The Free and Frank Series: How I Tried to Define the Undefinable, and What I Found Instead

04/10/2025

This is the first instalment in a series exploring what free and frank advice means in Aotearoa’s institutional arrangements. This week, I introduce the research journey: a four-year attempt to define a concept that turned out to resist definition for reasons that may be essential to how democracy works. Over the next twenty weeks, I will trace that journey through the theoretical, methodological, and empirical discoveries it produced. By the end of this series, I hope to have shown that the persistent failure to define free and frank advice is not a failure at all, and that the structured disagreement among practitioners about what it means may be essential to how democracy actually works. The findings are provisional. The viva has not yet happened. But the patterns are ready to be shared.

Four years ago, I thought I was asking a simple question: what is free and frank advice, and why does it matter? It’s mentioned in our laws, appears in Cabinet manuals, and gets invoked daily across government as the gold standard for how officials should advise ministers. Surely someone, somewhere, had defined it properly. I was wrong. Spectacularly, fascinatingly wrong. Over the next six to nine months, this series will outline my journey of wrongness. This series replaces Cases for the Practical State, which will return in June 2026.

This series follows my journey from that initial naive question through the theoretical rabbit holes, methodological challenges, and empirical discoveries that have consumed the last four years of my life. It’s the story of how I tried to define the undefinable and what I learned instead about how democracy actually works when nobody’s watching.

What I discovered instead was something far more interesting: a concept so central to how our democracy works that it appears everywhere, yet so contested that it means completely different things to different people. Not randomly different: systematically, coherently different. Like six distinct tribes speaking the same language but meaning entirely different things.

A few crucial caveats before we begin:

First, this is a work in progress. I’m sharing my thoughts as they develop, not settled conclusions. The findings I’ll discuss are preliminary: fascinating and statistically robust, but still being tested and refined with some expert practitioners and academics. As with everything I share with the world, I reserve the right to be wrong, to learn new things, and to change my mind as the research progresses.

Second, this isn’t partisan politics. If you’re looking for left vs right takes on government, you’re in the wrong place. This is about how the machinery of democracy works, regardless of who’s operating it: the patterns I’ve found cut across political parties, ideologies, and institutional loyalties.

Third, this is deliberately accessible academic work. I’m trying to bridge the gap between scholarly research and public understanding without dumbing down the complexity. Some posts will be more theoretical, while others will be more practical. All will assume you’re smart but not necessarily familiar with academic jargon.

Finally, this matters beyond academic curiosity. How ministers and officials relate to each other shapes every government decision that affects our lives. Understanding these relationships better might help us improve how democracy functions, or at least understand why it sometimes fails to do so.

What you’re in for:

This is a 40-week journey through the intellectual landscape of advisory relationships in government. We’ll start with the historical puzzle, work through the theoretical frameworks that public administration scholars and political theorists use to understand advisory relationships. We will explore the methodological challenges of studying something that’s deliberately undefined, and then dive deep into what I actually found when I asked people what they think. As you would expect, I will protect the identities of my participants. I am grateful to them for their wisdom, insights, and time. In return, I promised them confidentiality, and I will honour that.

This is not the PhD, but the record of my journey. It is a journey not just about understanding what free and frank advice is, but also about why it remains contested and why that contestation might actually be essential to the functioning of democracy.

Spoiler alert: the disagreement itself might be the answer.

Ready? The first post drops next Saturday. We begin with the Ghost in the Machine: The mystery of free and frank advice. The focus is on how something so important became so undefined, the deliberate silences in our constitutional arrangements, and why this matters for understanding how democracy actually works.

One last word: Work-in-progress PhD findings aren’t like hot takes on whatever dumb thing a minister or president said on their social media to get clicks. They’re provisional, fragile things, and the academic world is twitchy about premature certainty. The best way to engage with this series is as a work in progress: a hypothesis being tested, patterns revealing themselves, and puzzles Deb is working on; they are not finished conclusions. I am opening a window into my thinking so you can see what is happening, and if you feel inclined, shape the work. I cannot overstate just how provisional the findings are.