Free and Frank Advice: Practical Statecraft and What Every Posture Shares

07/03/2026

I set out what the six practitioner postures in my thesis hold in common, the four statements that recur across them, and the two-part test I call practical statecraft, which practitioners used to tell free and frank advice from advice that only resembles it.

This is the eleventh of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. Before I describe the six practitioner postures in the next two posts, I want to set out what those postures share, because the agreement among them is as much a finding as the difference. This post covers the statements that recur across the six factor arrays, the test of practical statecraft that grew out of them, and why that test places part of the obligation on ministers.

In the last post I described the six domains of advisory practice that came out of the Stage One interviews, and in the next two I will describe the six postures that came out of the Q-sort, but I have chosen to start with what those postures hold in common, because in my view a field of disagreement without a shared edge would tell us very little about a convention that ministers and officials still recognise as one obligation. I do three things in this post: first, I set out the statements that recur on the agreement side of the six factor arrays and what they describe when they are read together; second, I explain how the Stage Three validation widened the first of those statements and produced the two-part test I call practical statecraft; and third, I explain why that test reaches the minister as well as the official, and why I keep practical statecraft apart from the pragmatism that Aotearoa’s constitutional culture is known for.

What the six arrays hold in common

In Stage Two, 58 practitioners each sorted the same 34 statements about free and frank advice, and the analysis retained six factors, each of which can be read as an idealised sort, a factor array, showing where every statement sits for that shared viewpoint. Reading the six arrays together, as whole configurations rather than as lists of their most extreme placements, I found that four statements recur on the agreement side in a majority of them, and it is that recurrence across the whole field, more than the height of any one placement, that marks them as shared.

The anchor is Statement 31, that free and frank advice combines expertise, evidence and practical wisdom about implementation, which sits at the agreement end in five of the six arrays, reaches +3 or higher in four, and carries a mean placement of +2.50 across the six. Statement 29, that ministers and officials share responsibility for making free and frank advice work, follows the same pattern and is positive in five arrays, while Statement 30, that free and frank advice is co-produced through speaking and listening, and Statement 34, that the relationship between ministers and senior officials needs constant attention and adjustment, are each positive in four, with Statement 34 the most evenly placed of all. Read in that order, the four describe a sequence running from implementation wisdom, through shared responsibility and co-production, to the relationship that sustains them, and in my reading that sequence is the part of the convention practitioners did not argue about.

The eight sorts that did not define any single posture point the same way, which I take as further evidence that the shared field does not depend on how the factors were drawn. All eight of those hyperplane sorts placed implementation wisdom on the agreement side, with rankings from +2 to +5 and a mean of +3.6, while placing shared responsibility, co-production and relationship unevenly, high in some sorts and low in others. Practitioners who could not be placed cleanly in one posture still placed the strongest of the shared commitments high, and for the most part it was on the other three that they moved between postures.

One statement that might seem to belong with the four sits elsewhere, and the reason it does is instructive. Statement 28, that free and frank advice is an ultimate failsafe used only as a protective measure, reaches the top of two arrays and falls to the rejection end in the larger ones, with the lowest mean of the statements considered (+0.33), the widest spread (a standard deviation of 3.82) and an even split of three positive arrays against three negative. A statement that splits the field that cleanly belongs with the fault lines I will describe in a later post, and keeping it out of the shared field is what lets the shared field mean something.

From implementation wisdom to practical knowledge of consequence

The shared field took its final form in Stage Three, when 88 practitioners, across two wānanga, facilitated workshops and expert interviews, were given the findings back and asked to test them against cases. In the wānanga and workshops, groups were set nine examples of advisory conduct and asked to reason, case by case, whether each sat inside or outside free and frank advice, and in case after case they reached for the same criterion, which was whether the advice brought evidence, expertise and knowledge of consequence together in the relationship between ministers and officials. Advice that pressed a preferred outcome, advice built to please the minister, personal opinion, political advice, advice cut loose from implementation knowledge, and advice that hid its fallibility or kept back part of the picture were all placed outside, and so, in most of the discussions, was blunt speech on its own.

The validation also widened what implementation wisdom meant, and that widening is what turned a shared statement into a test. Implementation wisdom, as Stage One named it, was the delivery side of the advisory relationship, knowledge of how a decision would work once it met the world, but practitioners in Stage Three pressed the idea further and described what ministers need as the whole governing consequence of a decision, its strategic, fiscal, legal, constitutional and evidential weight, taken together with the authority ministers carry to decide and the duty they carry to answer to Parliament for the decision. I call that wider idea practical knowledge of consequence, and in my thesis it is what practical statecraft carries.

