Are Civil Servants Disposable?
Trevor Mallard may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Even his friends might concede that he occasionally betrays a lack of judgment. But, in his criticism of Deputy Police Commissioner Mike Bush when the senior policeman appeared before a Select Committee, he was entirely justified.
Trevor Mallard has a long experience of public life and his awareness of its basic principles is reliable. He recognised, as did many observers, that the eulogy delivered by Mike Bush on the occasion of former Detective Inspector Bruce Hutton’s funeral – containing as it did an assertion that a police officer who had been found by a Royal Commission of Inquiry to have planted evidence in a murder trial had an unsullied reputation for integrity – could not be allowed to pass without challenge.
The excuses offered for this remarkable statement – that Mike Bush was quoting words from another source or that it was a private occasion – do not stand up. There is no way that it could be seen as other than a public rejection, by the police as an organisation, of the finding of the Royal Commission or, alternatively, as a statement that the finding was of no consequence. Either way, the message is clear – the police loyalty is to their own rather than to acceptable standards of policing.
One might have thought that the Minister of Police would recognise the danger to the police if that perception gained ground with the public. But her riposte to the effect that Trevor Mallard’s challenge was an instance of “bullying” failed lamentably to take this on board. Is the Minister really saying that a Member of Parliament should not be allowed to point out that public confidence in the police can only suffer if the police are seen to refuse to recognise that such a serious breach of acceptable standards has been committed? Is the Minister really happy to leave the matter as it stands – and as represented by Mike Bush’s assertion?
However inappropriate it may be in this instance, it is of course commendable in principle that the Minister should defend her public servants; but her response is in marked contrast to the attitude increasingly taken by ministers in this government. It is now common practice, when things go wrong, for ministers – not to defend their officials, but to blame them – as a means of avoiding any responsibility themselves.
The most recent and egregious example is the fallout from the Novopay debacle. A process that has created huge damage to an important public sector undertaking – our schools – was monitored and eventually signed off by three ministers; when they put their signatures to the sign-off, they in effect accepted responsibility for what they had decided.
We are now told that they did not know what they were signing because they had been provided with inaccurate information by their officials. The consequence is that the senior officials involved have been hung out to dry; two have departed (the second under threat of an investigation) and the pressure is mounting against the third.
The ministers, however, sail on unchallenged and unaffected. It was not, it seems, anything to do with them. In this, they are following an unfortunate precedent set – amongst others – by Murray McCully.
Just over a year ago, it may be recalled, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade was to undergo a huge shake-up. The numbers of posts and of diplomats were to be slashed; appointments of ambassadors were to be made following advertisements for applicants.
When these plans were eventually abandoned, or at least substantially curtailed, the Minister declared that they were nothing to do with him. According to Murray McCully, MFAT’s Chief Executive, John Allen, was to blame and should carry the can. The Minister was, he assured Morning Report in March last year, merely “the purchaser of services” from the ministry.
This novel doctrine is, of course, in marked contrast to the keenness of his ministerial colleague to make common cause with the public servants who work for her in the police. It also raises an interesting difference in approach from that taken by another minister – the Attorney General, Chris Finlayson.
The Attorney General, we learn, is upset by a Supreme Court decision that advice from a civil servant to a minister is not protected by parliamentary privilege – indeed, he is so upset that he intends to legislate so as to make it clear that a civil servant and a minister are joined at the hip and must both be protected.
The Herald takes the same view. That view could be argued to represent a significant extension of parliamentary privilege (as the Supreme Court decided). But, in any case, if civil servants are so integral a part of parliamentary process that they and their ministers are in effect one and the same, shouldn’t they be less easily thrown to the wolves when it suits the government?
Bryan Gould
13 June 2013
This article was published in the NZ Herald on 17 June.
Who’s Extreme?
Whatever one may think of John Key, he can at least do his sums. He knows that anything less than 49% of the vote at the next election is likely to mean that he loses office, and that a Labour-led government will take over.
It is presumably fear of that outcome that has led him recently to sharpen his attacks on his political opponents. The contest, we are told, is between a cuddly-sounding “centre-right” and a threatening “far left”. A Labour and Greens alliance is a “devil beast”. We’ll soon be back to Cossack dancers, though North Korea rather than the Soviet Union seems to be the bogeyman of choice used these days to frighten voters.
It is always regrettable, and bad for democracy, when low-grade abuse takes over from reasoned argument. And it is even less defensible when the targets for such abuse are able to locate their political whakapapa in the democratic tradition which they, perhaps more than any others, did so much to build.
As it happens, though, we have now been presented with a rather more convincing example of extremism close to home. The paper leaked by a National party insider and reported in Saturday’s Herald reveals the determined efforts being made by a small group of zealots to foist upon this country policies that are supported only by a tiny percentage of the population – that is, the proportion that would normally vote for Act.
