Schick, then Ryan and Gill (2011), and Tenbensel et al (2026) This week, the series reads three pieces of local implementation scholarship alongside one another, written across the better part of three decades and from quite different vantage points. There is Allen Schick’s 1996 review of the reforms, and the warnings it carried. There is…

When the State Designs for a Person Who Does Not Exist This is the fourth post in a series about what it actually costs to navigate the state. Last month, I examined how burdens fall hardest on the least resourced. I also introduced the research on “deservingness”. Today, I turn to gender. The hypothesis that…

E te whānau. A longer Loose Thread this week, prompted by a moment in Beijing that has sent half the commentariat scrambling for their Thucydides. Graham Allison is having his moment in the foreign policy sun. But the Allison I want to talk about is the one almost nobody remembers. This post starts with his trap, notes…

The Plumbing Made Visible E hoa mā, The Ministry for Regulation has published its first comprehensive map of the regulatory landscape. It is called The State of New Zealand’s Regulatory Systems: Revealing the Structure and Scale of Regulation, and it is, in its quiet way, a significant document. Not because it tells practitioners anything they did not…

Last week, Barbara Allen and I published a piece in The Conversation on Aotearoa New Zealand’s Public Service AI Framework (Te Kawa & Allen, 2026). We suggested, perhaps a little provocatively, that it exemplifies a kind of “Pollyanna policy”: a governance instrument that names all the right principles but issues them without the armour that would convert…

There is a very specific discourse about delivery and implementation that keeps happening in the same way. A government announces that the state is broken. A minister commissions new teams, new advisers, and new task forces. The centre tightens its grip. And then, after a year or so, the same problems return, wearing slightly different…

He Waka Tē Ai Tahuri Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays is where I return to the Tribunal’s early reports, not as history or as legal analysis, but as maps of how the state is designed and how its policy advisory, delivery, and regulatory systems work. After the Motiti Island report, we turn to three short reports in succession: Wai…

Starmer, Free and Frank Advice, and What Three Jurisdictions Reveal About One Constitutional Problem On 7 May 2026, the night before local elections in which his party faced what most forecasters predicted would be a historic rout, Sir Keir Starmer emailed every civil servant in the United Kingdom. The email was, on its face, an…

This is the next post in the regular Te Rā Whakamana series. The post on Cohen’s street-level entrepreneurs closed by saying that critical traditions all argue that implementation is never neutral, and that the policy frame the public management system carries always has politics built in. Today’s post takes that on. Vaughn and Balch’s chapter on a decolonial approach…

There is a photograph from earlier this year that I cannot quite stop thinking about. It shows the new Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, on the W train from Astoria to City Hall, iced coffee in one hand, the other extended to a fellow commuter. He is laughing. The tap-to-ride has just failed at…

How Deservingness Shapes Who We Are Willing to Help This is the third post in a series about what it actually costs to navigate the state: whether you are a regulated party or an individual and whānau trying to access a publicly funded service. Last month, I went back to the foundational 2015 article by…

There is a conversation happening at the moment about who should be Prime Minister. It is, as these conversations tend to be, almost entirely about personality. Who is likable? Who connects? Who looks the part, sounds the part, and seems like someone you could have a beer with or trust in a crisis? I have…

Today marks fifteen years since the earthquake that killed 185 people and unmade a city. I want to tell a story I am not sure has been told quite this way before. I live opposite the Margaret Mahy playground. I say that not as a point of geography but as a point of orientation because…

Seeing Burden as a Political and Policy Choice This is the second post in a series examining the real costs of navigating the state in Aotearoa. Last month, I introduced the administrative burden framework developed over the past decade by American scholars Pamela Herd and Donald Moynihan, and asked whether the Ministry for Regulation’s focus…

For three months now, I’ve been building one argument: the gap between policy advice and implementation isn’t just institutional or technical, it’s also interpretive. The people designing policy, the people delivering it and those impacted by it, operate from different understandings of what the problem is, what the policy means, what the solution is, and…

The literature on systems change and implementation is vast, contradictory, and: if you are currently leading a transformation programme, which by the look of it, seems almost everyone in Wellington, almost certainly you are wondering what you need to know. This post offers a way through: a curated guide to the research and practitioner frameworks…

Last week I traced the way cabinet committees function as the coordination machinery of executive government: the institutional furniture through which political intent becomes administrative action. Across all of their iterations, the committee system addressed a persistent problem: how to get coherent decision-making across fragmented portfolios, competing priorities, and the relentless pace of the policy cycle….

