Scorning of experts has left bland leading us blind
Barry Soper has posed the very reasonable question, why does this Government need so many outside experts. The answer is simple.
We lack experts inside the public service doing the fundamental long-term work to offer reasoned, in-depth independent advice on important longterm national matters.
Why? Because this Government is on the receiving end of accumulated neglect by previous governments, both of the centre-right and centre-left. These governments have presided over a persistent and concerted devaluation of inside experts in the public service.
Hence, if any evidence-driven reform is required, we round up the usual outside experts, we chuck some money at them, we give them a short time frame and we demand well-considered answers.
The particular vehicle governments have used to drive us into this ditch is the State Sector Act 1988. The Act has led to the systematic corrosion of specialist advisory and delivery expertise at all levels of the public sector. It has seen the rise of the myth of the generic manager — the notion that anyone with the basic set of management skills can manage any government body, whether it be an environmental or economic agency, a museum or a hospital. These generic managers are anywhere you look in our government departments and agencies.
These managers have no expertise in the fields they are empowered to oversee. They lack institutional knowledge. They have little ability to provide informed leadership and are in no position to perform informal staff training and guidance. The expert knowledge of their staff becomes a threat to them: it risks upsetting the minister, which is the kiss of death to an ambitious generalist.
Generic managers don’t know the nuts and bolts of their organisations, their idiosyncratic strengths and their weaknesses. Consequently they manage ignorantly and they manage upwards, keeping a tight control on information coming down from further up the hierarchy, since this is one of their few points of systemic leverage.
In addition to trading in information, their other specialist expertise is in restructuring, which consequently becomes habitual and develops a life of its own. Restructuring kills valuable networks, eliminates valuable institutional knowledge and demoralises staff. Over time the institution’s collective ability to offer reasoned advice becomes corroded.
The problem of the devaluation of expertise, reasoned thought and informed policy advocacy in government is endemic. For example, the head of the Government’s largest economic agency, MBIE, has a background not in economics but in service delivery and human resources. The person running Te Papa, our national museum, is not a person trained in museums and heritage, but previously ran a district health board. Not surprisingly, he’s currently restructuring.
We’ve just appointed a new person to run the Ministry of Primary Industries, a role which requires advising government on complex policy issues dealing with interactions involving agriculture, science, economics and the environment. His most recent experience is the successful running of a delivery institution which locks people up.
I am sure these are all well intentioned people, but intentions are not the issue here. The issue is what is being valued as relevant expertise.
The Government is soon to release a consultation paper on the reform of the State Sector Act. As part of the problem definition, I hope this document will acknowledge the fundamental canker at the heart of the modern public service — a disrespect for specialist knowledge.
Our public service still has the capacity to act as a willing and loyal secretariat to the government of the day. But it has lost a considerable amount of its capacity to think independently and to advise, in a fashion that is not only free and frank but also well-informed.
Our public servants can park the car but have lost the ability to advise us on where we should be driving it.