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2:44 pm, November 13th, 2025 - 26 comments
Categories: Deep stuff, Judith Collins, mark mitchell, public services -
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New Zealanders are losing confidence in the institutions that once held us together.
Can this be changed?
A last-minute press conference with Police Minister Mark Mitchell and public service minister Judith Collins held last Tuesday evening pulled journalists out of the parliament bar and into the theatrette, where they heard of the efforts made by top cops to cover up complaints against former deputy police commissioner Jevon McSkimming.
It is a matter of cosmic cruelty for victims that Tuesday’s press conference with Ministers Mitchell and Collins and the Police Commissioner occurred on the one-year eve of prime minister Christopher Luxon’s apology to survivors of abuse in state and religious care. So before the House began its debate on the findings of the Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) on Wednesday, National MP Erica Stanford – in her role of the minister for the government’s response to the Royal Commission’s abuse in care inquiry – rose first to acknowledge the national day of reflection, and the estimated 250,000 children, young people and adults abused between 1959 and 2019.
Hundreds of thousands of people who are victims will not be assured that people will go to jail through Police prosecutions if the Police can’t hold themselves to account for being pedophiles and bullies, and will cover it up to get promotions.
It’s getting grim at the public sector when Sir Brian Roche is having to run interference for the government itself, giving interviews about the multiple and massive failures of judgement in the NZPolice via the IPCC report.
Trust in our institutions is declining and this will make it worse.
This Stats NZ series won’t be repeated again until 2027 and we don’t yet know in what form.
Of the public institutions tracked here, the decline in public trust in Parliament is strong and lowest. That is where our entire national political leadership reside, and reflects their leadership of all other public institutions.
I have no doubt many past and present public servants will read this, and thankyou for your service. But overall this is starting to rot.
It is also very difficult to trust in the public sector when it is in near-perpetual turmoil.
This turmoil has occurred under this government. It was only four years ago that our health and emergency and customs people were heroes who held this country together through the most massive crisis we have faced since the GFC. And it was on that basis that the Ardern was re-elected to overwhelming public support.
Where did that four years and that public support go?
It starts with employment viciousness from this government, and keeps going.
The number of public sector employees that this National-led government has fired or made redundant is over 9.500 when RNZ stopped counting at the end of 2024. Health and education are but two of multiple entities having gone through top-to-bottom restructures. That is a generation of relationships with the public and the NGO sector destroyed.
Strong institutions and trust in those institutions are accordingly to Acemoglu and Robinson the foundation of a successful country: lose that and eventually the country is irreversibly broken down.
That is particularly important in small, narrow-based , distant and vulnerable state like New Zealand and the weakening of our institutions is accelerating under Luxon’s hand.
No matter how this government tries its ideological best to replace the public sector with the private sector across so many institutions, we remain a small country that is and will be held together by the capability of our public institutions to deliver.
With trust in public institutions in decline we are in increasing peril.
Well, we have a scenario of top establishment wrong-doers, doing wrong permitted by the system, so when I heard Roche on MR this morning I expected him to spit the dummy and say so. Instead we got a guy obviously paranoid lest he admit the reality.
I suppose the deviance is due to the matter being in the prosecution pipeline, so he can justifiably evade the media questions. Seems obvious those top cops ignored the window-dressing procedures adopted by the cops last time they got caught out 20 years back – their excuse presumably being that they didn't feel like conforming to that prescription, and being a privileged caste, assumed they'd get away with it.
Roche seems not the kind of person that is willing to declare it a duck if it quacks and waddles. Could be a pterodactyl, he would point out. Not passing on 16 emails to the minister is audacious of Coster, since the implication is that he was supposed to. Roche could have given us reason to believe he was, huh? He could cite the actual requirement in the cabinet manual or police code of conduct or the law. It would have been public-spirited of him to nudge things along like that, but you need integrity to do so.
