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11:49 am, August 17th, 2026 - 50 comments
Categories: election 2026, labour, national -
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There is now a 50-50 chance that the government will change in November 2026, and Labour must have the plan to fully shift power beyond Parliament. This is how you do it.
Because the months after the unlikely 2017 election win by Ardern was focused on securing and implementing a large and expansive coalition agreement, nowhere near enough attention was paid to how to implement policy. In Wellington this is done through the leadership of public entities.
They didn’t have a plan, and boy did it tell. There remains even at this distance a clear public impression that ‘Labour didn’t achieve much’. The way to achieve results and not just attain parliamentary power is to prepare a list of all the entities whose leadership needs to change.
To give you a quick rundown of the determination National showed in 2023 to implement power through leadership change and not just legislation and policy, check out the extraordinary number of the big entities National has gutted and reformed in their own image of leadership inside two years of forming government:
With the changes of leadership, restructures follow and they are deep and comprehensive. Not only does decades-long expertise go in the form of learned staff fired, so too goes loyalty. Loyalty in the NZ public service amounts to keeping on doing a solid bureaucratic job while your management treats you like shit.
Labour’s allocated spokespeople need to have a plan to remove those leaders who can be removed fast, and put the ruler of suspicion of all other leaders who stay precisely because they have been politicised as National appointees who have executed National+Act+NZF’s clear plan to gut and shrink the entire capacity of the public service into something meaner, far more market driven, and less able to regulate let alone form a convincing plan to get New Zealand out of the massive multiple crises it now faces.
Each one of the initial list above has bountiful published media stories of intrigue, incompetence, and downright skullduggery: trip your memory through them all: Housing. Police. Health. Transport. Statistics. Human Rights. FMA. And out of the last three years we have seen nearly all of those entities grow less and less able to serve the growing needs of New Zealanders, and more companies just run roughshod over us.
It is not enough to come up with policy and coalition agreements and win Parliamentary power. National knew that and have executed one of the most drastic and cutting destabilisations of the entire public sector since the late 1980s.
Alongside each of the entities that they are responsible for, Labour’s portfolio holders must have likely names at the ready to replace those chosen by National and to hit the ground running. It is far more important than the usual “hundred day plan” folly.
Those parties preparing for a coalition with Labour would do well to prepare their own names of Boards and chief executives for state entities they really want to change as well. If they don’t, they will be filled for you and you will rue the day you didn’t prepare.
National has shown that there are no rules left when it comes to completely gutting and shunting the entire public service in just their first year in power. There is no time for politesse, nor need.
Unless Labour does the same comprehensive root-and-branch shift of power as National, they will again go down in their next term as a mere holding pattern who were collectively unable to execute and find they are unable to shake their reputation for achieving very little. Again.
Gut and rebuild. That is how you ensure power shifts.
I know someone working in winz , it's turned into a living he'll for staff having to bash down on those in need, with heaps of sneaky nastiness getting jammed through pre election, [deleted] , metaphorically if you wish.
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Mod note
Hi
A member of my family is unemployed and dealing with MSD is a nightmare. The website crashes. The phone – no-one answers and no-one rings you back. Walking into the office involves a queue a mile long. For people with a few odd jobs here and there and trying to pay the rent, buy food, it's a nightmare. And don't tell me there are plenty of jobs. Endless stories of hundreds of applicants for every job.
Fair enough knew I was leaning over the boundary fence on that one
Great post Advantage – a surfeit of considerations to address. Wish that I could post off to some other place! But lots to think about for the day so even if we put up thoughts on one topic at a time it will be useful so will come back.
Yes, I agree with you Advantage if Labour and other parties get in power, they need to be ruthless starting with getting rid of those appointments in government departments put there primarily to divide and destroy. They need to write the list as you have done above and prioritize them and then go for it. I have seen it firsthand in the justice system while attending a parole session a mole appointed by the COC government. Lucky I am experienced and my sister also in attendance said I put him in his place I found him to be very nasty.
Do you really want to establish the model of political appointment of the civil service?Following the US model – where the heads of the departments are political appointments made by the incoming President.
