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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

I was pretty critical of the last government for refusing to name outcome areas or set any shared targets for the public management system. They didn’t want to be pinned down. They said it was about flexibility and complexity, but in practice, it made it hard to know what mattered, who was responsible, or what…

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…

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…

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…

Let me analyse the crucial issues of public service leadership appointments, merit, and constitutional governance. The metaphor at the heart of the whakataukī above, of needing to manage between heaven and earth captures the unique complexity of public service chief executive roles. These aren’t just senior management positions; they are constitutional offices at the heart…

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 offered knowledge on good public sector governance, focusing on collaboration and anticipatory governance. I did this because I observed that the authorising environment was struggling with…

Public management reform worldwide follows four main themes: fiscal stability, managerial efficiency, improved capacity and better public accountability. Fiscal reforms are generally the most consistently pursued. They are far-reaching and directly affect the well-being of public sector employees, state capacity, and social cohesion. They mostly involve downsizing, reducing input and output expenditures, privatising, and reforming…

One way to see proposals to change the design of the public sector is through a lens that presents the state as fragmented whenua on which political struggles play out. In the same way, whenua reflects the battle between settler and hapū interests, agendas, claims and rights, so it is for the state. Through that…

The whakataukī above reminds us that different emotions can be more useful than others, especially in a time of conflict. I think about this whakataukī, especially when it comes to public service reform and the endless round of working group reports on state sector productivity and effectiveness. I mean, can we jump to devolution now?…

As the whakataukī suggests, not much is achieved without a plan and people to do the mahi. I’d add that not much is achieved without good governance. Here are some thoughts on public sector governance. I am not arguing for the models because they are not yet adapted in a Te Tiriti-led way. However, I…

I have been watching the co-governance and free speech debate. There seems to be an undercurrent that the state should focus on “equality” and not “equity”, and all public services – delivered by the state or by a third party – should be at the same or similar quality standard for every “New Zealander”. That…

I love this whakataukī. It reminds me that understanding comes from knowing and welcoming the difference between similar things and people. I have heard a lot of korero this week about our golden age of public management. Many commentators assumed the 1980s public management reforms are our high point. Sadly, those people are wrong. Let…

A small warning. I am writing a journal article on public-sector reform and why many reform programmes fail. It follows a panel discussion I was part of early this year. IPANZ and Deloitte hosted it. Deloitte was calling attention to their 2022 State of the State report. The report found that the public sector in…

Two years on from the Public Service Act 2020, I’m still asking: where is the change? We were told the Act would modernise the public service. It would be more connected, more accountable, and more aligned with the public good. It promised a shift away from the old siloed, transactional state of the 1980s, toward…

Over the past several years, I have been playing with the idea that we have a hopelessly distorted public sector governance system. My current hypothesis is that it’s distorted because most of the power is held by ministers and senior officials and is often exercised in the dark, in the hidden corners of Government, where…

Mātai Tōrangapū, Hononga Tāwāhi | School of Political Science and International Relations at Canterbury University asked me to speak about the importance of the new Public Service Act 2022. The lecture is attached.

Every few years, someone revisits the public sector reforms in Aotearoa and declares them a success story. They point to contractualism, outputs, ministerial purchasing power, purchaser-provider splits and accrual accounting. Maybe they even quote Allen Schick’s 1998 piece, “Why Most Developing Countries Should Not Try New Zealand’s Reforms,” waving it around like an endorsement. It’s…

After twenty years as a public servant, I now have the luxury of working for myself with some great clients, trying to finish a PhD on free and frank advice and observing the beltway from Rangiora. So here’s my take on what the new Government means for the public sector. The headline is this –…