A sticky mess for Shane Jones
It’s hard not to sympathise with Regional Development Minister Shane Jones’ view that the public service is a ‘‘treacle-ridden’’ system that slows down the delivery of government policy. Jones is by no means the first newly elected minister, full of pentup frustration from years in opposition, and in a hurry to effect change, to find himself battling through a maze of red tape. It’s almost a situation guaranteed by our system of government: ministers have just three years to prove to voters that they’ve done something useful, while public servants have a lifetime in which to prevent impatient politicians from doing something foolish.
Jones’ proposed solution is a radical one: politicians should appoint the chief executives of a handful of key ministries, whose jobs would be to implement ministers’ wishes. In his own inimitable words, he said: ‘‘I know we have this separation of governance and the bureaucracy, but I’m really attracted to the idea where the Aussies have softened that line, and key ministers bring in their shit-kickers to get things done. That’s always been my preference.’’
We have yet to find out whether that’s a preference shared by either his prime minister or his party leader. NZ First has long railed against the soul-sucking Dementors of bureaucracy, but the idea of interfering with the historically enshrined role of an independent public service may be a step too far for Winston Peters.
There are good reasons for that independence, and it is has served Westminster-style democracies well.
Good government needs not only to get things done, but to be seen to do it with integrity and transparency. Public servants need to be free to offer their advice without fear or favour; they cannot do that if they feel pressure to temper their advice to the demands of a governmentappointed ‘‘shit-kicker’’.
It may be true that the current system, under which ministry chief executives are appointed by the State Services Commission, wastes time. Leading public servants, however independent and impartial, are inevitably affected by their relationships with individual ministers, and some may well spend more time secondguessing those ministers than they should. A chief executive appointed directly by a minister would undoubtedly cut that out.
But it would not lead to better governance, and could easily take us down the path to the cronyism and pork-barrel politics that we rightly deplore in the United States. New Zealand’s international reputation for low levels of government corruption is one that should be vigorously defended.