Loose Threads: What the Spirit of Service Awards Rewarded

12/10/2026

Read through the interpretive hinge

In May I wrote here about a photograph of New York’s mayor on the W train, and about how seldom our own political conversation celebrates the daily work of public officials rather than treating it with suspicion.

I argued that the work of celebration is itself a joyful constitutional act, that we have the apparatus for it but are somewhat shy about using it, and I asked readers to encourage a colleague or a team to nominate their mahi for Te Hāpai Hapori | Spirit of Service Awards, particularly where the work seemed too quiet, too internal or too unshowy to warrant attention.

On 1 October 2026 the eighth Spirit of Service Awards were held in Pōneke, and this post picks that thread back up. Coverage of awards like these usually takes the form of a list of congratulations, and the congratulations are deserved. One of the threads that are often left loose or untied, though, is what the winners have in common, and what that tells us about the kind of public service we have, a public service that, for the most part, does good work every day, irrespective of the politics that undermines it, and that we often forget to celebrate.

This post reads every winner through the interpretive hinge I have been developing in Te Rā Whakamana, then sets out what the awards tell us. Where I mention a finalist it is because the finalist shares something with the winners, since the interest is in what they have in common rather than in a list.

The awards carry a phrase from the Public Service Act 2020. Section 13(1) states that “the fundamental characteristic of the public service is acting with a spirit of service to the community”, and section 13(2) requires public service leaders and boards to “preserve, protect, and nurture” it. Parliament placed the spirit of service at the centre of what the public service is while leaving its content undefined, and an awards night is one of the few occasions on which the system shows, by what it chooses to celebrate, what it takes that characteristic to mean.

The interpretive hinge: a reminder

In Te Rā Whakamana I have argued that our difficulty in Aotearoa is, for the most part, not only a lack of coherence in the purple zone, where political ambition, ministerial judgement, official advice and operational reality meet, but the fact that our policy advisory systems and our delivery systems have come apart.

The interpretive hinge is the space in the machinery of government where the two meet: it holds policy advice and delivery together while allowing translation and adaptation between them.

Three kinds of work are done in that space. The first is translation, carrying the intent of the centre into the operational reality of the front line and carrying that reality back in ways that can improve advice. The second is sense-making, reading policy against the cases in front of officials, the evidence available and the preferences in play. The third is relational work, the relationships with the people the work is meant to serve, on which the other two depend. The people who do this work I call the weavers.

The term comes from raranga, where the kairaranga works strands of harakeke that are prepared separately and stay distinct in the finished piece, bound together rather than dissolved into one another, and where the knowledge of how to do it is handed down from those who wove before.

The weavers in the interpretive hinge do something similar: they bring the intent of He Pōneketanga, the reality of the front line and the knowledge of the people being served into one piece of work without assuming those strands start in the same place, as the regional kaimahi of Te Puni Kōkiri did in the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund, at the point where community need met Crown authority.

The literature has names for people who work near this space, but none of them quite fits our context or our public service and its operating model. Street-level bureaucrats exercise discretion over individual cases within the rules they are given; policy entrepreneurs push their own solutions into the system; boundary spanners sit at the edge of organisations and connect them, in effect bolting systems together; and ministerial-facing advisors direct their attention upward. Weavers work across frames rather than within one, and the measure of their work is whether the strands are still whole once the piece is done.

The 2026 winners, read through the hinge

Te Tohu mō ngā Hua E Pai Ake Ana, the Better Outcomes Award, went to Clean Air Rotorua, a joint initiative of Bay of Plenty Regional Council, Rotorua Lakes Council and the National Public Health Service in Bay of Plenty and Lakes. In May 2025 the Rotorua airshed was declared no longer polluted, after five consecutive years at or under the national limit and about fifteen years of regulation, support and work with the community. Read through the hinge, it is a long piece of translation: a national standard carried into rules and support that whare and neighbours could act on, by agencies that stayed in relationship with those neighbourhoods for as long as it took.

Te Tohu mō Whai Ratonga, the Māori Crown Award, went to Tākai Here, a trust-based, Iwi-led collaboration between the Ministry of Social Development, Te Rūnanganui o Te Āti Awa ki te Upoko o te Ika a Māui and Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira, working across employment, education, health and wellbeing. It is at least the third time the ministry has won in this category, after its work with Ngāti Pāhauwera in 2019 and with Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira and others in Porirua in 2020, a record that suggests the ministry has learnt to do relational work with Iwi rather than around them. The finalist in the same category, the temporary accommodation village at Ōmāhu Marae, built by Ngāti Kahungunu Iwi Incorporated on land MBIE leased from Te Piringa Hapū for whānau displaced by Cyclone Gabrielle, shares that feature under emergency conditions. In both, the hinge held because the Iwi led and the Crown’s part was to keep the relationship in working order.

Te Tohu Auaha Hou, the Innovation Award, went to the Ministry for Primary Industries for Biosecurity New Zealand’s response to the yellow-legged hornet incursion. Its citation names advanced technology, large-scale field operations and community partnerships together, and the response has drawn on more than 18,000 reports from the public. That is translation running in both directions, with the community carrying what it saw back to the centre and the centre acting on it in the field.