Your general point re decline in public institutions lacks a causal focus. I could suggest a general decline in competence in the management but everyone would rightly respond "Well that was effing obvious." Perhaps the interesting bit is why. I suspect mediocrity contagion on the left and right, so we must blame democracy or God.
Lacks a causal focus? A four year decline from the heights of trust, 9,500 redundancies and multiple restructures later, under one government? Was that not clear to you?
We still have a 3-year term, so it doesn't really explain a 4-year decline. Still, I agree that National is way more culpable than Labour. Also, it is happening in the overall context of ebbing support for left & right in other western countries, which calls for causality not rooted in Aotearoa. I asked the gizmo to explain that:
It expands that tetrad summary considerably, but this bit is best: "Many citizens, particularly young voters, express a sense of fatalism and believe the current two-party system is dysfunctional and incapable of addressing critical challenges like climate change or economic inequality, leading some to disengage altogether or look for alternatives." Hard to disagree with all that, eh?
… next fallout: national head of aviation security is goneburger.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360885131/mcskimming-scandal-fallout-aviation-boss-leave-following-bombshell-report
Betcher Andrew Coster has days left.
Yep we are in big trouble with the atlas crew.
Breaking it make it's cheaper for the backers to acquire, job done.
This Government is deliberately undermining The Public Service by under funding sacking and removing whole Departments. Their story of "austerity" to correct an Economic position because of a previous Government's overspend, is just that a story.
This Government has spent more than the previous one. However their investment is not in Public Service, it is to encourage Private enterprise in Health Education in Defence and Service Providers. The profit margins of new suppliers raises costs for the Public, while cheap Government money assist these groups to erode public provision.
Further this Government will not underwrite disasters in future. This means relying on insurers to judge risk correctly. All of this raises charges to the Public, and adds to the cost of living uncertainty and stress. Vote wisely in 2026.
The question that immediately needs to be answered is how come the Minister's office did not show the Minister emails sent to him?
It's a good question, because its the type of email that Mitch and the Nats would have loved to have used politically against Ardern/Hipkins appointees (in the same way Trump does).
The official explanation is it was a directive from Coster, and to date nobody has refuted that.
Have you seen evidence that those 16 emails did reach the minister's office? I haven't. I saw media reports suggesting that Coster instructed his staff not to send them on – which means his office wouldn't have got them unless a cop with a sense of propriety disobeyed Coster and sent them as a whistle-blower.
Explained here: https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360883683/how-did-police-stop-ministers-hearing-about-their-disgraced-deputy.
If I can add something that’s been missing from this discussion: the crisis we’re seeing in the public sector didn’t begin with Mark Mitchell or Judith Collins. Or even with this government.
The roots run far deeper, right back to the neoliberal restructuring of the state that reframed public institutions as businesses and citizens as “customers.” Once you redesign a system around transactional service delivery instead of democratic stewardship, you inevitably hollow out the culture, ethics, and independence that make institutions trustworthy in the first place.
And if we’re looking for where that hollowing-out became entrenched rather than episodic, the uncomfortable truth is that it really set in under Helen Clark and more importantly, Heather Simpson.
Not because they shared National’s ideological commitment to shrinking the state, but because they professionalised and centralised it to the point of suffocation. “No surprises,” which originally meant “don’t blindside the Minister with critical information,” slowly mutated into “don’t allow the Minister to be exposed to any political risk whatsoever.”
Once that logic took hold in the Beehive; particularly once DPMC absorbed it, the infection spread rapidly through the rest of the public sector. Agencies learned to internalise political risk as their primary organising principle. What started as a reasonable expectation of good briefing practice became a culture of self-censorship, message-management, and bureaucratic risk aversion. The result was a system where protecting ministers mattered more than protecting the public interest.
We shouldn’t be shocked that someone like Brian Roche ends up acting as a kind of soft-focus mediator for whatever government happens to be in charge. He is simply a product of a system that rewards compliance over courage.
