Is Government Rejecting the Essence of Governance?

This article asks whether the likely outcome from the present government’s approach to the role of government amounts to a withdrawal from governance, leaving a vacuum for New Zealand’s communities[i].

It also argues that unless governments both central and local focus on well-being, it will be virtually impossible to achieve cross-party consensus on any of our major long-term issues including infrastructure. Effectively a back to basics approach will defeat its very objective.

In practice governance is about much more than how governments either central or local themselves take decisions; it’s also very much about whether people who are affected by a decision believe that their voices have been heard and the decision-making process itself was legitimate. Failure on that dimension directly contributes to declining social cohesion and loss of trust in government.

The Prime Minister’s address to the Local Government New Zealand conference was much more than just a speech to the audience in front of him; it was a speech to the nation, and especially to the base support for the three coalition parties, setting out his understanding of the role of central government and what government expected (and didn’t expect) of local government.

He certainly didn’t mince his words as this extract makes very clear:

First, Cabinet has agreed to streamline the purpose provisions in the Local Government Act to get councils back to basics.?

For Councils, that means abolishing the four wellbeing provisions in legislation and restoring focus on local services and infrastructure.?

For ratepayers, it’s simple. The central government focuses on must-haves, not nice-to-haves, and we expect local government to do the same.?

This is a Prime Minister leading a government, not the chief executive of an airline or infrastructure company no matter the parallels the Prime Minister might draw. The basics for a government are not the same as the basics for a corporate.

So, in a modern democracy, what should getting back to basics mean for a government? Start with a very simple answer; citizens should be able to expect good governance from their government. Next, what does good governance mean? Gold standard pothole repair and hospitals that are fit for purpose? Well yes in part. However let’s look at the essence of governance as seen through a number of different eyes.

First an oft quoted aphorism from Confucius:

There is good government when those who are near are made happy, and when those who are afar are attracted.

Confucius (c500 BC)

Next a 21st century statement from a recent UK Conservative party Prime Minister:

“Wealth is about so much more than pounds, or euros or dollars can ever measure. It's time we admitted that there's more to life than money, and it's time we focused not just on GDP, but on GWB - general wellbeing”

David Cameron (2006)

Now let’s look across the Tasman to some very recent research. Since 2015 the Centre for Policy Development, a leading non-partisan policy institute, has been measuring public attitudes to key questions around the purpose of government and democracy in Australia, and the performance of Australian governments in fulfilling these purposes. It is a reasonable assumption similar research New Zealand would produce broadly similar results.

The following is an extract from the foreword to the latest (2024) report from this research:

The research indicates a growing expectation that government decisions should prioritise citizen wellbeing, a sentiment that has risen from 70% in 2021 to 80% in 2023. There is also a strong preference for direct government involvement in public service delivery. Since 2015, surveys have consistently shown high support (never below 77% and peaking at 90% in 2022) for government capability in service provision over outsourcing to charities or the private sector. This reflects a desire for active and effective government presence in everyday life. (Access the report at https://cpd.org.au/work/2024-purpose-of-government-pulse/ )

Closely related to the view the purpose of government is very much associated with prioritising citizen well-being is the question of citizen trust in government. The OECD, which links together some 38 member countries with a focus on stimulating economic progress and world trade, undertakes significant research on issues such as trust in government. This is one of the core statements from its most recent work:

In democracies, the main instrument for the public to hold government and parliament accountable are free and fair elections. However, people do not necessarily believe that they are able to influence politics through the electoral system. In 2023, a majority (53%) believe that the political system does not allow people like them to have a say; and those who feel they don’t have political voice tend to have low trust in the government. This is a call to action for governments to rethink processes of participation and representation that are at the heart of democracy. https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/trust-in-government.html

The Prime Minister may want to get back to basics. The evidence from a number of different sources (I could have quoted many more) is clear; part of the purpose of government is a combination of prioritising citizen well-being and building/maintaining trust in government.

Measuring success is challenging. One approach is to survey levels of trust in government and public institutions, something which the OECD does on an annual basis for all its member countries. The following is an extract from its latest country note for New Zealand (published in July 2024):

Similarly to most OECD countries, New Zealanders place more trust in the police (71%), other people (63%) and courts and the judicial system (60%) than in the central government (46%). More than forty percent of the population reports high or moderately high trust in local government (45%) and national parliament (41%). Political parties (32%) and news media (37%) are the least trusted institutions in New Zealand. (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-of-trust-in-public-institutions-2024-results-country-notes_a8004759-en/new-zealand_3ca8436a-en.html )

The results are better than the OECD average but worryingly the level of trust in government, parliament and political parties especially is well below 50%.

Another approach, and one more directly relevant to questions of well-being, is what’s happening with social cohesion. The international research survey firm IPSOS undertakes an annual survey which highlights the state of social cohesion across a number of countries. For the first time, the latest survey included New Zealand amongst the countries studied. This is what it revealed:

The present government cannot be blamed for the findings from the IPSOS survey; it had hardly taken office at the time the survey was undertaken. However it is a clear clarion call that the basics for government include well-being. It is also not a point in time blip in public attitudes; instead it reflects years of entrenchment, under different governments, of a top down approach to government.

The same question of the nature of governance applies in respect of local government. Perhaps the strongest argument, because of the wealth of research involved, comes from public health. Following on from the seminal work of Sir Michael Marmot and colleagues, initially for the OECD and then for the UK government[ii], it is now widely recognised that some 80% of the social determinants of health are not under the control of the health system as such but under the control of the entities responsible for place management - typically councils.

