The Post: The unelected officials and how they’re defying our councillors

Read the original article in the Post

You may be startled to learn, dear reader, that the contracting-out of public services is for unelected officials, not elected politicians, to control. So too the question of whether councils pay their staff properly or not.

The latest story to suggest something is badly awry in our public bodies came this week, as The Post reported that unelected staff at Wellington City Council are apparently refusing to respect a resolution by councillors to investigate bringing services like cleaning back in-house.

Officials appear determined to instead press ahead with giving the cleaning contract to a private firm, telling The Post this is an “operational” matter. In other words: back off, politicians.

Unsurprisingly, Unions Wellington is threatening a judicial review if staff don’t respect the resolution, noting in a letter that outsourcing often fails, and issuing a reminder – obvious enough, one might think – that officials’ job is “implementing the decisions of the local authority”.

The incident is all the more alarming because the council has form here. Last decade, officials tried to argue it would be “illegal” for councillors to lift the pay of traffic wardens, cleaners and the like by mandating the Living Wage.

Pay policies were for officials to determine, supposedly. The Living Wage campaign had to roll out the big guns, in the guise of former Victoria University law dean Matthew Palmer, to make it clear to officials that they were totally out of line.

That he was right is demonstrated by a decade’s worth of experience, in which the Living Wage has not exposed the council to conspicuous illegality but has, instead, improved the lives of some of the city’s lowest-paid workers.

Grotesque over-reach is not limited to local officials, however. Central government agencies will rarely defy politicians explicitly, but they are perfectly capable of slow-pedalling policy they don’t like, delaying it in the expectation – often successful – of outlasting their minister.

They can also abuse their superior knowledge vis-à-vis politicians and, as a departmental CEO once admitted to me, carry on obstinately with previous work programmes even when a government changes.

At this point, it is tempting to start up talk of a “shadow” state, of “cabals” of unelected officials running the show and using politicians as their puppets. But there is fault on both sides of the fence.

It is hardly uncommon for ministers to ignore sound advice, insist on ill-conceived pet projects, bully officials and micro-manage initiatives. Back here in Wellington, former councillor and 2022 mayoral candidate Paul Eagle had to apologise for labelling officials “the Gestapo”. Many elected members overstep their bounds, bombarding staff with requests that pay no heed to the difference between governance and management.

The truth is that the relationship between politicians and officials is badly in need of repair, at all levels of government. Public servants often see political leaders as ill-informed and reactive, indulging the public’s worst impulses; for their part, elected members sometimes regard the bureaucracy as a left-leaning “blob” that imposes its own agenda.

At the heart of a restored relationship must be a public service that is transformed in two directions, simultaneously tougher and more pliable. Officials need to rediscover the art of genuinely free and frank advice; junior public servants often describe being told by their superiors not to put up certain arguments because “the minister won’t like it”. A ministerial advisor once told me he had to ring up agencies and tell them not to pre-censor material, because his office actually did want to hear all the options, even unpopular ones.

To give that more holistic advice, officials – at whatever level – will need to be better-resourced, benefiting from greater professional development, deeper specialist knowledge, less of the constant hopping from agency to agency, and enhanced job security for departmental CEOs so they can more readily speak truth to power. AI can help with the brute work of collating information and getting more quickly to the heart of the matter, albeit the more ambitious claims about its capacities should be treated with caution.

Part two of the transformation, though, is that, once its advice has been digested, the bureaucracy needs to be quicker and more effective in delivering whatever the politicians decide, however hare-brained that might be. No slow-pedalling, no subtle subversion. The sanction on politicians must come from the electorate, fallible and inattentive though the latter often is.

That’s a lot for any organisation to manage: change in one direction is hard enough, let alone two at once. But needs must.

And the responsibility for change doesn’t lie solely with officials. The conditions under which they work are set largely by the other partner in the relationship.

If, for instance, agencies are nervous about giving free and frank advice, it is because too many ministers have made it clear this can be a career-limiting move. The problems with officials start, ironically enough, with politicians.