The Free and Frank Series: The Purple Zone

25/10/2025

This is the fourth instalment in a series exploring what free and frank advice means in Aotearoa’s institutional arrangements. Having traced the public service bargain and its fraying, I turn this week to the institutional space where political and administrative authority actually meet. Alex Matheson and Howard Fancy (1995) named this “the purple zone”: the territory where the blue of politics and the red of administration blend into something that formal organisational charts never capture. By the end of this post, I hope to have shown that successive governments have quietly reconfigured this space, and that each reconfiguration has reshaped what free and frank advice needs to contain.

There’s a moment in every advisory relationship when the neat boundaries between “political” and “administrative” collapse. A policy proposal that seems purely technical turns political. A political decision requires implementation expertise. An official’s judgment conflicts with ministerial instincts. Last week, we explored the public service bargain: an invisible contract that Christopher Hood (2011), a New Zealander, revealed governs how ministers and officials relate to one another. But that abstract bargain must become operational somewhere. Alex Matheson and Howard Fancy gave that space a name in November 1995¹: the “purple zone,” where blue politics and red administration merge in strategic conversation. Today, this post traces how Aotearoa built its purple zone infrastructure for that integration, and how successive governments have reshaped it: each time potentially changing what free and frank advice could mean in practice.

Traditional public administration theory rests on a fundamental distinction between political and administrative roles. Politicians make value judgments and policy decisions. Administrators implement those decisions through neutral, professional expertise. This politics-administration dichotomy has shaped how we think about government for over a century.

Yet as Matheson observed through his work in Aotearoa’s State Services Commission, this dichotomy never worked cleanly in practice. The public management reforms of the 1980s had made this painfully clear. In attempting to separate purchaser from provider, policy from operations, the reforms had created what he called “problems of co-ordination” and given departments “a very short planning horizon.”

The purple zone emerged as the solution: not planned but evolved and emergent, not designed but discovered by a group of central agency officials grappling with flaws in the 1980s reforms and the need to better support collective decision-making.

As Hajer and Wagenaar (2003) observe, officials inevitably make choices with political implications when interpreting policy, allocating resources, or interacting with stakeholders. Politicians inevitably become involved in administrative details when they try to ensure their policies are implemented effectively.

The purple zone is where these realities become impossible to ignore. It’s the space where political judgment and administrative expertise must be integrated rather than separated. It’s where the formal boundaries between roles dissolve and where the real work of governance happens. And crucially, it’s where our ghost in the machine – free and frank advice – appears to find its natural habitat.

Building the Integration Infrastructure

Matheson’s (1995) research, documented in his work with Howard Fancy, then the OECD, and then in collaborations with Gerald Scanlan and Ross Tanner, revealed that the challenge in the purple zone isn’t maintaining separation between political and administrative roles; it is about integrating them effectively. This requires different capabilities than either pure political leadership or pure administrative management.

Matheson documented how Aotearoa developed specific mechanisms for this integration. Strategic Result Areas (SRAs) that crossed portfolio boundaries. Key Result Areas (KRAs) that anchored departmental contributions. And most importantly, the ongoing “strategic dialogue” between ministers and officials, enabled by these instruments through various strategic intentions and monitoring documents.

But the purple zone was not static. The Bolger and Shipley SRAs and KRAs were whole-of-government mechanisms that crossed portfolio boundaries to coordinate around shared outcomes. Crucially, at least from my point of view, they included explicit targets for reducing disparities between Māori and non-Māori: embedding the obligations of Te Tiriti article three into the purple zone’s integrative machinery. For officials offering advice on any significant initiative, this infrastructure made certain questions mandatory, shaping what ultimately counted as complete, as well as free and frank advice.

The Clark government that followed initially allowed the reshaping of the SRA and KRA architecture through the Social Report framework, and later through the Families Young and Old framework: that second framework was innovative by world standards, organising the purple zone around lifecycle stages rather than other coordinating principles. Yet this reframing came with a significant loss: the explicit focus on Māori disparities reduction disappeared. So while the purple zone’s integrative mechanisms continued, they also became silent on what the Bolger and Shipley purple zone had made explicit. Advice didn’t become less free and frank: it came differently framed, organised around different priorities. Closing the gaps between Māori and non-Māori was not one of those priorities.