The dream of these “fiscal conservatives” (who would find an enthusiastic welcome in the wilder Tea Party reaches of American politics) is to move elected governments out of the way so that the voters don’t matter and the country can be run by big business. To this end, they are, according to the leaked paper, working to place their supporters as National candidates in winnable seats, to target control of local authorities, to get their supporters promoted into top public sector jobs, to dominate media coverage, to build up a war-chest of “business money”, and to secure influential positions in strategic organisations – and all without revealing to their National party colleagues that they are engaged in a conspiracy against their own party.
This might seem far-fetched, but we have been here before. As Nikky Hager revealed in The Hollow Men, Don Brash and his secret backers were engaged in just such a conspiracy, and they nearly pulled it off. We nearly elected as Prime Minister in 2005 a man who had concealed his true intentions from the voters and who would have done enormous damage to this country, both economically and socially, and not least to race relations. If Don Brash had won, even many National voters would have woken up to ask “what have we done?”
Nor should we comfort ourselves with the belief that it couldn’t happen again. The tiny number of “fiscal conservatives” in this country exercise a disproportionate influence in business organisations, especially in some of our major industries. And the senior ranks of today’s National party are not immune; we are told in the leaked paper that even one or two very senior members of the present Cabinet may well be sympathetic to “cleaning out” the “wet wing” of the party and to ensuring that a National government will do whatever is required of it by big-business donors.
If John Key is anxious about extremism, than that is where he should turn his attention. But at least he himself can be acquitted of wanting to foist these unrepresentative views on an unsuspecting public?
It is certainly true that he is no ideological conspirator – he doesn’t have to be. He presents as essentially a pragmatist who goes with the flow.
But pragmatists still make judgments according to the beliefs they hold; they may swim with the tide, but it is the one they always choose. And the tide he chooses is not very different from the one chosen by his own extremists; the record shows that it is one that leads inexorably to a John Key government conducted in the interests of big business.
New Zealand voters, like the Americans, may have lost sight of what is extreme and what is not. Eduardo Porter of the New York Times reports that, while polls show that Americans believe that their political ideology has changed little in recent decades, what it means to be “conservative” or “liberal” (as the Americans use it, now a term of abuse in many circles) has changed considerably.
Porter drew attention to the success achieved by extreme right-wingers in moving the whole spectrum to the right. In surveys 25 years ago, for example, 71 percent of Americans
believed it was the government’s job to take care of those who couldn¹t care for themselves, a percentage that has now fallen to 59%.
So, while we must salute the public-spiritedness of the National party leaker who presumably recognised the danger of extreme views to both his party and the country, the danger is far from over. Without our realising it, a government whose priority is to support big business interests is still coming our way.
Bryan Gould
1 June 2013
New Zealand’s Elective Dictatorship
It was the Tory MP and peer, Quintin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham, who coined the phrase “elective dictatorship” to describe a government that – once elected – proceeds to ignore the wishes of the voters who elected it and to do whatever it wishes.
His point was that there is much more to democracy than the casting of a vote once every few years. In a properly functioning democracy, government is held to account – not least in parliament – and its decisions debated and often contested on a day-to-day basis. A government claiming legitimacy for its actions and decisions will ensure that this is so.
I was reminded of this important point when Nanaia Mahuta’s complaint about the inadequacy of facilities in our parliament for mothers with small babies was summarily dismissed by Rodney Hide in the Herald on Sunday. There was no problem, Hide asserted, because MPs did not need to be present in the debating chamber; they were required in parliament, not – it seems – to listen to, let alone participate in, the debate, but merely to act as lobby fodder.
As long as they cast their votes at the appointed time, it didn’t matter if they knew what had been said in the debate or even if they knew what the debate was about.
This offers a remarkable insight into how the current government and its allies view parliament and the democratic process. The notion that the elected members are there to exercise supervision and restraint over the executive – that the government needs to make and win reasoned arguments before making decisions – is obviously foreign to them.
Perhaps we should not be surprised. John Key’s government has given ample evidence of the contempt in which it holds parliament. Its majority in that parliament is, after all, the product of a disreputable deal with John Banks and its determination to preserve that arrangement is evidenced by its summary rejection of the public’s demonstrated wish to see – in the interests of democracy – reforms of our MMP voting system.
The government’s focus is clearly on preserving its majority, whatever the cost to effective democracy. And so little value is placed on parliamentary debate that the resort to “urgency” in passing legislation is now commonplace and has led to increasingly badly drafted law.
