointment is that being a member of the SLT did not make one collectively responsible for the bungle and that responsibility resides solely with the Chief Executive. This illustrates just how powerful he or she is, and reinforces concerns about the dependence of the system on the quality of the SSC appointments with so little means of remedying poor quality ones.

I could raise other issues which the proposed legislation does not seem to address but I have space for only one more. (You are welcome to test the proposed PSA legislation with examples of failures about which you are knowledgeable.)

The second example arises from the Government’s intention to separate out Archives New Zealand and the National Library from the DIA. When the previous government promoted the merger of the two into the DIA, Parliament was given ‘cast-iron’ assurances by Ministers and officials that the integrity of the two institutions would be preserved, promises that were promptly ignored once the legislation was passed. In particular the DIA has systematically tried to destroy the institutions’ identity, submerging them into itself.

This is well illustrated by the two institutions’ risible reporting to Parliament in short sections in the DIA’s annual report. Instructively, it also proves very difficult to trace the funding of the two institutions which has been submerged into a larger DIA output category.

A fundamental element of our democratic constitution is that Parliament votes funds to agencies and then holds them to account. The DIA has illustrated here that it is easy to frustrate this element of our constitution.

The proposed PSA legislation has some not-easy-to-understand provisions for ‘interdepartmental ventures’ and ‘joint operations’. They may be good developments but the DIA has demonstrated that such provisions can be used to reduce parliamentary (and thus democratic) control over the state sector. Even if the provisions unintended are not intended to have this effect, there can be little doubt that they will be used for such purposes when it suits the bureaucracy.

For example, the Minister of Internal Affairs has told the Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa that the final form of the two institutions must be made ‘in step with wider state sector reforms’. Presumably this refers to the provisions in the Public Service Bill but so opaque is the bill that I cannot see how the provisions might apply, for it gives the State Sector an very wide discretion to do whatever it wants,

A more transparent approach would be for Parliament be told what the government proposes to do with Archives NZ and the National Library, to illustrate the principles in the new regime. Instead Parliament and the general public is being given the mushroom treatment with the strong likelihood of whatever are the ministerial intentions, the State Services and the DIA will have the final say – which will be to consolidate the power of the state services and fail to address the particularities of the two institutions involved.

Geoffrey Palmer who as a senior minister was involved in passing the 1988 State Services Act, had a decade later doubts about its efficacy. :

I think the public service has declined in quality. I remember telling Helen Clark when she became Prime Minister, if the reforms of the Fourth Labour Government were done now I do not believe that the public service would have the capacity to carry them out.

There is no provided evidence that the proposed PSA legislation will address his concerns.