The Spinoff: Why does it feel like everyone hates the state?

Read the original article in the Spinoff

In September, the commentator and PR expert David Cormack stirred up his readers by writing: “I long believed [the existence of] charities indicated that the state wasn’t doing its job …. But maybe I’m looking at it the wrong way. Perhaps the real issue is expecting the state to show care at all. The evidence is clear: they don’t. And maybe they never will.”

Such comments would be unremarkable coming from the hard right, but Cormack is a former Greens staffer. He’s also channelling an ambient despair about the state of the state. Grant Duncan, an honorary researcher at the University of Auckland, wrote in October that New Zealand’s state “is eroding like a sandcastle, as public confidence and political consensus crumble beneath the waves of global change”.

Rhetorical exaggerations aside, such sentiments are now relatively common. Around Wellington, I often hear the public service described as inward-looking, out of touch with ordinary New Zealanders, or unable even to deliver decent services. It still employs driven and talented people. But even among its usual defenders – those who work in it – I hear a growing concern that government has somehow lost its way.

The state has always had its critics, especially among right-wingers and the radical left. Māori have long resisted it. But the lineup of critics now includes many social democrats, the authoritarian new right, and some government staffers. Although it retains immense power, the state has paradoxically few friends. Indeed it faces a greater challenge than any I can remember.

Nor is the chorus of critique specific to this government, although the coalition’s actions alarm many. The challenge, rather, is to the state itself – the collected agencies and departments that regulate the country, or, defined more broadly, the power of governing that each successive administration wields but must relinquish to its successor. The question is whether the current negative sentiment is merely a dip, a localised depression that can be lifted by well-judged tweaks, or whether we stand on the edge of something much more profound.

One plausible argument is that, in a decade’s time, the state as we currently know it – its schools and hospitals, its health and safety regulations, its justice system and so on – will be largely intact. 

As recently as 2017, the elite consensus was that the state could deliver services tolerably well. By this I don’t mean that New Zealand was a utopia. It endured racism, poverty, environmental degradation and many other ills. But that was all plausibly a result of the kinds of governments we elected, not a basic inability of the institutions of the state to deliver those governments’ pledges.

Now, though, there is a widespread belief – rightly or wrongly – that state agencies are a little like a slack piece of string: push one end, and nothing happens at the other. This sense is strongly connected to the perceived failings of the last Labour government.

Labour, as it happens, delivered rather more than is now remembered, including the legalisation of abortion, a rapid ramping up of state house-building, and an effective free school lunch programme. But it also famously struggled to implement policies like Kiwibuild and Auckland light rail. An extra $2 billion was spent on mental health services without anyone being able to show what it achieved. Overall, government spending rose by around one-quarter, adjusting for inflation and population growth, with decidedly mixed results.

The question, though, is whether those failures represent an existential problem for the New Zealand state, or whether they largely reflect one-off events – the pandemic, most obviously, but also the mosque shootings and the Whakaari White Island disaster – as well as Labour’s evident unreadiness for government. 

National’s argument is that the issues are relatively self-contained. Quarterly plans and KPIs will focus efforts. Social investment will measure “what works” and ensure that spending is effective. Better contracts for NGOs will break down enervating governmental silos.

The actual implementation of this approach is easily critiqued: social investment, for one, currently looks more like social disinvestment. But National’s approach is not wholly implausible. And it is complemented by other, under-the-radar work in areas like building projects, where the Infrastructure Commission is slowly bringing more rigour to the way that we plan for hospitals, roads and the like. 

Confidence in public agencies is also more robust than people think. Overall trust in government was higher in 2023 than it was in 1993, even if it has probably fallen since. Four-fifths of New Zealanders are satisfied with the public services they receive. Trust in the public service “brand” is higher than it was in 2015, albeit lower for Māori and Pacific Peoples than for other ethnicities.

On this reading, the challenges to the state are relatively superficial, focused on questions of delivery and amenable to targeted measures. But what if the problems run much deeper?

Many of the alleged defects of government date back decades. Most observers believe agencies struggle to comprehend the mega-trends of the age – population ageing, climate change, AI. The auditor-general has repeatedly warned that we know precious little about the effects of many government programmes. Far-sighted governance is, ironically, seldom sighted. Effective cross-agency working is even rarer. 

Free and frank advice, meanwhile, is generally thought to be on the wane. The public service no longer seems to be a home for bold, creative problem-solvers. And its staffers often appear profoundly distanced from the communities they are supposed to serve.

The system still contains well-motivated public servants trying to make a difference and defend the common good; especially at the frontline, some staff go above and beyond. But the agencies and structures in which they work often thwart their initiative.

