Article: The role of the central agencies

01/12/2025

The role of the central agencies: Collaboration or control? (2025)

In this 2025 article for Hāpai Public, Derek Gill and I ask whether the central agencies are rebuilding integrated coordination of the Public Service, or whether the talk of collaboration is a cover for centralisation. In a series of Hāpai Public webinars, the five central agency chief executives described their work as networked governance, influencing without authority and working alongside agencies rather than directing them. The direction of travel, however, tends to run the other way. It includes the Investment Management System, the procurement regime, a more active Commission role in wage setting, digital investment decisions led from the centre, and the Public Service Amendment Bill. That Bill strips out diversity and equity clauses, strengthens ministerial influence over chief executive appointments and performance, and reintroduces key positions requiring the Commissioner’s sign-off. We place these shifts within a long cycle between the authoritarian and egalitarian impulses in the constitutional culture of Aotearoa, from the tight central control of the 1970s, through the decentralisation of the 1980s, to the 2006 call to move from command and control to promote and assure. We conclude that collaborative rhetoric may be masking a centralising reality, one that concentrates decisions in ministers and the central agencies while removing statutory protections for diversity, long-term thinking and Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations. Whether the collaborative alternative can be built and sustained remains an open question.

Read the article: https://hapaipublic.org.nz/Article?Action=View&Article_id=150565

Reference
Gill, D., & Te Kawa, D. (2025, December 12). The role of the central agencies: Collaboration or control? Hāpai Public. https://hapaipublic.org.nz/Article?Action=View&Article_id=150565

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5129-5218