Free and Frank Advice: What follows, what remains open, and the puzzle returned

11/07/2026

I close the series by setting out what the findings mean for guidance and capability in Aotearoa, where the study reaches its limits, and how the puzzle that opened the thesis looks once free and frank advice is read as a bounded plurality.

This is the last of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice in Aotearoa. In it I set out the practical implications of the findings, the limits of the study and the research those limits point to, and I return to the case that opened the thesis.

Across this series I have argued that free and frank advice is worked out in practice, that it takes the form of a bounded plurality of six postures distinguished by four fault lines and kept within one convention by practical statecraft, and that Te Tiriti o Waitangi marks the edge of that field. In this final post I do three things: first, I set out what the findings imply for the way free and frank advice is recognised and discussed in Aotearoa; second, I set out the limits of the study and the research those limits point to; and third, I return to the puzzle that opened the thesis and restate it.

Implications for guidance, capability and the boundary

The first implication concerns guidance, which currently invokes free and frank advice as though its working meaning were already known, and in part describes free and frank advice as frank, which makes the reasoning circular. That circularity gives limited help to officials judging what the obligation requires of them, to ministers judging whether they are receiving free and frank advice or meeting resistance and disloyalty, and to anyone later asked to decide between those readings. In my view the bounded plurality gives guidance a more differentiated vocabulary, one that recognises the legitimate forms free and frank advice can take and identifies the point at which advice has ceased to meet the threshold of free and frank advice as the thesis maps it.

The second implication concerns capability, because if free and frank advice operates through situated judgement then capability development needs to move past repeating the principle. Phrases such as “speak truth to power” give limited help when an official must decide how to advise a minister who has a mandate, on evidence that is uncertain, with material implementation risk, when timing matters and the relationship must continue after the advice is given. The four fault lines give practitioners language for tensions they already work through, and the validation stage found that free and frank advice tends to be learned through modelling, correction and exposure more than through formal instruction. I would like to see capability development shift from exhortation to judgement, using the fault lines to help officials recognise the kind of free and frank advice a particular situation may require.

The third implication follows from practical statecraft, because if the shared test includes practical knowledge of consequence then capability must reach past evidence, analysis and independence alone. Free and frank advice requires knowledge of what a policy will ask of the system, how it will be carried into delivery, where it may fail and who will bear the cost if it does, and that is both a capability question for officials and a system question about whether delivery knowledge, operational constraint, institutional memory and front-line experience have reliable routes back into ministerial advice (Head, 2008). Where that knowledge is weak, delayed or filtered out, advice may still look free and frank while straining to meet the threshold of practical statecraft. In my reading, advice that falls short of that threshold also falls short of free and frank advice as the thesis maps it.

The fourth implication concerns the boundary between free and frank advice and the many other forms of candour ministers now receive, from political advisers, consultants, lobbyists, experts, academics, stakeholders, Iwi and Hapū, local government and think tanks, within what the advisory systems literature describes as a plural advisory system (Craft & Halligan, 2020). Some of these actors understand themselves to be giving free and frank advice. The practitioners in this study treated advice as free and frank where it met the two-part test of practical statecraft, its content the integration of evidence, expertise and practical knowledge of consequence, brought together between ministers and officials out of their different knowledge, authority and responsibility, and where it was tied to implementation responsibility and institutional accountability. That is why, in my view, free and frank advice remains a particular obligation of the public service in a crowded advisory field.

Limits and the research that follows

The limits of the study follow from the same design choices that made it possible, and the findings identify a patterned account within this study while leaving open how widely that account is understood or practised across Aotearoa. The study focused on the relationship between ministers and officials, where the statute places the obligation, and other advisory actors appear mainly as setting. Q-methodology identifies coherent viewpoints among those who took part, and it leaves open how common those viewpoints are across the public service, how they are distributed by agency, seniority or role, and whether the same structure would appear in a different sample (Watts & Stenner, 2012). I read the six postures as empirically based and analytically useful, and I would resist any reading of them as a census of the public service.

Two further limits matter to me as much as any limit of method. The study began from starting points other than kāwanatanga, rangatiratanga, tikanga, mātauranga Māori or Māori authority as organising concepts for the advisory relationship, and it leaves a Te Tiriti-grounded account of free and frank advice to later work, which in Aotearoa is a limit of real consequence. The study also captured practitioner meanings at one point in time, after the Public Service Act 2020, and those meanings may shift as political conditions, guidance and ministerial practice change. In my view these edges of the map should guide how the findings are used.