This theme is picked up in recent research in the UK undertaken jointly by the Local Government Information Unit, Queen Mary University London and Research England.

Place and wellbeing, we argue, are closely interconnected. One crucial way of understanding the importance of place is grasping the centrality of wellbeing: how place promotes individual and collective wellbeing, and how wellbeing, in turn, enhances the quality of place. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the limitations of measuring policy success through the narrow lens of how individuals and households perform on financial and economic indicators.

Together, both concepts help to define a wider and broader role for local government that goes beyond the administration of an area or the provision of services. The concepts indicate a fundamental orientation of councils towards responding to the concerns and needs of local communities.

This shift in how local government understands its role was first signalled in the 1990s, encapsulated in the concept of ‘governance’. Governance alluded to the recognition that local authorities could achieve their goals by collaborating with others, rather than directly providing services. However, in the intervening decades, local government has struggled to evolve and develop this collaborative function given the impact of top-down targets and edicts from Whitehall.

See https://lgiu.org/publication/a-new-settlement-place-and-wellbeing-in-local-government/ ?for the full report.

Against this background it is possible to have some sympathy for a Prime Minister who has relatively little experience of the public sector and who on coming into office (if not beforehand) found himself confronted with evidence of serious underperformance and poor investment decisions and delivery across a wide range of infrastructure and other activity. ?it is less easy to retain that sympathy when ‘solutions’ are being rolled out without any apparent endeavour to understand their true implications and likely impact.

First, the approach necessarily implies central government believes that neither it nor local government need pay any attention to the likelihood most citizens share the view that government decisions should prioritise citizen well-being or to findings such as that of the OECD for governments to rethink processes of participation and representation that are at the heart of democracy. Perhaps more seriously it’s implicitly denying that governance, in the sense discussed in this article and in the research it references, should be part of the role of government, central or local.

There are at least two very serious consequences which flow from this. The first is the implication that neither level of government has any responsibility to address the serious decline in social cohesion evidenced by the IPSOS report (amongst a number of sources). ?The reason is simple. ?Restoring social cohesion means tackling issues of well-being head-on; it’s about listening to individuals and the communities in which they live, understanding their needs and reasonable expectations and working with them to address those.

?New Zealand’s communities are all either or will be facing increasing uncertainty and stress from a variety of different causes including natural hazards, the necessity to address challenges such as climate change, the impact of an increasingly unstable geopolitical situation, and the need to take some very tough decisions about the nature, quality and availability of many public services. Fiscal austerity and enhanced social cohesion are not natural bedfellows!

To turn away from the importance of well-being is simply to invite further social breakdown and dislocation. Will the equivalent of the covid-19 protests become a recurring phenomenon in much the same way that one in 100 years floods are?

The second consequence is the impact on the prospect getting the kind of cross-party agreement recognised as essential to attract investment in long life projects. The single biggest cause of our poor record in developing major infrastructure and other projects, and in attracting the calibre of firms and people we need is the long settled tradition that an incoming government almost as a matter of routine reverses much of what the previous government had decided.

This reflects what has increasingly become the tribal nature of New Zealand politics. ?Democracy is less and less a question of public choice of the people best qualified to lead government and more and more about whose base will reap the rewards of office. ?Reaching a serious and durable cross party agreement on how to set priorities for major long-term investment (whether by government, or by the private sector in areas where some form of consent or licence is required) in practice means gaining the long-term acceptance by each party’s base of the need for this.

There is really only one way to achieve this; ongoing dialogue involving people from all political persuasions, not as representatives, but simply as citizens sharing a place and coming together to consider their respective aspirations. This is why the OECD stresses the importance of new processes for participation and representation.

Fundamentally it’s about people coming together to determine how best to maximise collective well-being including reconciling different understandings of what constitutes well-being. The main means for doing this is through empowering communities and providing them with the tools to enable meaningful ongoing discussions in ways that encourage people to be involved.

Inevitably this will need to be enabled by local government; it’s the level of government closest to communities and, by matching their counterparts internationally, New Zealand councils would be well-placed to start building the type of consensus needed to provide the foundation for making long-term binding cross-party commitments which can survive perhaps multiple changes of government. ?

The ball is now in the Prime Minister’s court. He has a clear choice. He can stay with his back to basics demand on both central and local government thus limiting the ability of either central or local government to deal with challenges such as declining social cohesion and virtually ruling out the potential for cross party support for major long-term policy initiatives.

Alternatively he can recognise that the well-being of citizens and their communities is at the heart of the purpose of government. For New Zealand to progress he needs to accept and act on this as an essential prerequisite for dealing with problems such as social cohesion and especially for building cross party, that is cross-base, consensus on initiatives which need to endure through potentially multiple changes of government. ?

The ability to understand when it’s important to change course, ?even if this means ?abandoning? deeply embedded commitments,? is the mark of true leadership. All New Zealanders should be hoping? we have a Prime Minister? who can pass this test .

[i] In asking this question we think of governance as as a collaborative approach to determining a community's preferred futures and developing and implementing the means of realising them. In practice it may or may not involve one or more of the different tiers of government, institutions of civil society, and private sector interests.

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[ii] go to https://www.instituteofhealthequity.org/home to access the Marmot reports