Nor does government appear to be future-proofed. AI, for instance, is not just a tool to speed up service delivery; it will irrevocably change how we work, establish shared truths, and even determine what it means to be human. But is our government well-prepared for these profound shifts? Only the foolhardy would say yes.

The underlying environment in which government operates has also become harder to manage. The past was, admittedly, a more complex place than people recall; memory has a habit of flattening out such wrinkles. But societies are undeniably becoming more diverse and more fluid: less ethnically homogenous, less oriented around predictable career structures. The world is increasingly riven by geopolitical conflict, trade wars, and actual war.

Meanwhile we live in a less deferential age. Unquestioning acceptance of authority is rare. Most people exercise unprecedented consumer choices, and expect something vaguely similar from government. Young people in particular have a greater expectation of being heard, and are frustrated by being ignored instead. The world has changed; the way the government works, by and large, has not.

The state also faces an ambivalent challenge from the authoritarian new right, exemplified by Donald Trump and his fellow travellers. Their vision of the world is one part hyper-individualist: hence Trump’s sweeping tax cuts for the rich. But it is also one part big-statist: witness the whole tariff saga, a story that has offended libertarians more than anyone else.

The populist challenge, as it manifests in New Zealand, is less about cutting back government and more about denigrating the idea that state agencies have any independent role in protecting due process, any separate guardianship of the public interest. Every time Shane Jones threatens to “exterminate” public servants and their pesky procedures, every time ministers arrogate more powers to themselves under the fast-track process, the traditional ideal of the neutral and competent state is noticeably degraded.

These are all hard challenges. The most comprehensive, however, is coming – has always come – from Māori. The legendary sociologist Max Weber famously described the state as the organisation that exercises “a monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force”, but Māori thinkers and activists have long made it clear that they do not regard the state’s use of force as legitimate (to put it mildly). Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the version that rangatira signed, preserves their sovereignty; even the English-language version arguably leaves their domestic autonomy untouched.

And for all that the current government is winding back Māori rights, we are witnessing the emergence of indigenous economic and political institutions that arguably have state-like qualities. Māori have long enjoyed a distinct education system in the form of kōhanga reo and kura kaupapa. Now, iwi like Ngāti Toa are using their economic base to slowly repurchase land; they also run chains of health clinics and other services.

All this operates, for the moment, within the Crown’s authority. But thinkers like Moana Jackson have started to sketch out a world in which Māori construct their own political institutions, operating peacefully alongside – and frequently interacting with – the departments and agencies of the Crown. How quickly this vision will become a reality is anyone’s guess. But it unmistakably challenges the traditional idea of the state.

None of this suggests that the state’s problems can be solved with a few KPIs and a dash of social-return-on-investment analysis. The state is, in some senses, alienated from its citizens. This alienation, and the failure to deliver improved living standards, are what lie behind the authoritarian-populist revolt. Over a decade ago, the writer Peter Mair argued that many ostensibly democratic administrations were in fact “governing the void”.

It is hardly surprising, then, that writers like David Cormack think it’s time “to stop relying on the government altogether” and to build anew, through “communities taking care of themselves” and other institutions of local self-help. (Libertarians, with their long-standing distaste for the big state, would argue for something similar.) Such utopias would face large obstacles: the time taken from daily lives, the difficulties communities would experience trying to build national grids and all the other things the state does at scale, the reliance on solidarity trumping self-interest almost every time. But the longer the social-democratic state degrades, the more appealing such visions will become.

The alternative, for social democrats like myself, is to rethink the state, to simultaneously revitalise and humble it, to bring it up to date with 21st-century needs and local realities. Any worthwhile conception of social democracy must, for starters, be flexible enough to accommodate indigenous autonomy and the institutions that will give it life.

Within the Crown’s sphere of governance, I would bet big on age-old political traditions that include participatory democracy – in which ordinary citizens take more decisions and elected representatives fewer – and deliberative democracy, which privileges listening, reciprocal turn-taking in speech, and, where possible, a search for consensus. Together, these two forms of decision-making are sometimes called everyday democracy because of the way they weave political decision-making and public freedom into people’s day-to-day lives. They combine, on the one hand, the pragmatic need for some kind of state to do all the national-level governing that the modern world requires and, on the other, a devolution of as much control to communities as possible.

The state has, of course, done immense harm to some communities, not least Māori. But I don’t think that means it is inherently incapable of care. What else do nurses and teachers do every day, except express their love and care for patients and children? And they are, in workforce terms, the single biggest part of the state. 

Of course even teachers and nurses carry out their work imperfectly, sometimes inequitably. The state needs to be far better than it is now. As multiple questions about its ability and authority coalesce, it faces a greater challenge, a more pervasive distrust, than I have ever seen. Though not about to collapse, it risks a slow degradation and erosion. In the face of this danger, reform is essential – and not in some far-off future, but starting right now.