Māku te ra e tō ana; kei a koe te urunga ake o te rā

02/10/2023

This election, I’m looking for a politician who understands that the sun is setting on New Zealand and the dawn of the new day that is Aotearoa.

That is not as radical as it sounds. It is simply a maturing and growing up of our nation.

But we need a politician or group of politicians that can lead us through that change with empathy, with honesty and with courage.

Since the mid-1990s, governments across the world have been experimenting with different kinds of deliberative governance. While this has been, in part, a response to declining trust in government and the need to demonstrate greater transparency and accountability, there have also been other significant drivers.

One of those drivers has been the impact of post-modernity on public institutions. It is an uneasy time for elected and senior officials: on the one hand, they are expected to deal with increasing complexity, inexplicability and intractability while at the same time, they are expected to be integrating and building on the strengths of plurality, constantly shifting alliances, and demands for greater participation and deliberation.

A second driver has been the demand for responsive public services, particularly a preference for more affordable, communicative, reintegrative, and procedurally fair public services, as well as regulatory systems that shape compliance rather than just correcting noncompliance.

The main driver here in Aotearoa has been the rise of deliberative governance in the context of both Te Tiriti as well as the role of local government in response to emergencies and crisis events: for example, the Iwi/Māori response to COVID and the local authority responses to the Canterbury sequences of earthquakes, the 2023 Auckland Anniversary weekend floods and Cyclone Gabrielle.

The solutions are found locally, often in the sub-nation state institutions. Whether they are local authorities, iwi and hapū institutions, school and kura communities or catchment areas, suffice it to say we need elected representatives who get this and can govern nationally while delivering value locally.