New Zealanders voted for a new generation of political leadership on September 23, 2017 and now has a coalition of three parties led by Labour Party leader Jacinda Ardern, at 37, the youngest prime minister in New Zealand’s 165 years as a democracy.
Elected as Labour leader just seven weeks before the election when the party seemed certain to lose to the conservative National Party, in government since 2008, Ms Ardern succeeded with a campaign for activist government on issues such as poverty, inequalities, environment protection and housing.
This paper will examine the extent to which this agenda will need changes to legislation passed thirty years ago by a Labour Government which chose to shake up a public service which had come to be seen as overly bureaucratic and inward looking (Norman, 2003). Trading operations were restructured into state enterprises or sold and public servants held to account for delivering outputs, frequently with the threat of competition from other providers as a spur to productivity. Public sector organisations were changed, in the terms of the competing values framework (Cameron et al., 2006) from being based on clan and hierarchy to market and network cultures.
Initially, the freeing up of institutional controls on New Zealand public service organisations fostered innovation. More recently there has been concern that mechanisms such as contestability and fixed employment contracts for senior managers have reduced the frankness of public service advice and led to a focus on the short term and political. A reforming politician of the 1980s, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, in 2014 called for a Royal Commission into public services which he thought had become unattractive as a career, been subject to endless restructuring and had silos preventing cross sector collaboration. A survey in 2017 of members of the Institute of Public Administration of New Zealand found that just a quarter of respondents disagreed with the statement that “public servants in 2017 are less likely to provide a minister with comprehensive and free and frank advice". [1]
For the first time since the 1980s, New Zealand has a government which has been unambiguous in its commitment to provide active public sector leadership on issues such as regional economic development, immigration, poverty and inequality, in contrast to a New Public Management emphasis on market mechanisms.
This paper will argue that for the ambitious agenda of the new Coalition Government to succeed, concepts such as ‘purpose’, ‘public value’ and ‘stewardship’ need to replace the command and control structures based on economics based theory of the 1980s that emphasised numbers based accountability and productivity measures. The paper proposed for Edinburgh, April 2018 will be a first stage for more in-depth research for the April 2019 IRSPM conference in Wellington, New Zealand.
Cameron, K. S., Quinn, R. E., Degraff, J., and Thakor , A. (2006). Competing Values Leadership. Creating Value in Organisations. Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar.
Norman, R. (2003) Obedient Servants? Management Freedoms and Accountabilities in the New Zealand Public Sector. Victoria University Press, Wellington.
[1] https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/95499693/chris-eichbaum--free-and-frank-advice-fast-disappearing
The practice panel (Connecting researchers and practitioners SIG)
IRSPM_abstract_Rediscovering_public_service_in_New_Zealand.pdf 