Balancing act: Keeping political masters happy and policy choices appropriate

The ironies of our 1980s’ state-sector reforms could easily be spun into comedy gold

I often find that undergraduate students are puzzled and confused as to what government is. This confusion is apparent because government is a curious amalgam of two contradictory elements. The first is our elected politicians who have a right to govern because they are chosen according to the rules of parliamentary democracy.

An important democratic principle is that anyone should be able to stand for public office. As such, the minister of health need not have any particular background in health policy. It might be a bonus if they do. Then again, it might not! This is crucial if democracy is truly “rule by the people”.

However, governing also requires significant expertise, both over content of policy, and over processes of policymaking. The fine details vary, but all advanced democracies have developed a “permanent state” – institutions of government agencies and their officials that outlive any particular elected government. Ideally, these agencies provide expertise and policy memory – the components of a policy brain – on which democracies depend.

But this gives rise to a fundamental policy puzzle; namely, how do these two parts of government – the elected politicians and the unelected officials – relate to each other? Should public officials primarily be there to do what ministers instruct them to do, or should they ensure elected politicians are given “free and frank advice” to counteract the short-term political and electoral im-peratives that drive politicians? What is the appropriate balance between these roles?

At one extreme was early 19th century America, in which anyone could be a public official, no particular qualifications or expertise was necessary. Does this sound vaguely familiar in the US context today? Public servants were clearly beholden to, and dependent on, their political masters.

At the other pole is the scenario parodied in the classic 1980s’ British TV series Yes Minister, and its sequel Yes Prime Minister, in which elected politicians are puppets manipulated by Machiavellian “Sir Humphreys” who possess the knowledge necessary to exert real power.

Yes Minister was comedy gold, but few of its fans realised that the motivation of one of its two writers, Antony Jay, was to popularise a doctrine known as “public choice theory”. This doctrine was enormously influential in “reinventing” the relationship between elected politicians and public servants in Britain and beyond.

Public-choice ideologues had a clear answer to the “politics/administration” puzzle – ministers need to be in charge, and public servants are there to do their bidding. Their approach was based on a very crude and narrow conception of what motivates public servants (or indeed anyone else) – rational self-interest.

Public choice is underpinned by an inherent suspicion of democratic processes and the role of government, and its advocates set out to privilege the role of market mechanisms in society. Accordingly, public-choice advocates sought first to limit the range and scope of government, and second to limit (as they saw it) the damage public servants might do in pursuit of their own (or their organisation’s) interest. This doctrine was championed by the New Zealand Treasury in the 1980s and its legacy remains extremely strong in the DNA of our state sector.

In the New Zealand context, the ironies of our 1980s’ state-sector reforms could easily be spun into comedy gold. No one could reasonably say the Muldoon Government was ever beholden to its senior bureaucrats.

Rob Muldoon, himself, pretty much ignored the Treasury advice between 1981 and 1984, giving senior treasury officials plenty of time to develop their public-choice blueprint for reinventing government. All they needed was a supportive minister. Enter Roger Douglas from stage left in 1984 (departing stage right).

To be sure, some important legacies of the older tradition of a neutral public service survived the 1980s’ reforms. For example, our most senior public servants are appointed by the State Services Commission (SSC), and employment time frames are independent of electoral cycles. Australian government agencies, by comparison, are subject to even stronger control by elected governments through hiring and firing.

Still, if it is clear that a director-general of health is not singing from the same song sheet as the minister, then the usual course of action has been for the public servant to fall on her/his sword.

Since the 1990s, a number of pathologies of the master–servant relationship between minister and ministry officials have become clear enough for the current government to be looking at how to rebalance it for current circumstances. The biggest problem concerns how risk-averse public officials and government agencies have become. Many senior public servants are so finely attuned to political risk that any suggestion a government policy is not as successful as its authors had hoped, is buried or smothered, lest it gets turned into a weapon that oppositions can use. This can have a chilling effect on intelligent policy processes.

The second casualty has been the considerable devaluation of the “vocation” of public service as a career destination for some of our best and brightest. This is what the current state services commissioner, Peter Hughes – who gave the Ministry of Health a “bollocking” in the SSC’s 2017 Performance Improvement Framework review – is currently aiming to revive (https://bit.ly/2JLHVTc).

None of this means we will be returning to the world of Sir Humphrey Appleby and minister James Hacker any time soon. But then again, it is doubtful such a world ever really existed in health policy in the first place.

Tim Tenbensel is associate professor, health policy, in the School of Population Health at the University of Auckland