The deeper issue is that New Public Management, the neoliberal model we grafted onto the state, has simply failed to deliver on its own promises.
It was supposed to make the public service more agile, efficient, and results-driven. Instead it fragmented institutions, ballooned managerial layers, and elevated KPIs and branding over actual performance. It has created an environment where covering up risk is rational, telling the truth is dangerous, and institutional loyalty trumps public duty. The outcome is exactly what we’re seeing now: declining trust, decaying capability, and political leadership that blames the public sector for failures baked into the very management model politicians demanded.
Given all that, it’s obvious we need far more than a reshuffle or a new Police Commissioner. We need a fundamental rethinking of what the public service is for. The current system is not “in decline”; it is reaching the end of a forty-year experiment that has run out of credibility, talent, and time.
If we want institutions that New Zealanders can trust again, we need to rebuild the public service on democratic foundations,not market ones, and restore the intellectual, ethical, and constitutional independence that a functioning state absolutely depends on.
How could that be done?
While feeling like a child while the adults are talking…
I would imagine it would be a directive from Ministers and the likes of Roche.
What party is made up of people with that amount of imagination and courage?
It might need something along the likes of a Royal Commission. A Royal Commission into the harm neo-liberalism has done.
A lot of this doesn’t actually need a revolution, or even especially brave ministers. Some of it is legislative (a new Public Service Act, nuking the Regulatory Standards Act), but most of the real change can be done with powers ministers already have.
Machinery-of-government changes, CE expectations, Crown entity directions, Cabinet circulars, functional leadership: you can reset the operating culture of the entire public service without passing a single new law.
And don’t underestimate CE appointments. Changing who runs agencies changes norms, culture, and the interpretation of “no surprises” far faster than rewriting statutes. A government could shift the whole system’s centre of gravity in 18 months just by appointing different people.
A Royal Commission might help build the political mandate for change, sure. But the decision to act isn’t technical. It's political
Randomising is cool, true, because nature does it. I'd prefer guidance though. There was a political paradigm shift that got us into MMP, pressure-driven, so it ain't unrealistic to expect another wave. The ancient Greeks had a minor deity called necessity, so we can cite it as a viable social archetype.
Often equated with fate, but not by hair-splitters like me! Your notion that a re-arrangement of the deck-chairs could produce a charm effect in 18 months seems feasible. I would support such a political proposal.
Enthralled derives from slavery, so charm offensives captivate people effectively. They voluntarily transform themselves into slaves of a new system quite promptly most of the time. It's why marketers advocate using the delight experience to sell consumers whatever shit is flavour of the month but I'm probably telling you what you know already so I’ll just add that a new Public Service Act should contract signers into ethical conduct.
It ought to be written into their employment contracts to lock the buggers into compliance! I'd also design a charter, to codify expectations generally.
Unfortunately this isn’t something we can fix with better rhetoric or a few governance tweaks. It will require deep structural reform, starting with a complete rewrite of the Public Service Act. The current legislation is still fundamentally built on NPM’s assumptions: fragmentation, contractualism, and a managerialist model that treats public agencies like quasi-corporate silos.
If we want a genuinely democratic, stewardship-oriented public sector, we need legislation that restores collective responsibility, constitutional independence, and real public service neutrality. Not just as aspirational principles but as actual statutory architecture.
We also need to unwind some of the structural anomalies introduced over the last 40 years. Boards on Crown entities, for example, were meant to mimic private-sector governance but in practice have created accountability diffusion and an unnecessary buffer between ministers and the agencies that carry out their mandates. Too often they serve mainly to launder political decisions and shield ministers from responsibility. There’s no compelling democratic reason for most of them to exist.
Likewise, chief executives should be directly accountable to the Public Service Commission for stewardship, integrity, and organisational performance and not to a patchwork of boards, ministers, and hybrid arrangements.
A coherent public service requires coherent oversight.