Because I can absolutely guarantee that the Right will go scorched earth, once it's established and they are back in power.
You also seem to be suggesting that the civil service don't necessarily need to implement the policies of the government-of-the-day – if they don't happen to agree with them. While I agree that we have a history of bureaucrats deliberately dragging their heels until there is a new minister, who can be snowed until the unwelcome policy just goes away; this has been just as much at the expense of Left governments as Right ones. I don't think it is an outcome to be wished for.
The right will be cheering your policy of 'gut and rebuild' along. Because they always have a slate of people who are prepared to come in and make radical change. Once the Left do it, there is no moral ground on which they can complain if the Right also do so.
Responsibility for policy needs to be sheeted home to the Minister, not the Department who are legally mandated to carry out the policies.
Is your goal a politicized public service – with the consequent lack of continuity in ongoing operational governance?
What would be different if we had a politicised public service from what we have now? There is a theory of pure disinterested competence and overview but visions and daydreams of such seem to have turned into nightmares for Kiwis.
We don't believe we have got that and have come to see that when decisions are being made in a mercantile society those with a lot of m0ney have the most say. Taxpayers together put a lot of money forward so there are endless expensive consultations but being asked to choose from a few possibilities doesn't really give us the ability to restrain, decide and shape our projects.
Res Publica below has good points to think about.
https://thestandard.nz/how-to-ensure-power-shifts/#comment-2070068
Res Publica is also saying that having a politicised public service is not the answer. We are largely in agreement.
But, in Ad's scenario, the difference is that we would have months of instability and uncertainty every three years, while the heads of the public service departments were fired, and replaced with the slate from the incoming government.
Have a look at the time it took in the US with the incoming Trump government. And the consequent paralysis of operational governance.
Also the inevitable horse trading between coalition partners – not only over ministerial positions, but also the departmental CEO to implement the policies.
My position is that we need to have more transparent ministerial direction of the bureaucracy – and that scenarios like the recent blatant lying by the Immigration department officials within MBIE – need to be sharply addressed.
But blaming the CEO and other staff for carrying out the legitimate directions of the government-of-the-day, is counter-productive.
Given that National has already politicised the public service, it seems like the options are:
Don't retaliate, let the Right put their political appointees in place and then leave them there when the Left gets in. This leads to the "Labour can't get anything done" story where any change of govt policy is resisted by the existing political appointees not wanting their political opponents to have a win.
Or, do the same which, yes, politicises the public service, but means that the public service will help the government get things done, which helps the government show it can achieve its agenda.
In the short term, I think only the second makes sense. In the longer term, a left government should review how the public service is appointed to try to depoliticise the whole thing, but that's a long hard job.
It also means we spend about a fifth of every term rebuilding the senior public service from scratch. How exactly is that supposed to help us “get stuff done”?
And I reject the premise that the New Zealand public service has already become a partisan institution. Individual appointments may be questionable. Individual officials may fail the test of neutrality. If so, identify them, demonstrate the problem, and deal with them.
But “National appointed them, therefore they're political appointees who will obstruct Labour” is an assertion, not evidence.
We already have an apolitical public-service model. We don't need to destroy it now so that some future government can undertake the “long hard job” of recreating what we already have.
You appear to have no idea how Board and CE appointments work in Wellington.
Outside of the Departments and Ministries, the entire apparatus is made of Boards. All of whom change after each election, except that the left is far too slow at it.
To give you a sense of the scale of what the let is up against, outside of the 2,400 school boards, there are:
– 150 independent or semi-independent state entities like ACC and FENZ
– 17 commercial enterprises eg Kiwirail
– Over 280 regulatory agencies
– A couple of very independent ones like NZSuperFund and the Reserve Bank
In case it needs pointing out, there is no way you are going to change the cruel policies of ACC or the risk taking profile of NZSuperFund or the mandate of the Reserve Bank, unless you quickly get your people in there and get the work of change done. And those supposedly statutorily protected ones are ones in which National had zero qualms about getting them Chaired by ex-Ministers.
