Thought blooms, but spoken words blossom

01/01/2018

Okay, as 2017 ends, I am finally able to my doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington to the University of Canterbury. One advisor said to me, “the only PhD is a completed one”. I will blog another time about what it was like studying at Victoria University of Wellington.

In the meantime, this post summarises my inquiry. More to come.

In 1859 John Stuart Mill proposed that the constraint on free speech emerged at the point at which a person incites violence. My PhD is looking at what that point is for free and frank advice. In the case of free speech, we are not entitled to shout “fire’ in a crowded theatre. My PhD asks: at what point do senior public servants constrain their advice, why, and what does this tell us about the elements of free and frank advice?

I have spent much of my career reflecting on this question. When I started out as a policy advisor in 1995, I thought free and frank advice lay in the idea of sovereignty – the right of decision-makers to have access to all the information to make good public policy decisions.

After nearly twenty-two years as a public policy advisor and manager, I think it is more nuanced.

I think free and frank advice has to consider the interests of the speaker and the audience and the empirical considerations arising from the risk that advice is fallible, and advisers are not always right.

This is because policy advice is not without costs: poor policy advice causes damage, can disclose personal and harmful information and is not risk-free.

Words matter. Speech matters. Advice matters.

And, because it matters, it is essential that Governments and senior officials who want to regulate free and frank advice, for example, to prevent things that would be embarrassing to politicians or otherwise upset the Government, should have that power of regulation carefully circumscribed and reviewed.

Now it’s time to see if I can get into Canterbury.

Ka hua te whakaaro, Ka hua te kōrero.