I had intended to be quiet today, in honour of our shared national day. But the Prime Minister did something significant yesterday that will likely be misreported or weaponised for other political purposes, and I think it matters that one or two people call attention to it. Christopher Luxon structured his Waitangi address around the…

Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays is where I return to the Tribunal’s reports, not as history alone but as maps of how the state’s policy advisory and regulatory systems are designed and how they still work. Each post asks what these findings reveal about who gets heard, what gets silenced, and how legitimacy is built or denied….

This post draws on research I am preparing for a journal submission, examining thirty-three years of Cabinet Office circulars to trace how successive prime ministers have configured the cabinet committee system in Aotearoa. The hypothesis I am advancing is perhaps a little too simple: that cabinet committees constitute the primary mechanism through which governments furnish…

Last week I traced five patterns in the Waitangi Tribunal archive: constitutional arguments flattened into regulatory rules, regulations and rules displacing tikanga, institutional self-protection through performative change, allyship disrupting the sequence, and silence functioning as policy. Today, I want to ask what those patterns mean, specifically what they reveal about the structure of the state, and…

In Part One, I offered a deliberately close reading of the Institute for Government’s Whitehall Monitor 2026: the methodology, the findings, the diagnosis of dysfunction in the purple zone. This piece is simpler. The question I ask here is whether we see the same patterns in Aotearoa. The answer is that we often cannot say. And…

This is the first of two pieces examining the Institute for Government’s Whitehall Monitor 2026. Here, I trace what I shall call the misdiagnosis problem: the tendency, endemic to Westminster systems, to locate public service delivery failure in bureaucratic deficiency when the evidence also points elsewhere: to that contested space where ministers and officials meet,…

I promised this post three months ago. October to be exact. One could not scroll through social media without encountering another account holding forth on the Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern’s documentary. The commentary was predictable in its cadence: she was “all style, no substance,” her leadership “merely performative,” her legacy reducible to good communication in…

Some months ago, I wrote about Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and his argument that plurilateral coalitions offer the practical path forward for small and middle powers unwilling and unable to choose between America and China. I want to return to that thread, and I am going to complicate it. Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney is now…

The Hidden Architecture of Bureaucratic Burden This series examines a deceptively simple question: what does it actually cost to navigate the state? Not the cost to the government; specifically, the forms processed, the staff employed, and the systems maintained, but the cost to the person standing in the queue, filling out the application, trying to…

This is the slower, more thoughtful essay on the Waitangi Tribunal reports I promised you. It is in two parts. For the past several months, the Waitangi Tribunal Thursday series has worked through the early reports one by one, reading them not as historical documents but as diagnostic evidence of how the state’s policy advisory…

The Government is reorganising the place-based policy advisory system, abolishing regional councils, and replacing the Resource Management Act, all within the next eighteen months to two years. This post uses recent Scottish research on placemaking to think through what these reforms might achieve and where they might struggle. Hopefully by the end, you will have…

Once a month, Te Rā Whakamana examines a single, deceptively simple question: why do so many policies that look brilliant on paper fail so spectacularly in practice? This series bridges two worlds that too rarely speak to each other: the world of public policy analysis and advice, where ministers receive briefing notes and the Cabinet…

A reading from Aotearoa of what the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences thinks is wrong with evidence in government, and what their diagnosis reveals about the limits of technocratic thinking. Today’s Loose Threads sits alongside the implementation series I have been building. It is about a report from the United Kingdom’s Academy of Social Sciences…