And yes, the new Minister of Justice needs their own names of people to be put forward for judges as well, from the Tenancy Tribunal up to the Supreme Court.
Sure there is.
You change the law. You make new regulations. You change mandates where Parliament has given you the power to do so. You use ministers' lawful powers to set direction and hold institutions accountable for delivering it.
And if, having done that, a CE or board demonstrates that it is unwilling or unable to implement the lawful programme of the elected government, then you replace them.
That's called governing.
Disagree with you. I've said before that the main weakness in Ardern's government was poor oversight on the top public service appointments. It skipped on keeping them close and accountable and many were Nat's hires. Remember that Irish disaster at Oranga Tamariki, for example? She seemed completely disconnected from her staff.
Clark had a very good grip in her time. In the part of the Ministries and Public Service I saw, there were excellent appointments, and firm leadership from government.
The new government need to say those CaCk appointments were corrupt. Readvertise openly on meritocracy, not political bent. Reinforce that message very publically. I'm sure there are rumps of competent old-school nat-leaning execs that cordially dislike the current idiot government.
Appoint pitbull Ministry teams to monitor the lot. Have the best in the ministries.
I think you've got the diagnosis absolutely correct, skipped right past the point in the middle, then came back to a semi-sensible conclusion.
Absolutely do not make the same mistake the Ardern government made by being too cautious and focused on political management. Absolutely keep a close eye on the public sector and make the incumbent CE's and Board members excruciatingly aware who they work for.
And when they fuck up, and only then, dispose of them ruthlessly and publicly. Pour Encourager les Autres
Sorry I meant both Ardern's and the previous Labour Coalition, across the 2017-23 period. God, I can’t even remember the Labour PM of the 1st.
My point is personnel first, that’s critical. Fantastic policy is useless without a functional workforce.
I don't think we're actually very far apart on the diagnosis.
Personnel are critical. A fantastic policy programme without capable people to implement it is just a very expensive collection of PDFs.
Where I disagree is that “personnel matter” means “replace the personnel”.
My starting presumption would be that the people already there are professional and capable of doing their jobs. Give them clear political direction, make expectations unmistakable, resource them properly, and hold them relentlessly accountable for delivery.
Then judge them on what they actually do.
If they're excellent, keep them. If they're mediocre, manage them. If they're incapable of delivering, obstruct the elected government's programme, or substitute their own politics for the Minister's, get rid of them quickly.
That's where I think the 2017–23 governments fell down. Not because they failed to purge enough people appointed under National, but because too often they lacked the confidence, capability or willingness to drive the machinery they already controlled.
Personnel absolutely matter. But so does knowing how to lead them.
Legislation is the most awkward, expensive and least efficient form of governing. It is less than 5% of the task of governance.
Seriously why don't you know this stuff?
95% of governing is through delegation. And the delegation afforded to Ministers is frankly occasional. The real work of governing is from the Chief Executive (if a Ministry or Department), or from the entity Board and CE down if it is an other form of state entity.
It beggars belief that there are people that think elected politicians are at the centre of political power in New Zealand. Their 5% of governing is important in just 3 areas:
proposing and defending their budget around March each year,
getting support for legislation, and
getting support for Cabinet decisions.
The rest of the job of governing this country is via that massive volume of state entities who are delegated to carry out the work. And usually those delegations are spelled out within an inch of their lives in legislation.
Which is of course why changing the personnel of those entities is the central need in an effective transfer of power.
If you want to argue about theories of public-sector organisation, then go ahead. I did my Masters in it.
Of course most of the day-to-day business of government is carried out under delegated authority. Nobody thinks Ministers personally run hospitals, build roads, administer benefits or make every operational decision of a Crown entity. That's what the public service and wider state sector exist to do.
But delegation isn't the transfer of political authority from elected governments to public servants. Those powers are exercised within a framework established by Parliament: legislation, appropriations, statutory functions and delegations, Cabinet policy and, where provided for, ministerial direction and accountability.
As you say yourself, those delegations are often "spelled out within an inch of their lives in legislation."
