The Free and Frank Series: Buzzwords

29/11/2025

This is the seventh instalment in a series exploring what free and frank advice means in Aotearoa’s institutional arrangements. This week, I ask a question that the previous posts have been circling: why has free and frank advice endured when so many other policy concepts have faded? Drawing on Richardson and colleagues’ (2025) framework for understanding how policy buzzwords gain and lose traction, I examine what distinguishes this concept. By the end of this post, I hope to have shown that the ambiguity which proves fatal to most buzzwords at the point of delivery may be precisely what has allowed free and frank advice to persist across decades and administrations.

The working hypothesis of this series is that free and frank advice is unlike other policy buzzwords: it has endured for decades rather than cycling through fashionable obscurity, adapting across different governance architectures without resolving into a stable definition. This post asks why: using a new framework from Richardson et al. (2025) about how policy actors respond to ambiguous concepts. It argues that the ambiguity of free and frank advice may not be a failure to be fixed but a constitutive feature of our policy advisory system so that the ‘concept’ can do its actual work.

There’s a particular frustration familiar to anyone who has worked in public policy in Aotearoa: watching a compelling idea arrive with fanfare, generate months of activity, then quietly disappear before anyone can say what it actually achieved.

Prevention. Co-production. Closing The Gaps. Review of the Centre. Better Public Services. Systems. Well-being. Each term catches fire, shapes strategies, and restructures the purple zone, then fizzles until the next compelling idea comes along, leaving policy practitioners wondering what they were meant to be doing differently, and delivery teams wondering whether they still need to programme the change.

A new article in Policy Sciences by Richardson, Durose, Cairney, and Boswell (2025) offers a framework for understanding this pattern. They call these recurring phrases “buzzwords”: words that become popular partly because they sum up concisely a valuable proposal for change.

The appeal of the “buzzword” lies in its ambiguity. Prevention sounds self-evidently sensible: who could oppose keeping people healthy rather than treating them once they’re sick? But that breadth is what makes the concept difficult to operationalise and problematic for delivery teams. The same quality that generates initial enthusiasm and energy in the policy advisory system becomes the source of eventual abandonment as it is readied for delivery.

In my doctoral work and throughout this series, we have been circling a concept that shares these characteristics but has proven remarkably persistent: free and frank advice. Like prevention, it commands near-universal endorsement. Like prevention, it resists precise definition. Cabinet Minister Bill Birch once observed that asking “what is ‘free and frank advice?’” is a question that defies precise interpretation, because there are as many opinions about it as there are people giving opinions (as cited in Voyce, 1996). He likened defining it to asking how long a piece of string is. So goodness knows why I decided to start a doctorate in that very thing (LOL).

Yet unlike buzzwords such as prevention or better public services that cycle through policy fashion, free and frank advice has endured across decades, adapting rather than fading. So perhaps the buzzwords framework can help us understand why.

What the Tradition Asks of Us

When Richard Mulgan (2012) addressed Hāpai Public (formerly IPANZ) in 2012, more than two decades after the initial state sector reforms, he returned to first principles. Public service advice, he argued, rests fundamentally on “respect for truth and evidence”: a commitment to intellectual integrity that transcends the particular quality of being free and frank.

With some distance, this sounds almost quaint in its formality. Yet, Mulgan was making something essential explicit: the defining characteristic of good public service advice is not merely that officials speak their minds, but that they do so in service of accuracy, balance, and the careful weighing of evidence.

Ministers who preface their statements with “departmental statistics indicate” are relying on this assumption, and opposition politicians seize on instances where ministers appear to have ignored departmental advice. Both assume that the department’s view carries a particular mana.

Safeguarding this reputation, the assumption that public servants maintain standards of judgment that other non-state actors in the policy advisory system cannot match, remains one of the main professional imperatives facing senior officials.

The distinction between state and non-state policy advisors matters because Mulgan recognised something that has only grown more pressing: public servants do not have a monopoly on advising government.

Ministers also operate within the policy advisory system: they listen to their political advisers, consultants, think tanks, lobbyists, Iwi and Hapū, local authorities, and sector and interest groups, all of whom offer analyses designed to reach preferred conclusions.

The marketplace of ideas has become genuinely crowded. In such a landscape, what Mulgan was saying is that advice from the public service is not merely opinion, but something grounded in professional values of integrity and independence, and I would argue ‘implementability and practicality’.

But protecting those values when they’re contested, when evidence itself becomes political, when ministers have many sources of advice to choose from, when the pressure to publish and perform is relentless, requires navigating a fundamental ambiguity.

How do you maintain the confidentiality that allows free and frank counsel while also contributing robustly to public debate? How do you operationalise “integrity” across contexts that pull in different directions? Policy systems don’t solve this through definition alone. They use multiple strategies simultaneously, often in tension with each other.

