Roles and responsibilities not clearly defined
Under New Zealand’s Westminster-styled parliamentary democracy a minister is vicariously responsible for the actions taken or not taken by his or her department or ministry. Vicariously, because ministers cannot usually be blamed for mistakes made by subordinates far from the comfort of ministerial offices in the capital.
This is the main reason why, historically, few ministers have resigned when calamities have occurred. Also, ministerial resignation is a matter for a prime minister to determine, and he or she will do so according to some calculation of political benefit or loss.
Ministerial responsibility primarily requires ministers to be answerable to Parliament and the public for the actions, positive or negative, of their officials. Ministers must do all they reasonably can to ensure that if bad mistakes are made then they will not occur again. As an appliance retailer used to say, ‘‘It’s the putting right that counts.’’
Blame-shifting games often abound. In this case, David Clark as minister of health, has made it clear that he holds his top official, the director-general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, responsible for the system failures around border control and quarantining.
For his part, Bloomfield, according to convention, is unable to publicly argue back, though privately he could be fuming. He rightly enjoyed, under the lockdown, a high level of public popularity in the way he exercised his emergency powers, especially through his daily public briefings with the prime minister.
However, there has been some evidence that he may have become too willing to embrace some ‘‘celebrity’’ status.
So the question may fairly be asked: did he perhaps take his eye off the ball? As the head of his ministry, his duty was to ensure the proper procedures were in place and to ensure they were working more efficiently than now appears to have been the case.
In my view, he should not be fully absolved of responsibility, just because his minister lacks public support.
Clark, largely because of the bad mistakes he made under lockdown, is today an extremely soft political target. Few, if any, seem to expect him to survive in the health portfolio, though when he may lose it, and how, remains to be seen.
He appears to have little public support, though most in his Dunedin North electorate may continue to regard him as an able
MP. In the meantime, members of the Parliamentary Opposition are circling like vultures awaiting the death of a fatally wounded animal. Does this really serve the public interest?
All this is the politics, pure and simple, of ministerial responsibility.
Only through open political disputation can the matter of final responsibility be resolved.
Arguably, the status of ministerial responsibility became more confusing after the radical state sector reforms of the 1980s and 90s.
These embedded a contradiction: on the one hand, the heads of departments and ministries were to be more directly accountable to their ministers; on the other, they were supposedly given more freedom to manage their agencies at arm’s length from their ministers.
The respective roles and responsibilities of both parties were never clearly defined (if they ever were or could be).
Such blame-shifting political games are not new.
There was a fiasco surrounding the electoral rolls for the 1978 general election, and in the early 1980s there were major problems over irrigation in the Maniototo.
On both occasions the relevant ministers sought to shift the blame on to their officials.
As on those occasions, and regardless of constitutional niceties, the decision about who should be held responsible rests ultimately with the voting public, through whatever influence these issues have on how each citizen decides to vote.
Bob Gregory is emeritus professor at the School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington.
Psalm 16:8