Last month, we traced fifty years of implementation scholarship and discovered that our public sector remains intellectually trapped in the assumptions of the 1970s. The purpose of today’s post is to examine the foundational fault line that explains why. Imagine you are the Prime Minister. You are standing on the ninth floor of the Beehive and looking…

The Public Service Commissioner’s second three-yearly briefing on the state of the public service, released this month, warrants close attention. Sir Brian Roche has produced a document that names structural problems with his usual frankness and proposes architectural change rather than incremental adjustment. The statutory architecture Schedule 3, clause 16 of the Public Service Act 2020…

An interlude on Christian Gade’s quiet clarification of what we actually claim when we invoke evidence. This piece sits outside the implementation series I have been building, but Gade’s work is too useful to put aside. Gade’s recent contribution to Evidence & Policy asks a question so fundamental that I am surprised it needed to…

Since 2000, I have been testing a hypothesis that our traditional Westminster-derived model is under strain. My instincts have long been that we are beyond Westminster. To evaluate that hypothesis, I use Rhodes, Wanna and Wellar’s framework, which emphasises five key elements: parliamentary sovereignty, strong cabinet government, ministerial responsibility, party government, and institutionalised opposition. Each…

The Public Service Amendment Bill promises better performance through tighter control. This post argues that the diagnosis is incomplete: what looks like a solution may, in fact, deepen the pathology it claims to treat. Drawing on comparative public management scholarship and recent developments in both Wellington and Whitehall, the analysis shows why the centralising instinct…

The Government’s “Simplifying Local Government” consultation landed this week, proposing to replace regional councillors with Combined Territories Boards composed of mayors, who would then develop regional reorganisation plans within two years. I am not going to comment on the details: I am doing that for clients, and the release of any analysis will be subject…

He mihi tēnei ki ngā Iwi me Hapū katoa, ki a rātou i tū ki mua i te Taraipiunara i ngā tau tōmua. Nā koutou i whakatakoto te ara. This post pauses to consolidate. Over the past four months, we’ve worked through the foundational Waitangi Tribunal reports, and what began as individual cases has resolved…

This is the first instalment in a twelve-month series examining why policies that look brilliant on paper fail so spectacularly in practice. Today’s purpose is straightforward: to introduce the intellectual history that explains our current ‘implementation’ predicament. By the end, you will understand how fifty years of implementation research moved from simple, top-down thinking to…

A nation’s character is revealed not just by how it handles a crisis, but by how it chooses to remember it. When the crisis is over, when the emergency powers have been invoked and the extraordinary measures taken, the real test begins: the reckoning. What questions are asked? What is examined? What do we let…

Public administration scholarship about Aotearoa appears to have trapped itself in an analytical loop, endlessly diagnosing what New Public Management did and how successive reforms have tried to fix it. This obsession creates two problematic myopias that allow scholars to sidestep the constitutional questions that should anchor any serious analysis of how the state operates…

Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays is where I return to the Tribunal’s reports as a road map for how the state is designed and how its policy advisory system works. This five-part series on WAI 11 has traced the journey from institutional silence to ongoing negotiation. Today, as we close this series, Tīpuna Reo is back before the Tribunal again: same…

Our foreign policy debate has calcified around a choice that doesn’t exist. America or China. Values or economics. Security or trade. The framing is everywhere: in select committee hearings, in ministerial speeches, and on radio talk-back. It is also, I think, wrong. Not wrong in the sense of morally misguided, though it may be that…

Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays is where I return to the Tribunal’s reports, not just as history, but as maps of how the state was designed and how its policy advisory system still works. This five-part series on WAI 11 traces the constitutional journey from institutional silence to ongoing negotiation. The first post examined how the state structured itself…

Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays is where I return to the older Tribunal’s reports, not as history alone but as maps of how the state was designed and how its policy advisory system still works. This five-part series on WAI 11 traces the journey from institutional silence to ongoing negotiation. The first post examined how the state structured itself…

Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays is where I return to the Tribunal’s reports, not as history alone but as maps of how the state was designed and how its policy advisory system still works. I apologise for the delay in this series: I did not think posting an analysis of how the state learns to listen while…

If, as I have been arguing on this platform, policy implementation is a messy, untidy, human process, how on earth can leaders and analysts possibly understand what is really going on? This week’s Te Rā turns to the practical method offered in Muhammad Hali Aprimadya’s (2025) work, and in particular the idea of “decentred analysis.”…

Singapore keeps popping up in our public sector reform debates like a mirage: sleek, disciplined, coherent, the city-state that somehow cracked the code. The comparison is false. We are not Singapore and never could be: our constitutional DNA, our politics, our whakapapa of contested legitimacy make sure of that. Yet the question lingers, because in…

This week’s Te Rā continues exploring what fills the so-called “implementation gap” when, as Paul Cairney (2025) reminds us, perfect coherence is impossible. I have been developing the hypothesis that implementation does not fail because communities refuse to comply. Instead, implementation is a process of constitutional meaning-making: a cycle where communities interpret and re-interpret, contest,…

When Te Arikinui Spoke and Whānau Answered In one weekend, Te Ao Māori spoke with two voices: Te Arikinui Kuini Ngāwai Hono i te Pō delivered her first public address as Māori Queen at Koroneihana, and the people of Tāmaki Makaurau elected Oriini Kaipara to Parliament. These moments were not isolated. Together, they signalled a…

Today’s post is part of my Loose Threads series: a place where I pick up strands in the public conversation that have been left dangling, half-woven, or quietly dropped. Today, I offer a view balanced by two data points: the Robodebt Royal Commission in Australia and a recent project I was involved in, where a…

This week’s Te Rā Whakamana takes Paul Cairney’s argument about the impossibility of perfect coherence and pushes it further. If the authorising environment cannot impose seamless alignment, what then fills the so-called “implementation gap”? Drawing on Muhammad Hali Aprimadya’s (2025) interpretive framework, I suggest that implementation is not a failure of obedience but an act of constitutional…

Today, we turn to Paul Cairney’s (2025) provocation that perfect policy coherence is not only unattainable but may in fact be counterproductive. Cairney reminds us that the gap between ideal and reality is not a mistake but a permanent feature of governance, and sometimes even a strength. Te Rā Whakamana is a regular series that…

Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays is where I return to the Tribunal’s reports, not as history alone but as maps of how the state was designed and how it still works. Each post asks what these findings reveal about the architecture of public policy in Aotearoa: who gets heard, what gets silenced, and how legitimacy is built…

Moving Beyond the Lobbying Debate Te Rā Whakamana is a series that examines what happens after policy is announced, tracing how delivery either holds or fractures, and where legitimacy is built or lost. This week pulls the threads of six posts into one argument: that Aotearoa’s current lobbying debate is the wrong fight. While attention…

Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays is not just a catalogue of claims. It is a personal inquiry into the state’s policy advisory system under pressure: who is heard, what counts as expertise, and how legitimacy frays when the Crown is challenged. This week, I pause the timeline deliberately before WAI 9 and WAI 10, because the next…

Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays is where I return to the early Tribunal reports, not just as records of truth and reconciliation but as maps of how the state’s policy advisory system weakens under pressure. Each report shows us who is heard, what counts as evidence, and how legitimacy is either built or denied. This week, the…

Te Rā Whakamana is a series that follows what happens after policy is announced: it focusses on the long tail of delivery, where systems succeed or fail in ways the drafters never intended. This week turns to regulation. The Regulatory Standards Bill sparked fierce debate, but most of it circled the politics of deregulation rather…

Te Rā Whakamana is the space where we reflect on what it takes to deliver public outcomes, and not just announce them. Every Tuesday, we draw on empirical and published work to better understand the hard part of government work: the relational, adaptive, on-the-ground processes where systems either earn legitimacy or lose it altogether. Our…

I’ve been away for a week or so, catching my breath after wrapping up a couple of big projects. I found my way back through music: last week’s theme was Massive Attack. I can’t lie, “Unfinished Sympathy” on repeat is my happy place. That slow-building track that starts sparse and grows into something enormous, where…