Three Responses

Richardson et al. (2025) identify three common responses when policy actors confront ambiguous concepts. Each offers a different strategy; none fully resolves the underlying uncertainty, and Richardson et al. argue that they rarely appear in isolation: concepts endure because actors define, deliberate, and do (act) simultaneously. What makes this helpful framework, which is why I am now working on integrating it into my doctoral studies, is that we can see all three responses operating simultaneously in Aotearoa’s attempts to grapple with free and frank advice: and in doing so, we see why Mulgan’s warnings in 2012 about maintaining the integrity of the advisory relationship have only become more acute.

The first response is to define: to reduce ambiguity through prescription. Te Kawa Mataaho has attempted this, issuing guidance under section 19 of the Public Service Act 2020 that specifies free and frank advice must be “politically neutral,” “comprehensive, objective and balanced,” and “honest about where the opportunities, benefits, costs, pitfalls and risks of all options are” (Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission, 2024). The guidance offers simplicity and aids communication. But it is less a definition and more a broad-brush shaping. But as Richardson and her colleagues observe, a too-prescriptive definition leads to rigid application and a concept’s decline when neat boundaries fail to accommodate messy realities.

More troublingly, from Mulgan’s perspective, such definitions often rest on an assumption that free and frank advice is a single thing that can be operationalised in all contexts. Yet Mulgan carefully distinguished between two quite different advisory functions, each with distinct requirements. Broadly, policy analysis is research and evidence for public debate, which can be published, peer-reviewed, and publicly contested. It operates best when it competes openly in the marketplace of ideas. But policy advice, the sensitive consideration of options and politically difficult recommendations that senior officials offer ministers in confidence, requires an entirely different logic. It needs confidentiality precisely so that serious disagreement between ministers and public servants can remain hidden; it needs trust, where that trust is the knowledge that officials will serve the government loyally and in confidence. The characteristics listed in the official guidance from the Public Service Commission don’t tell us how to balance frankness with loyalty, or what completeness means when political and administrative authority blur in the purple zone.

The second response is to deliberate: to bring together key actors to work out collectively the meaning and implications of an idea. Hāpai Public has convened roundtables and conferences precisely for this purpose, with scholars like Richard Mulgan examining the tension between responsiveness and speaking truth to power (Mulgan, 2008, 2012).

Matthew Palmer’s 2013 address to the Fabian Society was also an inflection. He diagnosed a “paucity of free and frank advice” and called for leadership of cultural change, which, of course, sparked debate among former Ministers and chief executives about what might be done (Palmer, 2013).

Andrew Kibblewhite, as Head of the Policy Profession, led sustained engagement about what free and frank advice should mean in practice, attempting to set guardrails through dialogue rather than prescription.

But deliberation faces its own limits. Palmer himself noted the paradox: can we rely on the government to provide policy advice about the provision of policy advice? (Palmer, 2013). Where power relationships constrain actors, specifically where officials’ careers depend on ministerial favour, free and frank expression may be chilled precisely when it matters most.

Moreover, the deliberative processes that might clarify free and frank advice often gloss over the distinction that Mulgan pressed. When practitioners speak of wanting “more free and frank advice,” are they asking for more confidential counsel to ministers, or more robust public contribution to policy debate? Is it possible that the frameworks designed to encourage freeness and frankness are actually pulling in different directions?

The third response is to do: to act regardless of ambiguity, working out the meaning of a concept through practice. The Policy Project represents this approach: building frameworks, toolboxes, and quality standards that allow officials to simply get on with it (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2015).

Andrew Kibblewhite’s leadership in this respect must be acknowledged: he enabled the building of infrastructure that decided not to wait for definitional consensus. On his watch, the Policy Project created practical scaffolding for free, frank, full, focused, without favour, fearless, fallible, and future-looking advice.

While the theoretical debates continued, this work came closest to defining free and frank advice for regulating policy work, ensuring accountability and transmitting learning. But, as with most concepts, this work risks co-option: activities eventually get re-branded without substantive change, which leaves the concept hollow, its radical potential, the willingness to speak truth to power in key moments, lost in accommodation to daily realities.

The Political Nature of Definition

This is also where the buzzwords framework makes something explicit: reducing ambiguity is about exercising power to win arguments and allocate resources, not consulting a dictionary (Richardson et al., 2025).

The question of what free and frank advice means is not a philosophical puzzle. It is a political contest over who defines the boundaries of acceptable official conduct and voice, and in whose interests those boundaries operate.

In Aotearoa, that contest is shaped by Te Tiriti o Waitangi and kāwanatanga obligations, so “free and frank” advice should speak not only to ministerial preferences but to the enduring Te Tiriti relationship.

This explains why different purple-zone configurations yield different operational meanings. Under Bolger and Shipley, advice that failed to address Māori disparities wasn’t merely incomplete; it was inadequate. Under Clark’s opportunities-for-all and lifecycle framework, different questions became central. Under Key and English, performance assurance shaped what completeness meant: noting, of course, the active inclusion of Te Pāti Māori and National Iwi Chairs in the policy advisory system deliberations. Well-being and the reduction of child poverty appeared to drive the Ardern administration, alongside a focus on building the state’s capability to engage with Te Ao Māori.