It is increasingly clear that – whatever the principles of our constitution may say – the government is unwilling to tolerate interference, not just from parliament, but from any quarter. It has now taken to ignoring the advice it receives even from its own departments, as in the cases of the Crown Minerals Amendment Act and the decision allowing mining on the Denniston plateau.
It has quite deliberately restricted the rights of citizens to go to law to contest government decisions, as in the shameful case of those who might wish to litigate the low level of remuneration paid to family carers. It has refused to publish the legal advice it has received on contentious issues like the criminalisation of protest against oil drilling on the high seas.
John Key has repeatedly made the argument that a policy on asset sales that is manifestly opposed, on strong grounds, by a majority of New Zealanders should nevertheless proceed because he and his party won the 2011 election. This is as stark an instance of an “elective dictatorship” as one could wish (or not wish) to see.
That argument has now been taken to even less defensible lengths on the issue of the Auckland convention centre. Not only are we told that the general election outcome means that the Prime Minister is free to strike whatever deal he wants to make with his big business cronies (in a secret process, in this instance, roundly criticised even by his parliamentary ally, Peter Dunne), but the Sky City boss then has the gall to jump on that bandwagon and to tell the public that the PM’s mandate means that they have no right to be heard.
It is now clear that the only people who have any chance of influencing the Prime Minister in his otherwise unbridled use of power are the leaders of powerful business interests. Warner Brothers can extract tax concessions and law changes without breaking sweat; petroleum and mining companies can have protesters outlawed and environmental concerns set aside; Sky City can have gambling protections relaxed and a licence to print money extended till 2048 – and parliament is threatened that any successor government would incur heavy penalties if it tries to change that arrangement.
A government that understands and values democracy would ensure that it was responsive at all times to the opinions of the voters. This is not to say that a government, including this one, cannot have its own way. But the strength of our democracy rest on assuring people of all views that they have at least been heard.
Our forefathers fought hard for our democracy. Whatever view we take of the government’s political stance, we betray that legacy if we fail to protest at the cavalier way in which democracy is now treated.
Bryan Gould
26 May 2013.
The Wrong Target
What the media described as a “back to black” budget was greeted in some quarters as though it was a test match victory. Beyond the headline, however, little attempt was made to help the public understand what the budget was all about.
For many people, the prospect of “getting back to surplus” was enough to assure them that all is well. Few would ask whose surplus we were actually talking about, whether it was or should be the prime goal of policy, what price we might have to pay to achieve it, and whether its achievement – when it happens – would have helped or hindered the resolution of our long-term problems.
Many, for example, would not distinguish the government’s position from the country’s; still fewer would understand that a government surplus could actually mean that the country’s indebtedness gets worse. All other things being equal, it would be nice to have the government’s books in balance, but the debt we should really be worried about is the amount we owe to overseas lenders – and that is going up, not down.
A government surplus, after all, means only that it takes more from us in tax than it spends on services and that is just one part of the overall picture; and sadly, its decision that its own accounts should take precedence over the country’s has meant that we are much slower in coming out of recession than we should be. Those looking for work but without jobs (of whom there are many more than revealed by the statistics), the families in poverty, the children going to school hungry, the families crowded into substandard housing, are all paying the price for an ideologically driven focus on reducing the size of government.
That slow escape from recession has meant that we have again spent several years failing to make proper use of our productive resources – and we are a poorer country as a result. And the focus on the government’s books has of course played its own part in directly creating unemployment, as public servants have been thrown out of work and sent to join the dole queue.
Even more importantly, the rundown of public services – the inevitable corollary of the constant cuts – means that in all sorts of areas, like biosecurity and safety at work, we are less well equipped to build an efficient economy; it is only occasionally, when PSA arrives or a Pike River disaster occurs, that we see in stark terms a price that is usually unseen but is actually being paid day by day and across the board.
Even in those areas where the government has found it necessary to acknowledge public concern, the theme that business, not government, must provide the solution remains dominant. Affordable housing, the government contends, is best provided if local government and community are shunted out of the way and developers are given free rein. The best way of securing an Auckland convention centre is to sell long-term concessions to a casino operator. Prospecting for oil and minerals will attract private investment if civil rights and environmental protections are scrapped.
If the price we pay for balancing the government’s books is that the country’s trade account goes into deeper deficit and the private sector continues to consume rather than save, there can be only one outcome – the country’s sizeable debt owed to foreigners will go on getting bigger.
That likely outcome is a recipe for a vicious circle of higher interest rates to persuade foreigners to lend to us, an even more overvalued dollar, more asset sales to overseas buyers to help close the gap between what we spend and what we earn, less national wealth so that we are more dependent on foreign capital to “invest in” (for which read “own”) our productive base and – as interest payments on our borrowings and profits exported overseas take their toll on our balance of payments – the need to undertake yet more borrowing to start the cycle all over again.
