Jess Berentson-Shaw explains why she thinks there is plenty of reason to be hopeful that the public service we all need is possible
I think of myself as a realistic optimist. That means I deeply believe in the ability of people in public service to do good for everyone, not just some people. To me, it means the public service consistently operates at the level where it has the greatest impact - people in it understand the power and responsibility they have to influence upstream systems and structures, and utilise this responsibility for achieving fairness across our communities.
It is an innovative and dynamic institution (or set of), buzzing with new ideas, engaging in trialling programmes that shift systems, programmes that iwi, hapū, communities, experts and people in public service build together.
Doing good for everyone would mean a public service focused firmly on future generations, so kids would be consistently put first in decisions. It would be a place where leading and supporting market activity for the true common good (like protecting the planet that sustains our existence) is a realistic endeavour, and done competently in respectful and reciprocal relationships with iwi and hapū, Pacific communities, business and community groups who share these goals. It's a fun thought experiment.
The realistic bit of my optimism also means I see that the current systems and structures of the public service are not set up to enable a lot of this to happen. Yet. People, focused on the wrong things, can too easily stymie the collaborative innovation and creative endeavour that people in policy can do and have done before, in true partnership.
For example, last Friday during two different meetings with people who are experts in their different fields - people with deep knowledge and a real commitment to delivering a more effective, more just approach to policy-making - told me how tired they are of being asked to provide advice to people in government and having it ignored. They framed it as a failure of public officials to care or to listen. In the worst cases it looks like (and sometimes is) outright prejudice and arrogance.
Like most things in life, it's a mix of many things that constrains people in various ways from acting in the most helpful ways, on the best information, for the greatest good. In the public service, workplace culture and mindsets matter.
It would be surprising if all the usual stuff that stops people from doing their most inclusive, thoughtful and impactful work wasn't also at play in the public service. Things like constant restructures, the everyday hustle of proving your staff’s worth and having your budget moved off you while also being asked to produce more and more. Small frustrations that wear you down, like higher-ups ignoring good work, or failing to recognise effort. And bigger ones, like a rubbish workplace culture that enables bully boy behaviour and toxic styles of leadership, a lack of good faith support from HR, etc.
There are probably people in various positions who want to hold things we have now in place and for whom listening to, and working with, communities sits outside of their ambitions or is seen as too risky to their or the organisation's position. External pressures, like media and political attention, play a role in that.
And finally, importantly, mindsets matter. These are the invisible (to some) barriers to more inclusive, more collaborative, and more effective policy-making approaches that lie in culture and thinking and emotion. Barriers that often get ignored in policy-making discussions. They include, for example:
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an ideology that infuses policy-making - of the rational, self interested public
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epistemological racism - basically western knowledge systems being treated as more valid than Indigenous ones, for understanding and solving complex problems
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a strong belief (and associated set of values and behaviours) that the role of government is to act as an adjunct to the market, rather than a shaper of markets to help deliver collective wellbeing
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a lack of understanding of the benefits of relationships with experts, and knowledge-holders from outside of public services.
Clearly there are many opportunities to help people in government realise its more inclusive, collaborative, and somewhat latent potential. This was the intent of the Public Service Act reform, and things like the long-term insights briefings. But more can happen, especially with regard to shifting mindsets within the system.
Shifting mindsets within the public service
Like all cultural shifts, it requires insider and outside effort. Leadership from within and pressure from outside from, as the PM puts it, “critical friends”.
Current ways of thinking, and the results of that thinking, need to be made visible. The more you name them, measure them and report them, the more visible mindsets become. I would say the lack of diversity of lived experiences, gender, and culture throughout the public service, including at a leadership level, is one pretty clear metric that single ways of knowing and solving problems are being prioritised. This adds to a lack of diversity of thinking.
What values are being enacted? What do the people working within the system say and feel about it? And does their action accurately reflect the prioritised values of people who need the service to be working with and for them most? Many communities' experiences of tokenistic consultation and their subsequent disengagement at local and national level is a good marker of some of this.
Ultimately measuring these and other less visible aspects of the public service tells us the sorts of stories and ideas we believe about the role of government in citizens' lives and how the public and their service should interact. They also tell us what the alternative stories and ideas need to be to reshape the public systems to be more inclusive and responsive to our current human-made crises. After all as Milton Friedman said:
“When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
Signs that the mindsets we need are already there
While there are plenty of problems, there are also plenty of existing policies, and processes and systems that can work to enable respectful and reciprocal relationships, greater collaboration between people in public service and communities, more innovation, and significantly better outcomes for many communities. It's a sign that the mindsets we need are already there.
Co-governance arrangements between iwi, hapū and representatives of government are being (patchily) enacted, for example. They do need people within the local and central government to see the importance of them, understand more deeply the law and their requirements, to fully realise the opportunity they have.
Then there is the current building act. Which already has as its purpose these two beauties:
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"buildings have attributes that contribute appropriately to the health, physical independence, and wellbeing of the people who use them; and
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buildings are designed, constructed, and able to be used in ways that promote sustainable development”.
The purpose is there – enact it and we could move on to creating buildings that all people can actually live in.
Little things are also changing. A good example of this is the Office of the Children's Commissioner working within the current legal structures to enact a co-leadership model between tangata tiriti (Judge Andrew Becroft) and tangata whenua (Glenis Philip-Barbara). It's a start.
Coming back to the thought experiment I started with, there is plenty of reason to be hopeful that the public service we all need is possible. Not least because some of the people I interact with every day inside it already hold the sort of mindsets that will help it be so, because changes like the Public Service Act are attempting to make it a better version of itself.
Supporting them to continue this work, while building the momentum, is critical.