And we absolutely have to confront one of the biggest failed orthodoxies of the era: the artificial separation of “policy ministries” and “delivery agencies.” The theory was that you’d get purer, more strategic policy by insulating it from operational realities. What we actually got was policy divorced from implementation, and delivery teams blamed for executing ideas they had no role in shaping. Every serious review of public management in the last two decades has concluded that policy–delivery separation is a dead end.
Re-centralising ministries nd restoring integrated organisations where implementation intelligence shapes policy from day one is essential if we want institutional memory, practical wisdom, and coherent capability.
We should also strengthen oversight and transparency by modernising the OIA and properly resourcing a more powerful, better funded Office of the Ombudsman. Trust requires scrutiny, and scrutiny requires capability.
In other words, rebuilding trust means more than better leadership. It means finally acknowledging that the NPM machinery we’ve been running for 35 years has reached the end of its useful life. If we want a public service New Zealanders can truly trust again, we need to rebuild the system around democratic purpose, constitutional integrity, and professional independence.
Bang on! The year was 1984. Remember Orwell's “1984”? That man was a prophet. In a manner of speaking, he predicted what we now know as 'neoliberalism' in all its harshness, duplicity and deception. 1984 was when it began. It has taken 40 years for the reality to hit home and the realisation that despots, psychopaths and neo Nazis are now in charge. Not only in NZ but everywhere. That's the way I see it anyway.
What we have learned in the past 48hrs is not confined to the NZ Police. It began in the 1980s when Richard Prebble (from memory) turfed out the former heads of a scientifically based Govt. entity, and filled their places with a bunch of business oriented managers. They knew not what they were doing. The result was uproar and dissent and the department in question came close to permanently crashing. It was, in fact, the Bolger Govt. which saved it.
What I see now are derivations of that early near catastrophe being repeated around the country and rapidly accelerating under this Govt, who have fallen into the same black hole as their forebears of the 1980s. Until a government comes along that has the courage to wipe the slate clean, and return NZ to a state of "democratic stewardship" nothing will change.
Totally agree Anne.
What Res P says is Bang on too. This has been festering for decades now.
We need a fundamental rethinking of what the public service is for.
I recall pondering that in my first stint with the Greens (early '90s). Making stories in the TVNZ newsroom at the time, I joined the PSA to express solidarity with the leftists (despite that I hadn't taken Labour seriously since Kirk died). My only time as a union member, and I recall voting to go on strike too! I did so with a postmodern stance, out of whimsical nostalgia. I absorbed the notion of class consciousness on an experiential basis then (at uni in the late '60s I just saw it as spectator sport).
Basically the guts is ethos, an ancient Greek concept for mass psychology. I suspect a rationalist might extrapolate ethics from that if the simulated pre-frontal lobotomy resulting from playing the rationalist were to have a less terminal effect on a random rationaliser. You get people (like me) to whom money is always mere means to a bunch of ends and who often make the mistake of assuming that folks can use collective intelligence for collaborative purposes. You know, just like TMP isn't currently doing. Saw that expelled woman hinting in an interview that the duo may be joined by a sympathetic third. I liked her sincerity around that (no hint of game-playing), and she said she still has no idea why they were expelled. She outlined the tribal schism scenario nicely, I thought. Anyway mutuality seems to be a strand of ethos if not the deeper level of it, and mutuality plays out interpersonally as well as in cliques and other groups. More of a sense, feeling-based, than belief system.
The servant ethos, though, is ever so 19th-century. Uncool to try and promote servant identity in politics nowadays. Wokeists would freak out. So one could argue that the actual notion of service has indeed been sabotaged by Labour going for the neolib ideology. I suspect some commentators here would argue from their careers as public servants that the ethos retains loyalty amongst public servants generally. Has that belief been tested via a credible political poll?? Would be interesting to see what proportion agree that they have actually served on that antique basis.