Each configuration represented a political choice about the Te Tiriti relationships and what officials were expected to attend to. And each carried different implications for how much confidentiality ministers granted advisers, how much analysis was published versus kept private, and how much officials spoke publicly versus through their ministers.

Neither Strategic nor Symptomatic

Mulgan’s other concerns about the pressures on free and frank advice included: the rise of media management, the expansion of ministerial advisers controlling access, and the expectation that policy be “evidence-based” when evidence itself becomes contested. These are all structural features of the purple zone that no amount of definition can simply wish away. They shape whether officials and ministers* can afford to be frank, what frankness costs them, and whose interests the definition serves.

Given these structural pressures and this fundamental ambiguity about the advisory system’s own role, the question becomes: is an unclear definition a strategic choice or a symptom of deeper disconnection? The buzzwords framework suggests a third possibility: the ambiguity is constitutive.

Free and frank advice endures not despite remaining undefined, but because it remains undefined. It operates in two fundamentally different registers simultaneously: as confidential counsel to ministers, and as a public contribution to policy debate. The moment you define it too precisely, you force a choice between these. You cannot write rules that govern both advice (which needs confidentiality) and analysis (which needs openness) without losing something essential in translation.

The Richardson framework shows why: define it, and you fix one meaning; deliberate about it, and you impose consensus that won’t hold across contexts; do it, and you risk forgetting why the distinction mattered. The ambiguity is what allows all three responses to operate in parallel without cancelling each other out.

Yet this is not costless. Mulgan was careful to distinguish between different types of advice work and their different requirements. When that distinction collapses: when the push to make all advice “free and frank” in the same way fails to attend to context, something vital gets lost. Put bluntly, the protections and expectations around confidential advice cannot simply be applied to all advice or all analysis without changing what the concept does. Officials may retreat into caution, so the analytical and advisory lines are chilled. Or they speak out, but without confidentiality, so they undermine the trust that enables them to speak freely and frankly to ministers in the first place.

This doesn’t mean my attempts to define it don’t matter. For all the other various attempts to explain, deliberate about, and enact free and frank advice have left cumulative legacies: narrowing frames of reference, establishing shared assumptions, and prompting tangible action. But it does mean we, as in me, should be cautious about expecting any single definition to fully resolve the ambiguity. The ghost in the machine may need to remain somewhat spectral to do its work: precisely because the work it must do operates across multiple contexts that pull in different directions.

The work of free and frank advice continues. But it continues in an environment Mulgan identified and which has only intensified: compressed media cycles, the multiplication of advice sources, the constant temptation to remake advice as “evidence-based” when the evidence itself is politically contested. These pressures are not incidental to the problem of defining free and frank advice: they are central to understanding why definition remains so difficult, and why the ambiguity, frustrating as it is, may be doing necessary work.

The buzzwords framework makes something essential explicit: the ambiguity of free and frank advice is not a failure to be fixed but may be a constitutive feature of the advisory system. The concept endures not despite remaining undefined but because it remains undefined. It operates in two fundamentally different registers simultaneously, as confidential counsel and as public contribution, and the moment one defines it too precisely, one forces a choice between them.

Next in the Series

Next week, we turn to the idea of political economy and what it might offer us regarding how free and frank advice actually operates. The week after that, we will rattle through the evolution of the concept in statute, so we can trace its whakapapa, because that lineage tells us a lot: we have moved from protecting an information product to describing a behaviour.

References

Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. (2015). Free and frank advice. The Policy Project. https://www.dpmc.govt.nz/our-programmes/policy-project/policy-advice-themes/free-and-frank-advice

Mulgan, R. (2008). How much responsiveness is too much or too little? Australian Journal of Public Administration, 67(3), 345–356.

Mulgan, R. (2012). What future for free and frank advice? Address to IPANZ, 30 May 2012.

Palmer, M. S. R. (25 November 2013). The importance of free and frank advice from the public service [Address to Rethinking Public Service: the PSA/Fabian Society Seminar Series]. Wellington, New Zealand.

Richardson, L., Durose, C., Cairney, P., & Boswell, J. (2025). How should policy actors respond to buzzwords? Three ways to deal with policy ambiguity. Policy Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-025-09596-3

Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission. (2024). Free and frank advice. https://www.publicservice.govt.nz/guidance/principles-guidance/free-and-frank-advice

Voyce, E. W. (1996). The provision of free and frank advice to government [Master’s thesis, Victoria University of Wellington].

*Author’s note: Much of the discourse on free and frank advice focuses on how officials and ministers speak and listen to one another. But one of the interesting insights from my doctoral research is that free and frank advice operates across multiple registers: between ministers at different levels, between coalition partners, between portfolio ministers governing shared outcomes, and between ministers inside and outside of Cabinet. Several interviewees have shared archival access showing just how candid these inter-ministerial exchanges were and remain. This matters because it deepens the argument about why ambiguity may also be constitutive: for there’s no single definition that can govern both the frankness ministers need with each other and the robustness and rigour they owe to public debate in explaining collective decisions.