Practical statecraft is therefore a two-part test, and the order of the two parts matters. The first part asks about content, the integration of evidence, expertise and practical knowledge of consequence, which draws on the accounts of public service advice as truth, evidence and disinterested judgement (Mulgan, 2012) and of policy knowledge as research evidence, political knowledge and practical implementation knowledge asked for at once (Head, 2008). The second part asks about the collective, whether that content has been brought together between ministers and officials out of their different knowledge, authority and responsibility, and in my view it is the joining of the two parts that asks more of advice than candour alone.

The minister’s part, and the limits of pragmatism

The collective part of the test places some of the obligation on ministers, which is the sharpest claim to come out of Stage Three and one practitioners stated plainly. The advisory-systems literature already describes a supply of advice and a demand for it (Craft & Halligan, 2020), and the public service bargain is an exchange in which loyalties and competencies are owed in both directions (Hood & Lodge, 2006), while one account written from inside the policy system describes the hard part of the work as “making the advice dock tolerably with democratic processes” (Parkin, 2021, pp. 192–193). Practitioners put the same point in terms of practice, holding that ministers have a part in free and frank advice, which is to seek it, to make room for it, to ask the question properly and to receive what comes back, and that where a minister rewards agreement alone the system tends to learn that lesson quickly.

What ministers bring to the making of advice is knowledge officials hold only in part, and the boundary on their contribution is drawn just as clearly. Ministers tend to arrive from a wider range of working lives than officials and, through their electorate work, hear how problems play out in communities (Parkin, 2021), while officials hold the knowledge that a permanent service alone accumulates about implementation, capacity, resistance and unintended consequence (Prebble, 2010). The decision that follows still belongs to the minister, a line the head of the policy profession once drew as “Ours is to advise; Ministers to decide” (Kibblewhite, 2015, p. 5), and in my reading the ministerial part of free and frank advice lies in the making of the account, with the decision left where it constitutionally sits.

The relationship is where both parts of the test are worked out, and the shared placement of Statement 34 records that practitioners treat the relationship as one of the conditions under which advice becomes possible. Trust, on O’Neill’s (2002) account, rests on judgements about another’s competence, honesty and reliability, and applied to the advisory relationship that account explains how difficult advice becomes hearable through a history of accurate work and dependable delivery. A minister who has reason to trust an official has reason to attend to advice that cuts across a preference, and I read the relational placement as the practitioners’ own recognition of that.

Practical statecraft also has to be kept apart from the pragmatism that Palmer finds in Aotearoa’s constitutional culture, an inclination toward working arrangements and settlement in practice (M. S. R. Palmer, 2007). Pragmatism, as I read it, helps explain why a system can treat free and frank advice as essential while leaving it undefined, whereas practical statecraft helps explain why that silence still has limits, because a response can be workable for the immediate political situation and still fall short where evidence, implementation knowledge or knowledge of consequence has thinned. The two concepts answer different questions, and the difference matters most at the edge of the field.

The edge is where the test is hardest to apply, and I have tried to say only as much about it as the evidence allows. The Political Servant places implementation wisdom at −3 and still sits inside practical statecraft, reaching usefulness to government by another route, through protective warning about political consequence, and the Stage Three cases show practitioners placing advice built only around the minister’s preference outside the convention. What the findings establish is that the boundary has an inside and an outside, and what they leave open, for the most part, is how far along that route the inside extends, which is a question one study at one moment cannot settle.

In the next post I turn to the six postures themselves, beginning with how the Q-sort revealed them and with the Institutional Pragmatist, the Democratic Constitutionalist and the Collaborative Sense-Maker.

References

Craft, J., & Halligan, J. (2020). Advising governments in the Westminster tradition: Policy advisory systems in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Cambridge University Press.

Head, B. W. (2008). Three lenses of evidence-based policy. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 67(1), 1–11.

Hood, C., & Lodge, M. (2006). The politics of public service bargains: Reward, competency, loyalty—and blame. Oxford University Press.

Kibblewhite, A. (2015, June). Free, frank and other F-words: Learning the policy road code [Conference presentation]. IPANZ Seminar on Free and Frank Policy Advice, Wellington, New Zealand.

Mulgan, R. (2012, May 30). What future for free and frank advice? [Address]. Institute of Public Administration New Zealand Centennial Lecture, Wellington, New Zealand.

O’Neill, O. (2002). A question of trust: The BBC Reith Lectures 2002. Cambridge University Press.

Palmer, M. S. R. (2007). New Zealand constitutional culture. New Zealand Universities Law Review, 22, 565–608.

Parkin, A. (2021). ‘Why didn’t it work?’ What goes wrong between ministers and officials in making public policy. In S. Mazey & J. Richardson (Eds.), Policy-making under pressure: Rethinking the policy process in Aotearoa New Zealand (pp. 192–201). Canterbury University Press. Prebble, M. (2010). With respect: Parliamentarians, officials, and judges too. Institute of Policy Studies.