I’m back. Thank you for indulging me with the week off: I needed it. We all do, sometimes. This post takes up a challenge most reform papers avoid: what happens when implementation expertise shows up in people the system refuses to recognise? Drawing on a Dutch case where a homeless shelter has been self-managed by…

Each year, as we move towards Matariki, I gather the seeds of knowledge I found most valuable in the previous year and offer them to others. In 2021, I focused on good public sector governance, especially collaboration and anticipatory governance, because the authorising environment was struggling with its theory of public governance. In 2022, I…

Two quiet pages that echo today E te rangatira, Tarsh Kemp, moe mai rā i te moenga roa. Haere atu rā ki te huihuinga o te kahurangi, ki te kāhui o ngā mātua tūpuna. Ko tō reo i ngā whare kōrero, ko tō ūpoko pakaru mō te iwi Māori, ko tō ūmanga mō te tika…

Each Tuesday, I offer a reflection on what it actually takes to get things delivered. Not just announced, but properly embedded in systems that work. These reflections sit alongside the Cases for a Practical State series because, together, they’re testing the same idea: that public delivery only works when it’s built on relationships, trust, and a decent…

From advisory state to advisory system In 1983, the number one song in the world was “Every Breath You Take” by The Police. Often mistaken for romantic, the song is unmistakably about surveillance, control, and possession: a chilling refrain that echoed the mood of 1983 far more than most listeners realised. Around the world, 1983…

Each Tuesday, I’ll share a short reflection on what it takes to turn policy into practice, drawing on international and local literature, peer-reviewed evidence, and real-world experience. This series presents theories and evidence in support of the practical state hypothesis. Te Rā Whakamana means the day of giving effect. Because implementation isn’t the tail end…

Kaituna River : When Engineering Met Tikanga He mihi tēnei ki ngā rangatira o Ngāti Pikiao, ki a Sir Charles Bennett, ki a Pokiha Hemana, ki a Stanley Newton, ki a Irikau Kingi, ki a Bob Kuni Roberts, ki ngā tangata katoa i kaha ai ki te whakamau i ngā tikanga o Te Tiriti. Moe…

Paper Three in the reform suite promises to break down silos and deliver a more integrated public service. On the surface, it revives familiar tools, for example, shared services, system leaders, and cross-agency levers, and stitches them into law. That could bring needed coherence. But the deeper risk is brittleness: integration without legitimacy, central control…

The Welcome Bay Sewage Claim Firstly, a quick correction and some transparency. My last Waitangi Tribunal post had a couple of errors. So, thank you to those who offered to peer review some of this work. I’m ever grateful, and in advance, I say thank you. Secondly, thanks also to the trolls who hate this…

Paper Two of the Government’s reform package promises to lift performance in the public service by tightening leadership standards, opening up chief executive roles to contestability, and making integrity mandatory. These are overdue corrections, and on the surface they strengthen accountability. But read alongside Paper One, they also signal a centralising turn: pulling authority closer…

Waiau Pa, regulation and rules without ears E ngā mana, e ngā reo, tēnei te mihi ki a T.E. Kirkwood, mō te ūmanga ki te tiaki i ngā tikanga o te Whatapaka, ā, ki a M.R. McLarin hoki, mō te tū pakari i te taha o ngā hapori katoa. He wā poto tonu tēnei, engari…

This first paper in the Government’s reform package promises clarity but risks control. By reviving the sharp lines of the 1988 Act, it restores focus on ministerial direction and trims back sprawling structures. But it also strips out equity clauses, weakens long-term stewardship, and risks reducing neutrality to obedience. The question for Parliament is whether…

This series examines the Government’s proposed reforms to the Public Service Act 2020. The direction is promising: a shift toward simpler accountability, clearer roles, and stronger responsiveness after years of drift. But there are risks. The challenge is to restore democratic clarity without tipping into overcorrection. Over the coming posts, I’ll unpack each Cabinet paper…

Joe Hawke and Others: Fisheries Regulations He mihi tēnei ki ngā rangatira kua wehe atu ki te pō. Moe mai rā, e Dame Whina Cooper rāua ko Joe Hawke. Moe mai rā ki a koutou katoa i takahi i te huarahi mō te mana o te iwi, ā, kua hoki atu ki te ao wairua….

