When a nation’s protective shell of institutions is being ripped away, its only concern is finding a safe place to hide

By Chris Trotter*

New Zealanders require an urgent answer to a brutal question: Can the public service, as presently configured and administered, be fixed? We must ask it because the latest scandal arising out of the ongoing disaster that is MBIE may be unusually bad, but it is not  unusual.

Certainly it is not the only expensive IT failure our public servants have presented us with in recent years. Each time, following the inevitable inquiry, reassurances have been given that lessons have been learned and that the nation’s bureaucrats will do better in the future. Neither of these claims have been vindicated by events. Expensive IT failure now presents itself as an unavoidable fact of bureaucratic life.

Which only raises more questions. Are expensive failures a peculiarity of IT, or are they occurring right across the public sector? And, if that is the case, if failures are occurring across the entire system of state administration, then should we not be asking an even more unnerving question: Is expensive failure a bug, or a feature, of our public systems?

There will be many who dismiss that last question as hyperbolic. What sort of large, publicly-funded system essential to the smooth running of New Zealand’s complex economy and society would be quite deliberately set up to fail – rather than succeed?

The very notion is insulting to the thousands of public servants engaged in serving the public. It also carries the foul odour of conspiratorial thinking.

There would be many New Zealanders, however, most especially those dependent on the state for economic support, such as the elderly, the homeless, the unemployed, the injured and the disabled, who would, if asked, be reluctant (without guaranteed protection against bureaucratic reprisal for replying honestly) to speak glowingly of their experiences at the interface of service provider and citizen. The idea that such systems might have been designed to fail, or that their manifest failings have been left unrepaired on purpose, would not seem strange to them at all.

When New Zealanders in need are presented as a fiscal drag upon the taxpayer, or as the generators of social dysfunction, or both, inefficiency and failure in the provision of all those outcomes not associated with purging the welfare rolls and saving the state money might strike those reliant upon such public assistance as mechanisms which the bureaucrats in charge would be in no hurry to fix.

Those on the right of the political spectrum might even venture the opinion that any public service not conspiring against these useless mouths and idle hands was failing in its duty.

Too harsh? Perhaps. But the animosity of those who regard the welfare state as a vehicle for carrying society at reckless speed along the “road to serfdom” is not to be underestimated.

One such ideologue is the long-time American champion of free markets, Grover Norquist. He has publicly declared his views on this subject with admirable (and oft-quoted) clarity:

 “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Norquist’s language may be violent, but his hostility towards the welfare state is entirely rational when set against the long-term goals that he, and all those who share his antipathy to the twentieth century social-democratic state, have been pursuing since the 1980s.

Accordingly, it is important to acknowledge Norquist’s first sentence. He does not want to abolish government.

Norquist is not an anarchist. What he shares with the anarchist, however, is the understanding that all governments, all states, build around themselves an institutional shell carefully constructed to meet their goals. Inevitably, these institutions and agencies, the structures of the state’s bureaucratic shell, will be staffed with men and women whose ideals and temperaments harmonise with the ideological objectives of the public system’s political architects.

In New Zealand’s case, what would grow into a large and active state bureaucracy had its birth in the wide-ranging reforms of the Liberal Government (1890-1912) and  was expanded hugely as the welfare state inaugurated by the First Labour Government (1935-1949) matured into an entrenched – and seemingly immovable – feature of the nation’s political and administrative architecture.

The ethos of Labour’s (and, reluctantly, National’s) social-democratic state bureaucracy was one of service and integrity, expertise and competence. Confident that its purposes and direction were secure from radical political revision, New Zealand public servants accepted their central role as nation builders. Senior bureaucrats were chosen for the professional expertise, practical experience, and lengthy service records they brought to the government departments they were appointed to lead: qualities which encouraged the politicians of the day to trust their judgement and heed their advice.

Clearly, the imposition of a neoliberal state was utterly incompatible with a social-democratic public service. A new institutional shell, one designed to both empower and protect the new economic, social, and political paradigms being set in place by David Lange’s Fourth Labour Government would have to be constructed – and quickly.

The old social-democratic bureaucracy would have to go. Nation builders were no longer required. A new bureaucratic elite was shown the bathtub, handed a meat cleaver, and instructed to make the old system small enough to drown.

Fortunately for the tiny clique of Reserve Bank and Treasury officials who masterminded the “bureaucratic coup d’etat” that spawned “Rogernomics”, there existed a battle-tested set of ideological tropes and rhetorical memes with which to undermine the public’s faith in the old bureaucracies of the social-democratic state.

Crowning New Zealand neoliberalism’s wild collection of cautionary tales trumpeting criminal levels of inefficiency and waste were the popular stereotypes forever imprinted upon the popular memory by Roger Hall’s “Glide Time” play and his “Gliding-on” television series.

Deployed alongside the devastating “Yes Minister” series imported from Thatcher’s Britain, Hall’s gentle humour encouraged Kiwis to view their public service as a tired old workhorse that should have been put out to pasture long ago. Kiwis weren’t to know that the workhorses who had built their nation were about to be replaced by jackals without a country.

In a neoliberal system, the state bureaucracy’s primary function is to amputate as much of itself as it can, as often as it can. The upward flow of wealth requires the constant shrinkage of redistributive fiscal mechanisms. That means lower and lower taxes, compensated for by a more or less constant reduction in the state’s inherited economic and social responsibilities.

To expect a state en route to Norquist’s bathtub to fund the sort of massive IT overhauls required for the Age of Artificial Intelligence is fanciful. The funding required to make New Zealand ready for the epochal changes that loom ahead would require higher, not lower, taxes, and a public service replete not only with in-house expertise and competence (i.e. contractor-proof) but also with the nation-building spirit that produced the country far too many of us still believe we live in.

Sadly, the spirit of today’s public service is the spirit of the jackal, constantly alert to the chunks of meat that continue to fall from the state’s shrinking corpse. What we need to understand, however, is that when a nation’s protective shell of institutions is being ripped away, its only concern is finding a safe place to hide.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.