The Key-English governments matured the purple zone through the Better Public Services result areas, the Performance Improvement Framework, and numerous other strategic assurance systems, including four-year plans with integrated budget and workforce planning tools and input costing tools that could benchmark back-office spend across the system. It also introduced the Whānau Ora outcomes framework as a cross-government tool. Of course, given I train Gateway reviewers in Australia and Aotearoa, let’s not forget how these reviews provided (and still provide) structured checkpoints for significant investments. None of these were merely technical management tools; they were purple zone mechanisms designed to align political priorities with administrative capability across extended timeframes and multiple agencies, and build confidence between the political and administrative authorising environment through performance assurance.

What Matheson had identified as a strategic conversation between ministers and officials had, within twenty years, evolved into an elaborate infrastructure for integration. The purple zone expanded from the interface between individual ministers and their departments to encompass cross-agency collaboration, long-term planning, and systematic performance management.

The Iron Cage

But this evolution came at a cost. Derek Gill and Bill Ryan (2011)’s research revealed that the purple zone had become overburdened and overly complex: what they characterised as an “iron cage” of performance management. The elaborate frameworks meant to enable integration had begun to constrain it. Formal documents were “irrelevant as soon as they were written,” yet the system demanded their production. The purple zone had created its own performance cage. We will return to Derek and Bill’s work in late November, as it forms a critical foundation for developing a workable definition of free and frank advice.

The Ardern Labour government elected in 2017 represented another shift in approach. Under that administration, much of the purple zone infrastructure was simplified or set aside, and the elaborate cross-agency mechanisms, as well as the outcome and impact measures, were made less visible. What remained was a focused goal: reduce child poverty in the context of “wellbeing”. A worthy objective, certainly, but one that now operated without the underlying infrastructure developed over decades. Political will without administrative integration mechanisms. The purple zone had evolved once more: simpler perhaps, but also thinner, and less able to support ministers with either a performance narrative or an outcomes story when re-election time arrived. Under the Ardern and then Hipkins administrations, the structured spaces where certain kinds of free and frank advice had not just been possible but procedurally expected had begun to fade.

The Relational Foundation

That said, the purple zone is also relational. It’s not just about mechanisms. As Matheson emphasised, it emerged not through formal design but through “a combination of frustration with a blinkered and over-specified performance regime and the desire to explore the new freedom.” It’s not about individual roles or formal procedures; it is also about how different actors with different sources of authority and expertise work together to achieve governance outcomes.

Peter Shergold (2007), adapting the concept for Australia, captured this when he wrote that effectiveness in the purple zone “will depend less upon applying a contractual framework to the respective roles and responsibilities of Minister and Secretary/Chief Executive, than upon establishing an effective working relationship between them.” The purple zone is built on relationships, not rules. Maybe the purple zone sheds light on why free and frank advice can’t be reduced to procedural requirements or statutory obligations.

Maybe the relational foundation explains why neither free and frank advice nor the purple zone itself can be regulated into existence. As Royce Elliott’s (2019) report for the Institute of Public Administration in New Zealand on the 1996 colloquy noted, participants worried that wherever joint and overlapping responsibilities occur in a highly political environment, there will inevitably be tensions, opportunities for passing the buck, and problems in determining who is to blame when things go awry. The purple zone requires not just formal mechanisms but what Jonathan Boston (1996) refers to as keen consciences and a capacity to explain the subtleties of the situation to an inherently suspicious public.

The Evolution of Strategic Space

Matheson’s later work with the OECD traced how the purple zone concept spread internationally, as it was adapted by different Westminster systems facing similar challenges. Each country’s purple zone reflected its unique constitutional arrangements, yet all shared common features: the need for strategic conversation, the challenge of integration, and the complexity of accountability.

In Aotearoa, as we saw above, the purple zone has evolved through multiple phases. The 1984 economic crisis had exposed the inability of centralised authority to cope with complexity. The subsequent reforms created new problems of atomisation and short-termism. The purple zone emerged as the space where these problems could be addressed: not through returning to centralisation nor accepting fragmentation, but through creating what Matheson called “a strategic governor” linking political vision with administrative operation.

For two decades, successive governments built on this foundation, developing increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for managing the integration challenge. Each government adapted the infrastructure to its priorities and governing philosophy. The challenge now is whether we can maintain the purple zone’s integrative capacity in simpler forms: learning from both the iron cage and its simplification.