There’s a lot to chew on here, but I think the core point you’re making is actually really important: ethos matters. A public service can survive bad structures for a surprisingly long time if the underlying ethos of stewardship, neutrality, and service is strong.
I’m a current public servant, and in my experience the “old” ethos of serving our communities is still very much alive. Most of my colleagues aren’t there for prestige or money or power. They’re there, at least in part, because they genuinely want to do their bit for the country.
People move between agencies more than they used to, and yes, some of the old institutional identities have faded, but the basic commitment to public good hasn’t gone away.
The problem is that the current state of the public sector is living proof of Goodhart’s law: that "When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure."
And we’ve spent 40 years turning every measure into a target.
The incentives are all wrong. And when the incentives are wrong, even the best ethos gets bent, blunted, or buried under risk-management, KPIs, and managerial box-ticking.
That’s why structural reform matters. Ethos isn’t the issue, the system is.
Agree. The incentive structure is essential, you're quite right to specify that, and it is a design issue. Labour would just give a revision task to govt legal beagles to chew over, but that's how they always recycle problems instead of solving them.
If Labour wised up about that, and contracted a few mass psychology specialists into a task force, we might make genuine progress. Any designer grad who has become a consultant to large orgs would also be a damn good addition.
Nudge theory is so very mid-noughties.
The Obama administration poured a lot of energy into behavioural insights in his second term, and while some interventions showed promise, the overall results are still fairly inconclusive. It’s a tool at the margins: not a foundation for public sector reform.
Behavioural econ is kind of naff. But if we’re talking about institutional design and incentives, Malcolm Sparrow’s work is far more useful. His whole point (and he’s right!) is that effective regulation and public administration depend on:
And what Sparrow shows, over and over, is beautifully simple:
That aligns with what we already know from experience:
That’s Sparrow 101: ministers say what, professionals determine how — and the system actually functions.
We don’t need behavioural psychologists or pop-econ fashions to fix the public sector.
We need what Sparrow called “the regulatory craft”:
Good to see you framing via a tetrad and a triad. Most people read bullet points as mere lists. Only a neopythagorean can get traction via natural archetypes. Doesn't matter if you just did that intuitively – we know from neuroscience that subliminal decision-making has around 98% of the power of the mind behind it, driving it through into behaviour.
I looked the academic dude up & this from his primary text intro is worth featuring, since it promotes a doctrine of opportunism:
I agree that opportunism often produces a crucial stance that shifts the user out of normalcy into progress. Labour folk usually hate it, so good luck…
Gordon Campbell's take seems sensible: https://werewolf.co.nz/2025/11/gordon-campbell-on-the-toxic-police-culture-that-enabled-jevon-mcskimming/
Yet that is what Labour and National always do. Rearrange the deck-chairs. They assume voters are too thick to notice that their strategy is to create the illusion of reform without actually doing reform. Problem is, only Nat/Lab voters prefer delusion to reality, and the other third of the nation ends up rejecting both in consequence. Operating a control system that has an out-of-control trajectory is a loser's option.
The murk gets a tad murkier: https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/11/13/the-unholy-consort-of-a-cover-up-name-suppression/
Deep State methodology is clearly being used: agents were deliberately preventing elected reps in govt getting info about moral corruption in the police, so as to stop them enforcing accountability upon predators within.
Depending on your point of view what we have learned about the police this week is nothing new.
While not covering up the sexual offending they certainly predict their own when it comes to shooting people.
“When taken over the last 10 years, the rate of fatal shootings is 11 times higher in New Zealand than in England and Wales – or six times higher dating back to 1990.”
“Shargin Stephens, a 35-year-old Rotorua man who had been bail checked by police 64 times in 36 days – as late as 2.15am and 3.49am – was shot dead in July 2016, after smashing the windows of a patrol car with a weed slasher”
And the IPCA found the shooting was justified.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/in-depth-special-projects/story/2018834464/licence-to-kill-the-startling-truth-about-new-zealand-s-fatal-police-shootings