How do you get from the entirely uncontroversial observation that CEs and boards exercise enormous delegated power to the proposition that an effective transfer of political power therefore requires replacing them with people politically aligned with the incoming government?
Ministers already have, for the most part, very broad powers to hold the entities they oversee accountable. Where they don't, there's generally a deliberate constitutional or statutory reason for limiting ministerial control.
So what additional political power is actually created by changing the name on the CE's office door?
If an incumbent CE or board cannot or will not implement the lawful programme of an incoming government, then by all means replace them. Ruthlessly, if necessary.
But if they can, you've yet to explain why replacing them simply because the previous government appointed them makes the incoming government any more capable of governing.
Delegation is how political authority is exercised at scale. It isn't a substitute for political authority.
A small step for man and womankind, and Maori iwi have changed the balance on the scales a little.
A piece of news that brings some momentary peace to my mind and also to Maori in south Wellington (don't know Maori name but its in news item.)
https://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=182519
Reclaiming ancestral land August 16, 2026 by Roy Murphy
This was a master stroke as IIRR the item says that iwi had only a month to get all organised to achieve the purchase.
I thought the final paras speak well about the aims of true Kiwis. About Porirua and environs –
It is inescapable that this government has done real and long-lasting damage to the public service. But the solution is not to import a US-style spoils system in which senior officials are treated as political appointments to be cleared out whenever the government changes.
Doing that sends public servants one very clear message: your political provenance now matters more than your capability, ethics, judgement or commitment to public service.
You can perform your role professionally, act with integrity, give free and frank advice, and faithfully implement the lawful decisions of the government of the day. And still be fired for the crime of having been appointed while the other lot were in office.
That does not restore a neutral public service. It destroys the possibility of one.
There is already a strong and usable constitutional process for dealing with a chief executive or board that is unwilling or unable to exercise its functions in accordance with the lawful policy of the government of the day, or which substitutes its own political judgement for that of elected ministers. Use it.
Test their neutrality. Judge them on their conduct. If they fail that test, manage them out.
But don't declare them politically compromised simply because of which government happened to appoint them.
To do otherwise is also an insult to the thousands of public servants who work every day to deliver for governments of every political stripe, under immense political and public scrutiny. Many have already lost their jobs as a consequence of this government's ideological programme. The answer cannot be to tell those who remain that their professionalism counts for nothing either: that simply doing their job under the wrong government is enough to make them politically suspect.
Yes, National and ACT have used institutional power aggressively. Yes, they have damaged conventions that deserved better protection. But that does not mean Labour should treat those breaches as the new rules of the game.
A constitutional convention does not necessarily die when one government breaches it. It dies when its opponents decide the breach is precedent.
We should be asking whether New Zealanders really want every change of government to bring a purge of senior public servants and a new set of politically trusted replacements. I suspect most would rather see the last few years as a damaging blip than as the beginning of a permanent spoils system.
We either have a neutral public service or we don't. And we cannot claim to support one while helping to destroy it.
Yes, Res Publica however if the new government does not get rid of the current government appointments it will be like leaving a rotten apple in with a bunch of good apples and they will also undermine a new government as has been done in the past. So far better to have a clean out, how they do it, well that will be up to them, but they need to do it.
I do hope that all of these proposed new appointees have a transition plan in place, because they will absolutely be seen as left-wing political appointments. And the Right will gleefully turf them out, next time the government changes. Once the genie is out of the bottle…..
The post-election churn is a simply predictable part of the Wellington tide. It's not a "genie", it's just cyclic life as a public servant.
So why is it acceptable for Labour-leaning officials to be swept out on the “predictable Wellington tide”, but National-appointed officials must be treated as politically compromised and removed immediately?
If post-election churn is just normal institutional turnover, why the need for a partisan purge?
OMG that is so simple:
to determine that the right people get in.
It's the simple directed transition of power.
Currently no public servant expects to be unceremoniously fired when the government changes.
Appointments to boards (which are generally term-limited) don't happen on a election cycle, either.
