Natalia Albert says we're thinking about the public service in the wrong ways, perhaps we need an engineer rather than consultants to figure out its future

By Natalia Albert*

The minister responsible for reforming New Zealand's public service currently holds 11 portfolios. Eleven. That’s too many. Paul Goldsmith is Minister for Defence, Justice, Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, Arts and Culture, Veterans, Pacific People, Space, National Security, Media and Communication, Digital Government and drum roll: the Public Service. In what world? 

Goldsmith is not the point. The point is that we have designed a public service where one minister holds 11 portfolios, running from Space to the needs of Pacific People to TVNZ. We built a system where that arrangement is possible, and then decided the problem was size. 

"The cuts are a part of a target to get the public service down to a level 1% relative to the New Zealand population, which would reduce the government funded job head count to 55,000."¹ So the government did what made sense under that assumption: it fired too many public servants, too fast, and called it Public Service Transformation. Cutting to a headcount target before you've built anything to absorb the capability gap, is an incorrect, and destabilizing approach. 

This government has done too much, too fast. The reforms since 2023 landed a lot of disruption in a short window, on a sector whose entire reason for existing is to provide a national sense of stability. The public service trades in continuity. You cannot destabilise it at speed and then act surprised when it stops working. In spite of what people think, the main role of the public service is not fairness, or even equity, its stability. Doing as much as possible, for as many folks as possible to maintain a level of national stability. 

The principle of the public service reform is correct. The execution is not. The pace of change and the fixation on size have undermined the basic thing the public service is for. The government can credibly say it has cut roles and spend. What it cannot say is that the advice got better. Or that anything else stabilised (not the economy, not health, not the cost of housing). 

And here is the part that should worry both sides: Labour will campaign on rebuilding it, National will campaign on cutting it further, and neither of them is describing a better design. They are describing a dial. Bigger, smaller. That's the whole conversation. And they will hire a consultancy agency like PwC to tell them where to cut down and where to build up. 

So, due to the need to keep reaching out to big consultancy firms like Deloitte, in Wellington City Councill's case, to tell us what to do, we have not only destabilized our public service, but we have privatised it. We outsourced the risk that advice carries, and that matters because it takes advice out of the democratic process. It weakens the advice, which weakens the institutions, which weakens the democracy. Three tiers, all leaning on each other. The cost of these reports is criminal, the quality of the advice is rubbish, and everyone knows it. So why do we keep doing it? 

Because we have very high levels of transparency, which produce very high levels of accountability, which in turn produce a very low appetite for risk. In that environment it becomes irresistible to ask an 'independent' agent to tell the government what to do and to carry the risk of having said it. Consultants are political insurance. Both the politicians and the firms have framed this as cost-cutting and as partnership in governance. It is neither. What this model does is moves knowledge, memory and judgment out of the state and into the private sector. Capitalism, neoliberalism and liberal democracy, meeting in the middle of the Venn diagram and shaking hands, endlessly. 

So what would a better one look like? 

We have too many agencies and ministers have too many portfolios. Facts. It's overcooked, 100%. But cutting roles based on an arbitrary number like 1% of the population is not the answer either. 

Nobody has ever shown that a smaller state is a more effective one. And a larger public sector will always consume more consulting services than a smaller one, because size correlates with organisational complexity, and complexity creates problems of coordination, collaboration and control. So, I'm not arguing for a bigger one. I'm arguing that the size question is the wrong question. 

Some agencies do need to go. We do need fewer portfolios, managed better. But that is a conclusion you reach by looking at how the system works, not by counting heads and cutting. It's a design problem, not a size problem, and I don't think political scientists or politicians have cracked it. Maybe what we need is an engineer. Just a thought. 

Take the population agencies (Women, Pacific Peoples, Ethnic Communities). They need either a real budget and a stronger mandate, or to be absorbed into departments that have both. Small, underfunded, with no lever to pull is the wrong model. The value behind them is right. In practice they are infuriating, and I say that as someone the state counts as an ethnic migrant. 

Countries like Ireland and Singapore, with populations close to ours, organise their governments in entirely different ways. Ireland caps its cabinet at 15 ministers, in the constitution. Singapore runs 16 ministries and layers second ministers and ministers of state underneath, so a portfolio has depth rather than one overstretched person on top. Neither is a model we should copy wholesale. But both are the result of someone sitting down and deciding how thinly executive attention can be spread before accountability stops meaning anything. We have never made that decision. We just keep adding.

1) From The Conversation article by Barbara Allen, Jonathan Boston and and Michael Macaulay; https://theconversation.com/the-push-for-a-smaller-public-service-risks-coming-at-a-larger-cost-for-new-zealanders-283271

*Natalia Albert is a political scientist specialising in New Zealand politics. She is a regular contributor on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan, Afternoons with Jesse Mulligan and writes for interest.co.nz. Less Certain is her weekly newsletter. Albert stood as a TOP candidate in the 2023 election.