A plea from Ōtautahi. Can we stop using the phrase “bad apples” when discussing institutional problems? It is a tired cliché that has outlived whatever usefulness it might have once had. The idiom “one bad apple spoils the whole barrel” initially warned about how quickly rot spreads. Yet in contemporary discussions about institutional accountability, we’ve…

Regulation often gets a mixed reputation. Some see it as unnecessary red tape, slowing things down and making life harder for businesses and communities. Others worry that it’s too weak and fails to properly protect people and the environment. What both views have in common is frustration with regulation that seems disconnected from the real…

The collapse of the US administrative state is not just an American problem, it carries important lessons for Aotearoa New Zealand. As Washington grapples with political dysfunction and the erosion of public institutions, we should pay attention to how a weakened state apparatus invites economic instability, political turmoil, and diminished democratic control. For Aotearoa New…

Navigating the tension between bureaucratic expertise and democratic mandate A longer post than usual e te whānau. Also, it’s a little more policy wonk than my usual musings. I’ve been noticing something curious lately. The phrase “public value” keeps popping up in government strategies and official documents. It’s often sitting right next to its familiar…

Ngā Pūkenga o te Pokapū | Voices from the Centre is a series where I share reflections on Hāpai Public’s conversations with senior public servants, listening less for soundbites and more for the signals underneath: how the centre sees the system, where it’s heading, and what risks it is naming out loud. This week, Ben…

What Cave Creek Still Has To Teach Us In 1995, a Department of Conservation platform collapsed in Paparoa National Park. Fourteen people died. The cause wasn’t just poor workmanship. It was poor public management. DOC, like much of the public service at the time, was under acute fiscal pressure. After years of cuts and restructures,…

Child poverty was meant to be the Sixth Labour Government’s defining social outcome. All the machinery of state was re-tooled around it, with one target carrying the weight of political ambition. But as the Auditor-General’s latest report shows, ambition without governance and delivery doesn’t close the gap. The plan was clear in intent, yet undercooked…

Before I begin, I want to mihi to Hon Shane Jones. In the House yesterday, he reminded us of the first four rangatira who first stepped into Parliament on behalf of Māori. He did more than recite names: he called us to remember them properly, to see them as political actors who helped shape the…

I came across this report while reviewing public sector reform literature:Final Report: More Effective Social Services – The Treasury (2015) It’s not new, but it’s worth revisiting. Nearly a decade on, many of the issues it identified are still with us. The report is a sobering reminder of how hard it is to shift the…

In 1995, a Department of Conservation viewing platform at Cave Creek collapsed, killing 14 people. It wasn’t just a failure of timber and nails, it was a failure of public management. After years of cuts and restructures, the Department of Conservation had been stripped of expertise, overloaded with risk, and left without the capacity to…

The 2023 election delivered a message, but not the one some in Wellington appear to be hearing. Voters were not asking for austerity; they were asking for a course correction. It was, in my humble opinion, a vote to hold the previous government accountable, particularly for its handling of the pandemic and the years that…

Running a country is hard. Governments need to make sure they spend money wisely to improve people’s lives. In a recent article, Robert P. Shepherd and Evert A. Lindquist talked about something that could help: regular strategic spending reviews. These reviews would not just check if money is being spent, but also if it’s being…

Regulation is like plumbing. When it works, you don’t notice it. When it doesn’t, everything gets clogged, leaks, and starts to smell. The UK has decided to grab a wrench and fix the mess, while Aotearoa New Zealand is still standing around debating whether to call a plumber. The UK government has admitted its regulatory…