The only people whose jobs cease to exist following an election, are those employed in the political offices. So the chief of staff changes when the PM changes (and at other times as well); but the Secretary for Education (CEO of the Ministry) does not.
These aren't “bad apples”. They're senior public servants and officeholders, and we cannot simply assume they are incapable of acting impartially because of which government appointed them.
If there is evidence that an individual has behaved politically, obstructed lawful policy, or cannot professionally serve a new government, then deal with that individual.
But presumptively firing officials in job lots because they were appointed by the other guys is how you turn every change of government into a purge. It makes the public service less neutral, less stable, and worse for everyone who has to work in it.
And for what?
We're running around assuming a problem we don't actually have evidence for.
I, for one, think that more than a century of principles, continuity and public-service values shouldn't be thrown away simply because we're too afraid of losing to even put them to the test.
The 1999-2008 government by their own admission was somewhat slow in getting their own people in to leaders. Ardern's lot barely tried until it was too late.
We don't have a neutral public service and to believe so is a 1980s Gliding On fantasy. Get a grip it's 2026.
The only time to ask New Zealanders what they want from the public sector is at the election and at no other time. After that they should give effect to what they are told.
Stop fanning yourself about the professionalism of the public sector and some putative insult. Feels are the enemy of change.
Providing advice without fear or favour is quite possible, in my experience, while also giving effect to what Cabinet wants. Time and again the best advice is the most contested both within your Department and across the other Departments relevant to that draft going up:
The coalition of the left will simply continue to lose power to the right unless they sack and stack all the boards right across Wellington. Just like last time.
I'm sorry, but “it's OK when we do it” isn't a compelling argument.
I want a Left that has a legible, democratic theory of power and the confidence to govern well. Not one that decides it's already lost before it's even formed a government, and therefore needs to trash the public service before it feels capable of achieving anything.
If we cannot implement our programme without “sacking and stacking” the state with our own people, the problem isn't that we haven't accumulated enough power. It's that we haven't learned how to govern.
Best of luck finding your theory of power that is as polite and sweet as you need it. It is the position of losers.
God you talk naive horseshit.
Labour invented most of the institutions we have. Labour were the first to master MMP governance. Labour wrote the actual legislation on public service neutrality in 2020.
To see how public servants figure out politics, compare the history of the labour party in and out of power 1916-1940 written by Bruce Brown published in 1962, and the one put out on Labour's centenary by McAloon, with Bruce Jesson's books on how he led and fought for regional assets in Auckland, together with Dr Cullen's political autobiography put out in 2021: they show how public institutions are not only formed and sustained; they show how they are led by leftist leaders.
That is the only way to change this country through public policy.
I think you've misunderstood me entirely.
It's not about being polite or sweet about anything. It's about economy of force, and about not breaking the democratic machinery of state in order to save it.
The tools already exist for left-wing governments to govern, and govern well. Clark, Cullen and Simpson amply demonstrated that between 1999 and 2008.
You don't demonstrate political strength by reaching immediately for the most destructive instrument available. You demonstrate it by understanding the institutions of government well enough to make them deliver your programme.
If subsequent Labour governments failed to do that, I'd look first to failures of political confidence, ministerial capability and intellectual ambition before concluding that the answer is to politicise the state.
There's a simple solution: clone Heather Simpson.
Amen to that! It'd solve a lot of problems
Feijoa ask your family member what their life would be like if they got $360 a week no questions asked and where free to take what ever part time work they could with no claw back??
Part of being a public servant is the continuity and impartiality one provides.
If you look at the infrastructure debacle where changing governments flip flop projects so they can take many more years to complete than they should and then roll it out across the whole public sector you get a picture of what life would be like. Imho, the right creating temporary dictatorships for 3-6 years, the left undoing them and the cycle beginning again.
Also, many state departments already are politicized through the appointment of lackeys on boards.
Also, you would end up with a culture of inept but patronised or moneyed people trying to run things they don't have the skills to run.
I'm with Ad on this debate. With the advent of the State Sector Act, we don't have a public service any more, we have a chief executive-led state service. That means that the personnel appointments are crucial, and the "democratic machinery of state" has some relevance but is in reality just a nice abstract.
