The Free and Frank Series: Working in the Purple Zone: Where Theory Meets Daily Reality

01/11/2025

This is the fifth instalment in a series exploring what free and frank advice means in Aotearoa’s constitutional arrangements. Last week, I mapped the purple zone as an institutional space. This week, I bring it to life through the people who actually work in it. Drawing on Rose Cole (2022)’s (2022) research into portfolio private secretaries, this post examines what it looks like to navigate dual accountability on a daily basis, serving both a chief executive and a minister’s office simultaneously. By the end of this post, I hope to have shown that the human cost of this ambiguity is real, and that understanding it matters for understanding why free and frank advice resists the kind of tidy definition we might prefer.

Last week, we traced how the purple zone evolved from Matheson’s (1995) strategic conversation through increasingly elaborate infrastructure across successive governments: with each reconfiguration reshaping what free and frank advice could mean in practice. But understanding the purple zone as abstract management infrastructure misses something crucial: it’s also a workplace where real people navigate competing accountabilities every single day. Rose Cole’s 2022 PhD research locates the purple zone precisely and, in doing so, reveals what successive governments’ decisions to add or remove integrative machinery mean for the portfolio private secretaries who must serve two masters simultaneously: the minister as immediate principal, and the department as employer and career home. Today’s post explores Cole’s findings about this “very dicey minefield” and what the human experience of working in the purple zone reveals about why free and frank advice resists definition, and why that resistance, despite its costs, might be necessary.

Cole’s research reveals three reasons why free and frank advice must remain undefined: the physical location where integration occurs, the dual accountability that creates impossible tensions, and the human cost of navigating ambiguity without procedural support. Each dimension illuminates why attempting to define free and frank advice precisely would freeze it into a single configuration when it must adapt across changing infrastructure.

From Process to Place

Where Matheson described the purple zone as a strategic conversation between ministers and officials, Cole locates it precisely: the minister’s office. Not a metaphorical space where blue politics and red administration blend, but the actual institutional habitat where political craft and public administration converge, where “politics and administration converge to transform political will into administrative action.”

Once you understand the purple zone as a physical workplace rather than an abstract process, different questions become possible. You can ask not just what the purple zone does, but what it’s like to work there, and what it’s like to make sense of it, and potentially more crucially, how successive governments add or remove integrative infrastructure and how the humans operating in that space interpret it.

Understanding who works in that space reveals why infrastructure changes matter so profoundly. A minister’s office is staffed by a mix of partisan and non-partisan advisers, each with different commitments and accountabilities.

Senior private secretaries, press secretaries, and political advisers bring political commitment and partisan perspective. Portfolio private secretaries, public servants seconded from departments, bring administrative and implementation expertise as well as institutional knowledge to the office. In Cole’s work, it is this second group, the non-partisan apolitical advisers, who illuminate why free and frank advice resists definition: for they must navigate between two worlds simultaneously.

Servants of Two Masters

Portfolio private secretaries serve dual principals simultaneously: the minister as their immediate principal, and the department, which remains their employer and career home.

This dual accountability, suggests Cole, creates profound complications. They must maintain political neutrality whilst working in an increasingly politicised environment. They must transform political will into administrative action whilst preserving professional integrity. And they must offer what they understand as free and frank advice whilst navigating these competing pressures daily. As one of Cole’s participants put it, there’s “a real art to maintain[ing] your relationships through that very dicey minefield every single day and how to not burn your bridges [with the department] and still get stuff done.”

How officials navigate this dual accountability connects directly to the historical evolution we traced last week. When Bolger-Shipley’s SRA frameworks were in place, private secretaries had structured mechanisms for navigating between their departmental obligations, including Article Three Te Tiriti commitments and ministerial priorities. If you were a portfolio private secretary working in a minister’s office in 1997, advice that failed to address Māori disparities reduction wasn’t merely incomplete; the SRA infrastructure made it inadequate. You had procedural scaffolding that made specific questions mandatory rather than merely optional. The purple zone’s integrative machinery created a structured space for officials to speak frankly about whether advice honoured Te Tiriti by closing disparities between Māori and non-Māori, without that frankness depending entirely on individual courage.

When that infrastructure disappeared under Clark’s opportunity-for-all and lifecycle frameworks, the burden of navigating dual accountability for Article Three Te Tiriti matters shifted entirely onto individual officials. Private secretaries found themselves navigating between their minister and their department without the structured channels that once made frank advice procedurally expected rather than personally risky. The essential quality of free and frank advice remained constant as a constitutional expectation, but the form it takes, the questions it must answer, and the frameworks it must engage with all shifted as governments reconfigured the workspace. This is precisely why defining free and frank advice rigidly might be unwise: for it must operate across different purple zone configurations, adapting its form whilst maintaining its essential character. Noting, of course, none of us is really sure what its essential character is.

The Evolving Role

But infrastructure changes didn’t just affect how private secretaries navigated dual accountability. Cole’s research reveals that the role itself evolved as governments added and removed purple zone machinery. Private secretaries who served in the 1990s, before political advisers became common in all offices, described providing direct policy advice to ministers: engaging in “long, long discussions” as ministers developed their thinking on policy direction and impact. The purple zone furniture was simpler then, but the advisory relationship was direct.