Why We Cannot Define It

This evolution reveals something crucial about why free and frank advice resists definition. What counted as complete advice under one purple zone configuration differs from another. Under Bolger and Shipley, advice on any significant initiative that failed to address Māori disparities reduction wasn’t merely incomplete; it was inadequate. Under Clark’s lifecycle framework, different questions became mandatory. Under Key and English, performance and outcomes assurance with cross-agency coordination became expected elements. Under Ardern and Hipkins, simpler framing and the language of “wellbeing” prevailed.

The infrastructure in the purple zone shapes not just how advice is given but what advice must contain to be considered adequate. An official offering free and frank advice in 1997 needed to address different questions than one doing so in 2007, or 2017, or today. It is possible that the essential quality – fullness, frankness, professional judgment, evidence, and speaking truth to power -remained constant. But the form that quality takes, the questions it must answer, and the framing it must use to engage ministers all shift as the purple zone itself evolves.

Perhaps our unwillingness to define free and frank advice precisely isn’t a failure of clarity but an exercise in wisdom. A rigid definition might freeze the concept into a single purple-zone configuration, preventing it from adapting as governments reshape the integrative infrastructure to align with their priorities and governing philosophies. The productive ambiguity we’ve discussed throughout this series so far isn’t accidental: it may in fact be what allows free and frank advice to remain meaningful across different purple zone architectures, and in doing so honour both democracy and ensure the official’s role in supporting ministers in their accountability to Parliament and the public.

But too much infrastructure creates an iron cage that can potentially constrain rather than enable. Too little leaves political will unmoored from administrative capability. But in either configuration, free and frank advice must still be possible. The concept’s resistance to definition preserves its ability to operate across this spectrum, adapting its form whilst maintaining its essential character.

As Matheson observed, the purple zone is where “a critical element in coherent government policy was the understanding amongst the key players of the intended direction of the whole.” It’s where strategic conversation creates shared meaning without requiring a unified definition. It’s where free and frank advice, our ghost in the machine, finds form and function without losing its essential mystery.

The purple zone reveals a second layer. Free and frank advice must operate across different configurations of integrative machinery, each of which reshapes what advice needs to contain. A rigid definition would freeze the concept into a single configuration. But what does it actually mean to work in this space, day after day, navigating its competing demands?

Next in the Series

Today, we’ve traced how the purple zone evolved from Matheson’s strategic conversation through increasingly elaborate infrastructure across successive governments. We’ve seen how these changes could shape what free and frank advice means and how it operates. But what does it actually mean to work in that space and give free and frank advice?

The purple zone isn’t just a theoretical construct or a management framework. Practically speaking, it’s also a workplace, an institutional location, a daily reality for those who must navigate it. Next week, we’ll explore what Rose Cole (2022)’s groundbreaking research reveals about the human experience of working in the purple zone, and what this tells us about how free and frank advice actually operates in practice. The week after that, we move to the authorising environment and political economy.

¹ The purple zone concept was first presented by Howard Fancy and Alex Matheson in their paper “Future directions in public management in New Zealand: towards strategic management” delivered at the Public Sector Convention, Wellington, November 1995. The concept was further developed by Matheson in collaboration with Gerald Scanlan and Ross Tanner in their paper “Strategic Management in Government: Extending the Reform Model in New Zealand” for the State Services Commission, and in Matheson’s 1998 article “Governing strategically: the New Zealand experience” published in Public Administration and Development.

References

Cole, R. (2022). Purple zone practitioners: Portfolio private secretaries in New Zealand ministerial offices [Doctoral dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington].

Elliott, R. (2019). Understanding ministerial advisers and the public service bargain: A New Zealand perspective [Master’s thesis, Victoria University of Wellington].

Gill, D., & Ryan, B. (2011). Future state: Directions for public management in New Zealand. Victoria University Press.

Hajer, M. A., & Wagenaar, H. (Eds.). (2003). Deliberative policy analysis: Understanding governance in the network society. Cambridge University Press.

Matheson, A., & Fancy, H. (1995). Future directions in public management in New Zealand. Paper presented to the Public Service Senior Management Conference.

Shergold, P. (2007). What really happens: An inside account of policy making. In J. Wanna (Ed.), A passion for policy (pp. 91–110). ANU Press.