The problem Ad is addressing I think is very real. We do have an ideological government with an agenda presently in place and which is as rapidly and as far as possible putting in place the personnel that suit their ideology – Maoris out, and grifters in.
I wouldn't go quite as far as the "horseshit" ResPublica but I do agree with Ad your arguments are a trifle naive. The problem does lie with the machinery.
I find that a genuinely extraordinary thing to say in 2026.
We've just spent the last decade watching democracies around the world backslide precisely because political actors decided that constitutional norms, institutional independence and a professional state were merely “nice abstracts” that could be dispensed with when they became inconvenient.
The democratic machinery of the state isn't an abstraction. It's the thing that ensures a government can exercise enormous coercive and administrative power without the state itself becoming the property of whichever political faction happens to hold office.
Of course personnel matter. Of course the State Sector reforms changed where managerial authority sits. Of course a bad CE can cripple an organisation.
But none of that makes political neutrality irrelevant. If anything, concentrating greater managerial authority in senior officials makes the norms governing how those officials exercise that authority more important, not less.
I don't want a state that works for Labour. I want a state that works for the democratically elected government of New Zealand, whether I voted for it or not.
And I genuinely cannot believe that has somehow become a controversial position.
Given the "pendulum effect" on the Government: swing right, swing left, swing right again etc. would it not be reasonable to expect that natural process to affect the public service in a significant manner, levelling-out attempts to control it by appointing ideologically aligned people at each swing? That's not to say it won't be tried, but is the danger perceived really that significant? It's irksome to see lackeys appointed, but is the threat actual?
100% agree with this, the people who think this will create a "USA style" civil service are blind to the fact we have already had a defacto USA civil service for over 30 years.
The left seems to think legislation and holding the Treasury benches is all that matters, but if you don't have agreeable people running the organizations, you can flood the ministries and agencies with cash and reforms and it'll achieve little
$1.7 billion for more mental health beds but none of it was spent! You can fund it all you want it doesn't mean the managers will spend it.
I don't know whether it's because the most powerful unions in NZ are the PSA, the teachers and nurses so the left treats any criticism of civil servants as a personal insult but it's short sighted, the civil service is a tool for governance and deploying services nothing more nothing less.
National has always understood that the only way to ensure their reforms and ideology is sustainable long term is to highjack the civil service at every level and inflict their vision of the management and delivery of service on all soes and govt departments.
Because the right are in government a lot more often than the left they are brutally efficient at this, getting their people or agreeable people into every facet of governance, training the next generation of bosses and servants to think the same way
When the left gets in its usually after a very long time in opposition, with a cabinet with very little experience in governance and they focus far too much time and energy on legislation and holding the purse strings that it's halfway through the first term they realize their reforms and institutional changes are glacial slow and the extra funding is not being used and if it is usually not as expected because you have managers and executives and a staff culture that actively slows down the govts agenda.
If you're not getting your people in control of the organizations that control and deliver services you're not going to be able to achieve change.
The right gets this!
Why the left would defend high paid unelected civil service bosses is beyond me.
Ythe civil service is a great thing, but civil servants aren't our friends just because the psa is labour aligned, many of its members hate labour and scoff at the Labour party.
If we get a 7th labour govt after this election, it cannot repeat the mistakes of the 6th labour govt, hopefully we're on for a long time so we can change all mechanisms from the inside out so it won't be as easy roll back everything as it has been for this govt
And also labour needs to get its major reforms like any employment relations reforms through parliament within the first year so by the time of the next election they are baked into law and hard to roll back and people have actually experienced the benefits, not wait until the last year like the sixth labour govt.
I'm defending public servants because they're not our political enemies. They're citizens doing a job, and many of them aren't particularly highly paid or powerful.
It doesn't matter whether they personally vote Labour, National, ACT, Green or not at all. They're not there to be our friends or ideological allies. They're there to administer the state, provide free and frank advice, and faithfully implement the lawful programme of whichever government New Zealanders elect.