By contrast, those serving after 2000, as political advisers proliferated and purple zone infrastructure became more elaborate, described fundamentally different work. Their role had become predominantly administrative: processing correspondence, reviewing briefings, and commissioning advice from departments. The advisory function had been crowded out by both political advisers and the demands of managing increasingly complex integrative machinery. As one participant observed, the work was no longer intellectually demanding: “taking a draft letter that somebody has written, proofreading it, referring it to the minister”.

This evolution from direct policy advice to administrative processing illuminates why free and frank advice may not be procedurally mandated or precisely defined. The same role title could mean fundamentally different work depending on the surrounding infrastructure and the other actors in the minister’s office. In one configuration, “free and frank” used to mean direct policy challenge in long evening conversations. In another, it meant ensuring departmental advice reaches the minister intact, but without spelling mistakes, through layers of political filtering, or navigating the performance frameworks that shape what counts as adequate advice. Define the concept rigidly to serve one context, and you render it inadequate for others.

The Human Cost of Constitutional Wisdom

This adaptability across different purple-zone configurations might seem like an elegant constitutional design. Yet Cole’s research reveals profound costs to this flexibility. While productive ambiguity may be constitutionally wise, preserving free and frank advice’s ability to adapt across different governments’ approaches, it creates profound challenges for those working in the purple zone daily.

Each infrastructure reconfiguration, each rearrangement of the furniture, requires officials to renegotiate what free and frank advice means in practice without clear guidance about how to navigate between their dual principals.

The daily reality of operating in this ambiguous space emerges vividly in Cole’s interviews. Participants described navigating “a very dicey minefield every single day.” The purple zone isn’t just an abstract constitutional space where strategic conversations happen. It’s a daily lived reality shaped by whatever infrastructure successive governments provide, or remove. When Key-English built their performance frameworks, officials had systematic channels for free and frank advice about whether initiatives worked and produced the outcomes as promised. When Ardern dramatically simplified that structure and added a ‘wellbeing’ message, those same officials lost that structure but remained accountable for frank advice without any procedural scaffolding.

This pattern across governments, infrastructure added, then removed, then reconfigured, suggests something about why we’ve never defined free and frank advice precisely. Perhaps our unwillingness isn’t a failure of clarity but an exercise in wisdom born of experience. A rigid definition might freeze the concept into a single purple-zone configuration, preventing it from adapting as governments reshape the institutional workspace to match their governing philosophies. Yet as Cole’s research reminds us, this adaptability comes at a human cost. Each reconfiguration creates “additional tension, complexity and personal challenge” for those navigating the minister’s office daily, serving two masters with whatever tools the current government has chosen to provide.

The pattern emerging from Cole’s research is stark. Too much infrastructure creates an iron cage that constrains rather than enables integration. Too little leaves political will unmoored from administrative capability, and officials without the structured channels that once made frank advice procedurally expected rather than personally risky. Yet in either configuration, free and frank advice is still expected, if sometimes not welcome. So perhaps the concept’s resistance to definition preserves its ability to operate across this spectrum, adapting its form whilst maintaining its essential character. But it does so by requiring individual – often junior – officials to bear the weight of constitutional ambiguity in their daily work, balancing dual principals through what one participant called “a real art”: the art of not burning bridges whilst still getting stuff done.

Discovery: The Real Art

Cole’s research reminds me that free and frank advice exists not in statutes or frameworks but in the daily interpretative work of real people making sense of impossible situations. The “real art” her participants describe of navigating dual principals, adapting to infrastructure changes, balancing frankness with relationships, is not one that can be captured by analysing formal institutions or structural arrangements alone. It requires understanding how people interpret their roles, construct meaning from ambiguity, and act within constraints. This is precisely why Rhodes and Bevir’s (2003) interpretative approach increasingly feels like the right frame for my doctoral work. Institutional theory can map the purple zone’s design, but it can’t explain why the same furniture means different things to different officials, or how free and frank advice persists when the arrangements disappear entirely. That requires an interpretative method: attending to the beliefs, meanings, and practices through which officials make sense of the ghosts in the machine. If free and frank advice operates through what Cole’s participants call “a real art,” then understanding what free and frank advice is means understanding how that art gets its meaning, and then how it is practised, negotiated, and passed on, not just what structures and institutions surround it.

Cole’s (2022) research makes visible what institutional analysis alone cannot: the human cost of constitutional ambiguity. The “real art” her participants describe, of navigating dual principals without burning bridges, is not taught in induction programmes. It is learned through observation and accumulated experience. But dual accountability, it turns out, undersells the complexity. Officials navigate not two masters but many.

Next Week

Next week, we’ll explore how this challenge of navigating multiple accountabilities extends beyond the formal relationship between ministers and officials. We’ll examine the authorising environment and how advisory relationships must navigate multiple sources of authority and legitimacy, not just the dual principals Cole identified but the broader political economy that shapes what counts as legitimate advice.

References

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

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