Te Tohu mō te Hiranga o te Mahi Kaupapa Here, the Excellence in Public Policy Award, and Te Tohu a te Pirimia, the Prime Minister’s Award, both went to the National Infrastructure Plan from the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, Te Waihanga, a 30-year, evidence-based roadmap for how infrastructure is planned, funded and maintained. The plan sits on the advice side of the hinge, and its test will be translation: whether its evidence about building, funding and maintenance is carried into the investment decisions of successive ministers and agencies over several electoral cycles. The two finalists in the policy category share a feature with it at a smaller scale. Medsafe’s reduction in medicine approval times and Customs’ review of its goods fees are both reforms built on sense-making, on officials’ knowledge of how a regulatory system behaves where it meets the people who use it.

The individual awards show that the hinge is, in most cases, carried by people. Te Tohu Oranga Angitū, the Lifetime Achievement Award, went to Raj Rajasekar for more than five decades of work on trade, food standards and biosecurity, from his start as an agricultural economist in 1971 through each restructure from the Department of Agriculture to the Ministry for Primary Industries. A career that outlasts that much machinery-of-government change is one of the few ways the system keeps its translation and relational capacity intact. Te Tohu Rāngai Tūmatanui mō te Tumuaki o Te Tau, the Public Sector Director of the Year Award, went to Bill Moran, Deputy Chair of WorkSafe, whose citation speaks of trust between regulator, workers and industry, which is relational work done at board level.

Te Tohu mō te Kaiārahi Rangatahi o te Tau, the Young Leader of the Year Award, went to Luisa (Lu) Avia, Chief Advisor at the Ministry for Pacific Peoples, who operates at the highest levels of government with confidence and humility and creates pathways for others across the public service. I have been lucky enough to come across Lu and cannot think of a more deserving public servant. The three finalists share the same orientation: Liam Cain at the Ministry of Social Development, improving how the needs of senior clients are understood and met across the regions; Emily Gardner at NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi, delivering one of the most complex transport projects in Ōtautahi; and Jasmine Lindsay at Whaikaha, the Ministry of Disabled People, removing barriers to participation for disabled people. Each of these young leaders works in the hinge, where advice meets delivery, and they are the weavers the system will depend on next.

What the awards tell us

The awards tell us, first, where the public service tends to do its best work. This year’s winners and the finalists named here worked in places that are notoriously difficult rather than in business as usual: a biosecurity incursion threatening key industries, whānau displaced by a cyclone, intergenerational change for whānau, the long-term planning of the country’s infrastructure, and an air quality problem that took some fifteen years to shift. Some were moments when the public service was needed most and was there; others, Clean Air Rotorua above all, were the slow work of years, ending in an outcome public services are rarely able to point to.

They also tell us how a system signals what it values. Earlier this year I wrote about the email the United Kingdom Prime Minister sent to every civil servant on the eve of local elections, affirming the value of “speaking truth to power” weeks after sacking the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. I read that episode as an example of the gap, which tends to be structural to the Westminster model, between rhetorical commitment to a public service and the conditions under which it can do its work. The email told public servants what the centre said it valued; the Spirit of Service Awards, in contrast, show us what the public service values by naming the work it chose to celebrate, and this year that was work done in the hinge, across organisational lines, with authority shared. In the language of the wine shows, 2026 was a vintage year, and the public service agenices and officials that produced it has earned its gold.

Finally, they tell us what the system will need to reward on the other days of the year if the spirit of service is to be nurtured as the Act requires. Work in the hinge tends to be slow, shared and hard to attribute, and the accountability arrangements we inherited from the reforms of 1984 and 1988 were built to attribute results to single agencies and single chief executives. Most of this year’s winners succeeded across those lines rather than within them, and the question I am left with is whether the arrangements around them will learn to recognise that kind of success as readily as the awards did.

This year’s winners answer the May post, about Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, regular celebration of officials, at least in part. For the most part they were recognised for the quiet translation, sense-making and relational work I said had no publicity of its own, and the Prime Minister’s choice to present the overall award to a piece of long-horizon advice is, I think, a small instance of what I was asking for: an elected principal standing alongside officials rather than above or against them. Officials need clarity from politicians to do their work, protection to do it well and, occasionally, recognition to keep doing it at all, and an awards night is one of the few places where the third is given in public.

References

Public Service Act 2020, s 13. https://www.nzlii.org/nz/legis/consol_act/psa2020152/s13.html

Te Kawa, D. (2026, February 17). Te Rā Whakamana: The interpretative hinge unpacked. He Pōneketanga.

Te Kawa, D. (2026, May 9). Loose Threads: “Dear Colleagues …”: Starmer, free and frank advice, and what three jurisdictions reveal about one constitutional problem. He Pōneketanga.

Te Kawa Mataaho Public Service Commission. (2026). Spirit of Service Awards 2026. https://www.publicservice.govt.nz/role-and-purpose/spirit-of-service/spirit-of-service-awards/spirit-of-service-awards-2026

ps: broken links updated