Celebrating the millions of small daily acts of service

01/05/2026

There is a photograph from earlier this year that I cannot quite stop thinking about. It shows the new Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, on the W train from Astoria to City Hall, iced coffee in one hand, the other extended to a fellow commuter. He is laughing. The tap-to-ride has just failed at the turnstile, and he has turned the failure into a small joke about the authenticity of the New York experience.

The image is theatrical, of course. It was photographed, filmed, and circulated, and the circulation was the point. Yet what struck me about it was not the staging but the underlying posture: a politician who appears, on the available evidence, to take almost uncomplicated joy in standing alongside the public officials who do their very best, day in and day out, to keep the city running.

The contrast with our own discourse is, I think, worth dwelling on.

It is a striking feature of the contemporary political conversation in Aotearoa, and indeed across most Westminster jurisdictions, that public officials are almost exclusively discussed through the register of suspicion.

We hear, with some regularity, that there are too many public servants. We hear about how they waste money. We hear that they are too independent. Usually, in the same breath, we also hear they are too responsive to the government of the day. We also hear, with even greater incoherence, that the neo-liberal state is the answer, and, alternatively, that government must be larger, though usually this is quickly followed by zero appetite for the accountability that larger government would require. What I seldom hear is anything resembling a celebration of the daily work itself: the millions of small tasks, undertaken in the unglamorous middle of the system, that quietly keep the lights on and the frontline workers safe and effective.

This is not a sentimental observation, for I have read most of the Royal Commissions and most of the Waitangi Tribunal reports. My observations, I would suggest, concern the structural quality of the political discourse on the administrative state.

The political-administrative literature has long held that the dignity of the public service depends, in part, on whether elected principals are willing to stand alongside their officials rather than above or against them.

That point is sometimes framed in terms of public-sector bargains, sometimes in terms of constitutional convention, and sometimes in the more workwomanlike vocabulary I use, namely strategic coherence.

The underlying argument is the same.

Officials need clarity from politicians to do their work; they need protection from politicians to do it well; and they need, occasionally, recognition from politicians to keep doing it at all. The absence of any one of these conditions is, as we have seen in other jurisdictions, corrosive. I think the absence of all three is where the Westminster jurisdictions currently sit.

Mamdani’s particular gesture matters because he appears unafraid. He is not, on the available evidence, fearful of his officials, nor is he performing the more familiar political move of locating himself rhetorically against them. He is, instead, in there with them, supporting their service, while also drawing public attention to the millions of tasks that go on every day in the service that make ordinary lives a little better. Only this morning, I watched him on Instagram taking 311 calls alongside the operators who do this work every shift, listening, redirecting, problem-solving, and using the mayoral platform to remind voters why those daily acts of service matter. That is the posture. Not the photo opportunity, but the fact that the photo opportunity is being spent calling attention to the work of others rather than the work of himself.

That is not a small thing. It is, by contrast, the kind of public posture that has been almost absent from our politics for some time. Remember, I got to serve in Hon Parekura Horomia’s office, so I know it is possible and what it looks like.

I am not arguing for a Mamdani in Wellington. The American mayoral form is not ours, and the temptation to import its theatre would, I suspect, end badly. The argument this post proposes is that the work of celebration is itself a joyful constitutional act, and that while we have the apparatus for calling attention to good works of service, I wonder if we have been somewhat shy about using it.

So, with that in mind, I call your attention to two award regimes worth knowing about and nominating your colleagues for.

Te Hāpai Hapori | The Spirit of Service Awards recognise initiatives and individuals across the wider state sector. Eligibility is generous: central government departments, Crown entities, Public Finance Act Schedule 4A organisations, Offices of Parliament, state-owned enterprises (excluding mixed ownership model companies), tertiary education institutions, and local government organisations all qualify.

Categories include Better Outcomes, Innovation, Whai Ratonga | Māori Crown, Excellence in Public Policy, Young Leader of the Year, Public Sector Director of the Year, and the Lifetime Achievement Award. Past finalists have ranged from cross-agency collaborations involving seventeen partners to small, single-agency, community-led initiatives.

The 2026 entry deadline is Wednesday, 27 May. Details are at publicservice.govt.nz/role-and-purpose/spirit-of-service/spirit-of-service-awards. Get amongst it!

Te Rā Ratonga Tūmatanui | The Public Service Day Awards sit alongside the Spirit of Service Awards and recognise individual public servants in the narrower core: agencies listed in Schedule 2 of the Public Service Act 2020 and Crown agents in Part 1 of Schedule 1 of the Crown Entities Act 2004. There are two categories: the New Zealand Public Service Medal (established by Royal Warrant in 2018) and the Public Service Commissioner’s Commendation for Excellence, the latter explicitly intended for those in delivery roles, frontline, operational, policy, corporate, technical or specialist, who are responsible for the delivery of work rather than its management. These are the public servants keeping the lights on and the doors open.

Nominations for 2026 are due by 13 August. Details are at publicservice.govt.nz/role-and-purpose/spirit-of-service/public-service-day-awards.

So, if you work in or around the public service, the practical question I have for you is whether there is someone or a team in your peripheral vision whom you could reasonably encourage to nominate their mahi.

The most common reason, in my experience, for not nominating is that the work in question is too quiet, too internal, too unshowy to warrant attention. That, I would gently suggest, is precisely the work that the awards exist to surface. The big set-piece initiatives have their own publicity. The quiet translation, sense-making and relational work does not.

There is one further point worth making. Because if you know me, you know I will always have another point. The act of nominating is itself a small public good. It signals, within an agency, that the work being done is seen and valued; it generates, in the preparation of the nomination, a useful institutional record of what was actually achieved and how; and it offers, regardless of outcome, a moment in which colleagues are obliged to articulate to one another why the work mattered. These are not trivial by-products. They are, in fact, much of the reason such regimes exist.

We will, I suspect, not see a prime minister in my lifetime riding the station bus to the Beehive any time soon, and perhaps that is just as well. But the deeper instinct that Mamdani’s morning commute exemplified, namely a politics that takes joy in standing alongside its public officials as they serve their communities, is one we could usefully cultivate by other means.

The awards are one such means. They cost nothing to nominate for* and they remain, even now, somewhat underused.

Ngā mihi nui,

Deb x

*Apologies in advance to the public servants who are now being asked to help prepare nominations.