These prospects are not fanciful; it is precisely such fears that prompted both the IMF on their recent visit and the credit rating agency Standard and Poors last week to make their own damning judgment of the government’s strategy. However careful their language, neither of these agencies – historically predisposed as both are to “responsible”, not to say conservative, policies – could conceal their alarm at what are now emerging as the prospects for our economy.
While the government and our media are focused on the sideshow of a prospective government surplus, the wider economy is belatedly coming out of recession by making a headlong dash back to all our familiar problems writ large. Little wonder that informed observers (including our own Reserve Bank) are alarmed at the overheating Auckland housing market and at the impact of an overvalued currency on our weakening productive sector and growing trade deficit.
“Back to black”, in other words, was a snap judgment on a budget that, by again ignoring the important elements in our economy in favour of an ideological predilection for reducing the role and responsibilities of government, has compounded rather than resolved our real problems.
Bryan Gould
18 May 2013
This article was published in the NZ Herald on 24 May
Clicking Fingers
At first glance, Aaron Gilmore has paid a heavy price for what seem to have been pretty minor misdemeanours. He isn’t the first person to make a fool of himself after a few too many.
But on closer scrutiny, the episode might appear in a different light. It was not so much what he did, but what he revealed himself to be that attracted such unfavourable attention. Here was a man who was ready to treat with contempt those whom he clearly regarded as mere minions, and who was misguided enough to believe that his imagined power and influence meant that he could demand and get whatever he wanted. Is someone who will so arrogantly ride roughshod over others the kind of person we want running the country – even if only in the most minor of minor roles?
It was that question that meant that Aaron Gilmore lost the support of his colleagues, and particularly of the Prime Minister. They could not afford to have the National government tarred with the Gilmore brush.
Within a few days of the Gilmore episode, however, the government has found that a new issue has dominated the headlines. The long-heralded deal with Sky City over a convention centre in Auckland has been announced. No one would dispute that Auckland would benefit from such a facility, but the way it has been arranged raises a number of questions that are in their own way not so far removed from the Gilmore saga.
There is of course no reason that a convention centre should have anything to do with a casino. Sky City’s involvement is something cooked up by the government. If it were a commercially viable project, Sky City should pursue it on their own account without demanding the concessions they have obtained. If it is not commercially viable, then the government should face that fact and fund the project from its own resources, rather than sell concessions to a gambling interest that is careless about the welfare of our fellow citizens.
There are other peculiarities of the deal. The government has not only sold its power to make laws, but has purported to do so in a way that will bind future governments and make it impossible to unpick the deal. Even its supporters must have been brought up short by the realisation that the arrangement will last till 2048 and that any attempt to change it will involve future taxpayers in hefty annual penalty payments to Sky City.
This looks like an unconscionable attempt to use contract law to circumvent the generally accepted constitutional principle that one parliament cannot bind its successors. And that injury is exacerbated by Sky City’s further demand that the public should be denied any involvement in determining the shape of the project.
We have, it seems, in Sky City’s view, already endorsed the deal by voting in the National government in 2011 – in just the same way as we apparently supported asset sales. This attitude brings us perilously close to what Quinton Hogg, later Lord Hailsham, once famously described as “an elective dictatorship” – a government that, once elected, claims a democratic mandate to ignore the will of the people and do whatever it pleases. And what pleases this government, sadly, is carrying out the wishes of big business, even if that runs counter to the interests of ordinary people.
The Sky City deal is – in line with that solicitude for business interests and lack of concern for the common good – in line with the Warner Brothers deal (which reduced the rights at work of New Zealand employees, and cost the taxpayer $67 million). The keenness to promote asset sales is a further example. The case for selling assets cannot be an economic one, when the assets being sold generate an annual return of at least 7% and the government can borrow at less than half that rate; the outcome can only mean a greater burden for future taxpayers.
But the government will pursue asset sales because they provide another opportunity to reward their supporters; consumers might suffer, through higher prices, along with taxpayers, but stockbrokers and investors, accountants and receivers (if things go wrong) will (it is hoped) make a killing. We see a similar pattern in the government’s suggested solution to the problem of housing affordability; those who cannot afford decent housing and struggle to pay their rent are somehow to be helped by providing enlarged opportunities for property developers to pocket the increased development value of land.
Which brings us back to Aaron Gilmore. Do we see something of the departed MP in the ruthless use of power to get what the government and its supporters want? In the contempt with which the interests of ordinary people are dismissed? In the readiness to suck up to the rich and powerful?
When Aaron Gilmore clicked his fingers to the waiter, the sound reverberated round the whole country. When John Key, with a ready smile, does the same, hardly anyone notices.
Bryan Gould
14 May 2013