If an individual can't meet that standard, then deal with them. Hold them accountable, manage them out, sack them if necessary. I've got no problem being ruthless when ruthlessness is actually required.
What I won't accept is treating tens of thousands of public servants as politically suspect simply because they worked for the state under a government we dislike, or assuming senior officials are enemies because the other side happened to appoint them.
Sometimes we win. Sometimes we lose. That's the entire fucking premise of democracy. When National wins, the machinery of state serves their elected government. When Labour wins, the same machinery serves ours. The state belongs to all of us regardless.
And that's where I find this whole argument increasingly troubling. We're supposed to be social democrats. The democratic part isn't an inconvenient obstacle to achieving the social part.
If our theory of power requires us to distrust anyone who might vote differently, purge institutions we don't control, and fill them with “our people” before we believe ourselves capable of governing, then I have to ask what we think the democratic part of social democracy actually means.
It seems to me that no one actually wants democracy any more. The right and the left both appear to want some form of autocratic rule – because the other side makes 'bad decisions' and can't be trusted.
I agree with Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that people have tried."
If democracy itself is the enemy, I don't know if I can believe in the Left anymore.
The idea that the civil service senior leadership is made up of rational and pragmatic actors eager to serve whoever is there master is a fairy stuff best left to the Opportunity party and it's political Taylorism.
The bottom line is the civil service upper management is now largely colonised by the sort of pro-market fanatics who are dedicated to ensuring that if a left wing government presses the lever for action their class disapproves of nothing will happen. Forty years of neoliberalism has produuced a public service so enfeebled that it can't even confidently promise it can run a census, FFS.
Personally I would go a step further. I'd make the governor of the reserve bank an elected position that we got to vote for every three years. And in addition to replacing people quickly I would legislate to explicitly identify what roles are held at the pleasure of the minister, and require parties to publish a list of likely appointees to those jobs should they win the election so the public can judge the radicalism or otherwise of an administration.
And who allowed that to happen? It didn't happen all on its lonesome.
Governments of both stripes spent forty years creating the incentives, structures, funding models and institutional cultures you're now complaining about.
If the public service has been hollowed out, rebuild its capability. If managerialism has produced perverse incentives, change them. If agencies lack the capacity to deliver, invest in them. If particular leaders cannot lead the institutions we need, replace them.
But don't absolve elected governments of responsibility for the state they spent decades governing and then blame some amorphous cabal of neoliberal public servants.
If forty years of political choices built this state, different political choices can build a different one.
That's what governing is.
And how would you trust people to make the 'right' choice?
Being the Reserve Bank Governor isn't a popularity contest. We shouldn't be appointing the nicest person, or the one with most name recognition.
We already have the issue with MPs, where the set of skills which get you elected, have absolutely nothing to do with the set of skills required to govern. Why would we create the same situation with the heads of the Ministries?
The rest of what you are asking for is functionally the same as the US politicized civil service. How's that working out for you ATM?
"…And how would you trust people to make the 'right' choice?.."
Isn't that the whole fucking point of democracy you complete egg?
To my mind it would be a greater and more lasting victory, if a new government left the existing leadership in place and converted them to the benefits of a progressive and generous state. That these acolytes of the free-market became believers and supporters of the welfare state. Allowing the economic and social improvements of policy directives to do the talking and walking rather than spiteful appointments and restructures.
Labour should avoid the ideological zeel of National and rely on the resilience and purpose of the public service itself as an institution – one that serves the will and welfare of all people in NZ.
IMHO one of the first organisations to lose it's current board is FENZ.
New Zealand Initiative is backing a return to FPP.
Rather than mention Don Brash''s call for right wingers to vote strategically (National in electorate seats and their partners on the list) to guarantee winning the election, it refers to the MP not contesting the party list as its cause for concern about MMP.
Reading around the mixed messaging, it appears they and Brash want to eliminate Maori electorates AND return to FPP.
https://www.nzinitiative.org.nz/reports-and-media/reports/unravelling-mmp-how-the-2026-election-could-break-the-voting-system-from-two-sides/