I came across this report while reviewing public sector reform literature:Final Report: More Effective Social Services – The Treasury (2015) It’s not new, but it’s worth revisiting. Nearly a decade on, many of the issues it identified are still with us. The report is a sobering reminder of how hard it is to shift the…

Let’s talk about the latest concern over Aotearoa New Zealand’s ministerial portfolios. Some commentators suggest we should reduce them because “other countries have fewer.” This is a bit like suggesting we reorganise our national parks based on how Denmark manages its forests. Now, don’t get me wrong, the critics are onto something real. They’ve noticed…

Representative bureaucracy is not a fashionable add-on to modern administration. It is a core democratic principle. First articulated by J. Donald Kingsley in 1944 and later developed by scholars such as Mosher, Selden, Meier, and O’Toole, the theory argues that public institutions work better and hold greater legitimacy when they reflect the diversity of the…

During the January break, whilst others were sensibly occupied with finding the sun and avoiding the rain, I found myself pondering legitimacy and trust in regulatory systems. This wasn’t merely academic wool-gathering: ACT’s proposals for regulatory reform have made these issues pressingly relevant. Reading Giandomenico Majone’s classic work on regulatory legitimacy from 1999, I was…

In December 2024, I was commissioned to write a short analysis for a local private sector client. With their permission, I’m now sharing it more broadly. The analysis itself remains unchanged from that original version, but the format has been adapted to speak to a wider audience. In comparing the challenges facing Aotearoa New Zealand…

Since 2000, I have been testing a hypothesis that our traditional Westminster-derived model is under strain. My instincts are that we are beyond Westminster. To evaluate that hypothesis, I use Rhodes, Wanna and Weller’s framework, which emphasises five key elements: parliamentary sovereignty, strong cabinet government, ministerial responsibility, party government, and institutionalised opposition. Each year, as…

When we examine Aotearoa New Zealand, through the lens of its institutions, we see a remarkable pattern of action and response between the Crown and Māori that continues to shape our nation. This narrative begins in 1840, but its echoes resonate powerfully in today’s political landscape. In the initial Te Tiriti period (1840-1860), the Crown…

Let me explore the shift in central agency leadership and its implications for public sector governance. The whakataukī “He niho tō te paraoa” offers a profound insight into public service leadership—it’s not just about having authority but about having the institutional experience and capacity to exercise it effectively. This metaphor perfectly captures the current moment…

Australia’s Robodebt scandal has become something of a cautionary tale: and for good reason. I’ve just finished reading the commission of inquiry. It wasn’t just a case of a system gone wrong. It was a full-blown failure of politics, public service ethics and culture and basic decency. And for those of us in Aotearoa New…

In the ever-evolving landscape of public governance, a new approach is catching attention across the seas in the United Kingdom. Called mission-led governance, it promises a fresh perspective on how institutions and organizations might better serve society. The core idea is compelling: what if our public institutions could genuinely prioritize social and environmental purposes alongside—or…

If you’ve been following this blog, or I have taught you, you’ll know I’m generally sceptical about the government’s capacity to deliver meaningful change. Only because, in my view, meaningful change is delivered by and because of communities. But occasionally, I see institutions that genuinely shift the dial. Te Puni Kōkiri is one such case…

Most of us have been to one. The offsite that hums with energy, fills flipcharts with ambitious arrows, and sends everyone home feeling that something significant has occurred, only for Monday morning to arrive and nothing, in fact, to have shifted. I call this “strategy theatre.” It’s a day when the rituals of strategy are…

This post offers my view on Aotearoa’s approach to public governance and why it is so fascinating: over the past 300 years, we have moved from the participatory democracy of rangatiratanga, through colonial imposition, to our current search for balance between efficiency and inclusion. This evolution reveals not just changing administrative arrangements but fundamental shifts…

Looking at Te Tiriti through a political science lens offers us something valuable beyond the usual historical and legal interpretations. Let me be direct about what this means for our public management system. Te Tiriti isn’t just a historical document or legal framework – it’s a living diplomatic relationship between two sovereign nations. This isn’t…