The research programme that follows extends from those limits. It includes the remainder itself and what it may be displacing in practice; an account of free and frank advice that begins from Te Tiriti, for which the constitutional transformation work of Matike Mai Aotearoa supplies an architecture (Mutu & Jackson, 2016); the routes by which implementation knowledge returns to the centre; and comparative work across Westminster systems. The question I find most pressing is how officials learn free and frank advice, since the five newer professionals who completed the Q-sort came close to the factors without loading cleanly on any of them, which may suggest a learned craft, and since the Moment Chooser’s craft of timing drew the strongest recognition in Stage Three while resting on the thinnest scholarly literature of the four fault lines. The acquisition of that skill has been described in Aotearoa as an apprenticeship, closer to learning the road code through use than learning a rule by recitation (Kibblewhite, 2015), and in my view research that follows how officials learn to choose the moment would serve both the question of craft and a literature still taking shape.

The puzzle returned

The thesis opened with the treatment of Derek Leask and Nigel Fyfe after the inquiry into leaks from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which the Ombudsman later found to have been a failure of process (Paterson, 2016). I read it as a failure of recognition as well, because the system lacked a vocabulary developed enough to distinguish disloyalty from principled candour, resistance from institutional memory, or political opposition from professional warning, and free and frank advice was present as a value in the background without yet appearing as an analytical category able to protect the officials whose conduct was being judged. The original inquiry read the conduct through loyalty, neutrality and compliance with approved channels (Rebstock, 2013), and the bounded plurality accepts those matters as real while showing that they form only part of the field. In my view the original failure was conceptual as well as procedural.

Read through the bounded plurality, the officials in that case can be understood as acting from a posture concerned with institutional integrity, public consequence and implementation wisdom, because they had knowledge of how a major restructuring would affect the Ministry’s capability to serve current and future governments. That is the kind of practical statecraft the permanent public service is expected to contribute, and such advice, though unwelcome, stays within the convention. Had the bounded plurality been available, an inquiry might have asked whether the conduct served practical statecraft, distinguished opposition to a government from advice about institutional consequence, and recognised that persistence in raising concerns can be one legitimate form of advisory duty. Conceptual clarity could never have guaranteed fairness, although in my view it would have made the damaging characterisation harder to sustain.

The case matters because others resemble it, and practitioners described other moments when advice was recharacterised after the event, when professional judgement became resistance, and when the safest path became advice that would be welcomed more than advice that was needed. The convention is fragile in a particular way, because whether officials are brave enough to speak is only part of it, and the rest lies in whether the system can recognise what they are doing when they do. I began the thesis expecting to find a definition, or at least a contest over the terms of one, and what I found were practitioners who were clear-minded about free and frank advice and who were managing real tensions with skill, judgement and care. Their disagreement, in my reading, is the form taken by a convention that democratic government requires and leaves finally open.

The puzzle can therefore be restated, and I restate it as the thesis does. Free and frank advice is undefined because its working meaning is plural, and it takes the form of a bounded plurality: an idea in daily use, structured by practitioner postures, organised by fault lines recognisable in democratic theory, bounded by practical statecraft, and limited in Aotearoa by the constitutional edge of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, which presses on the advisory system from a place the mapped Westminster field can only partly contain. Taking free and frank advice seriously means recognising the different legitimate forms it may take, looking after the conditions under which it can be given and heard, and resisting the temptation to punish as disloyalty what may be the convention doing its hardest work. In my view the next account of free and frank advice in Aotearoa must begin from a wider constitutional footing than this thesis could fully occupy, and I hope this series has made the case for that work as well as for the findings themselves.

This post closes the series of twenty posts drawn from my doctoral thesis on free and frank advice.

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.

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.

Mutu, M., & Jackson, M. (2016). He whakaaro here whakaumu mo Aotearoa: The report of Matike Mai Aotearoa — The Independent Working Group on Constitutional Transformation. Matike Mai Aotearoa.

Paterson, R. (2016). Investigation into SSC conduct of MFAT leaks inquiry. Office of the Ombudsman. https://www.ombudsman.parliament.nz/resources/investigation-ssc-conduct-mfat-leaks-inquiry

Rebstock, P. (2013). Report to the State Services Commissioner on the investigation into the possible unauthorised disclosure of information relating to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. State Services Commission.

Watts, S., & Stenner, P. (2012). Doing Q methodological research: Theory, method and interpretation. SAGE Publications.