Hooton on neutral public service

Matthew Hooton has an excellent reasoned column on the public service, and the many examples of previous neutrality:

When he was trade minister, Lockwood Smith found that invariably the junior diplomats in our overseas posts had burned him in effigy a few years earlier when he was education minister and they were student protesters.

Smith was amused rather than offended. Old war stories could be swapped over dinner when the trade negotiations were done.

Winston Peters must know that many of his foreign affairs officials deplore his domestic agenda, but those same officials report that he behaves with the utmost courtesy and professionalism in all his dealings with his department.

Perhaps jet-setting foreign-policy ministers become more cosmopolitan and tolerant of political differences, but that does not explain why, as social welfare minister, the more aggressively partisan Roger Sowry worked entirely professionally with senior officials Vera Smith, who stood for Labour the previous election, and Alison Timms, whose husband Tony was a long-standing general secretary of the Labour Party and, at the time, was opposition leader Helen Clark’s right-hand man.

In 2000, I helped Margaret Wilson’s Labour Department communicate the Employment Relations Act to employers. Wilson, I’m told, was very happy with the work. Biosecurity New Zealand, I hope, received value when I reviewed their communications after the 2005 Waiheke Island foot and mouth scare.

Smith, Goff, Sutton, Peters, Sowry and Wilson are very different people, but they are all professionals. They understand that the departments for which they are temporarily responsible are not extensions of their political machines. However important they may think their work is, they know that one day they will be replaced, potentially by someone from a different party. In the meantime, they meet their obligations to protect their department’s reputation for integrity and independence, to ensure any future government will also have confidence in its work.

It’s a point well made.  Benson-Pope, Anderton and Parker have trampled on the neutrality convention, but not all Ministers do so. Some may be surprised that the Labour Department under Margaret Wilson hired Matthew Hooton to communicate the Employment Relations Act to employers, but that is how it should work – if he was the best person for the job, he should do it.  Professionals are able to separate out their personal views and not let them interfere with their professional duty.

In the next year, government departments will spend at least $60 million on advertising to inform us about government services and to explain the government’s policies.

If the public service is truly independent, it needs to satisfy itself that the tone and style of all this advertising would be identical under either Labour or National. It should reflect the brand personality of the department, not the party in power.

Indeed.

Logan then appointed a senior Labour Party official, Clare Curran, who was recommended by Climate Change Minister David Parker just days after she presented a paper to a Labour conference arguing Labour needed to “take greater charge of the language of debate and discussion in New Zealand”.

Curran is as entitled as anyone to secure work from the ministry, but given her political activity and the fact New Zealand has a bipartisan climate change policy, she needs to be absolutely sure that she would have given identical communications advice had National’s Nick Smith been its minister instead of Parker.

That has been questioned. As a result, all her work should be released publicly. If there is even a hint that it was politically slanted, she must never again be given a government contract and Logan and Parker must be fired.

There have been numerous OIA requests filed for Curran’s work and advice.  It will be most interesting to see what emerges.