Policy Quarterly

Editorial: Trustworthiness, trust and legitimacy of public institutions: foundations of capability

Geoff Plimmer, Wonhyuk Cho — Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

New Zealand society has become distrusting and polarised. It now sits between Ireland and the US in trust ratings (Acumen, 2025). In some ways this reflects global trends, including the impact of Covid-19. But there are local issues too, such as those around the Treaty of Waitangi. The issue of concern to this editorial is preserving the trustworthiness and legitimacy of New Zealand state-funded and mandated agencies. This is a broader scope than the core public service. Without trust and legitimacy, public service capability is lessened, and public services cannot be valued.

Addressing Capability Challenges and Restoring Trust in New Zealand’s Public Management

Geoff Plimmer, Wonhyuk Cho — Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

New Zealand’s public sector confronts mounting capability challenges, while public trust in government institutions is declining. In this introduction to the special issue, we propose that, to restore trust deficits in Aotearoa’s public management system, we should focus on structures of capability, accountability and legitimacy, as informed by the articles in this collection. We argue that New Zealand’s traditional public management model, although effective for many service deliveries, demands different approaches to adequately diagnose and tackle wicked problems that call for cross agency collaboration and community engagement.

Building a Working Relationship Policy Advice Quality – the fundamental capability for public management

John Yeabsley — Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

High-calibre written advice is the basis of government decision making. It produces good decisions and fosters trust in advisors which benefits the process. Data series of average scores based on two batches of assessments of policy advice quality over the last 16 years show little sign of sustained quality improvements. There remains a challenge.

Observations on Effective Accountability in Collaborative Working Arrangements

John Ryan — Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

While some changes have been made to the public sector’s management, finance and accountability systems to enable collaborative working, public organisations continue to find effective collaboration challenging. Many of the things that are important for developing and sustaining effective collaboration are also elements of effective accountability, including understanding roles and responsibilities, being clear about goals and performance, and developing the right incentives for everyone to act in the best interests of the collaboration. Getting collaborative working right – and being collectively accountable for it – is increasingly important for achieving positive outcomes for all New Zealanders.

The Myth of the Shrinking State in New Zealand Revisited

Derek Gill, Norman Gemmell, Arthur Grimes — Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This project uses a variety of lenses – the state as spender, producer, employer, investor and steward – to assess how the size and shape of the state has changed. We explore the conventional wisdom that New Zealand’s ‘neoliberal’ reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s resulted in a dramatic reduction in the size of the state. We find – with two notable exceptions – that the shrinking of the state over this period of reform is an urban myth. Indeed, relative to GDP, spending on real resources to support public production and investment in non-market outputs has been stable or has increased slightly since the 1990s, while the Crown’s balance sheet has steadily strengthened. We include an additional lens to explore the proposition that ‘deregulation’ in 1980s and 1990s led to a reduction in the regulatory state. We find the opposite: that the number of words used in the New Zealand statutes has grown steadily since 1908, but dramatically from the 1960s.

In the last decade, under the Ardern–Hipkins Labour administration, government current spending on collective consumption grew rapidly to reach record levels, even after allowing for Covid-19-related spending programmes. The fiscal adjustment proposed by the National–Act–New Zealand First administration in the 2024 Budget involves winding much of this increase back.

Legitimacy and the Use of Ethnic Categories in Public Service Long- Term Insights Briefings

Simon Chapple — Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article considers the way government agencies use the concept of ethnicity in their long-term insights briefings. Ethnicity receives a disproportionate focus compared with other socio-demographic categories. Yet the concept is treated as self-evident, and its manifold
limitations are unexplored. Salient outcome variations are reduced to average ethnic differences, and variation is further reduced, in an
essentialised manner, to comparisons between Māori, Pacific and the largely invisible others in the European and Asian categories. Human commonality and complex webs of micro-connections between people are not explored. Questions arise regarding whether the briefings’ treatment of ethnicity relative to other socio-demographic dimensions fulfils statutory obligations to be impartial and politically neutral. The article argues that the briefings’ treatment of ethnicity may undermine their public legitimacy. Significant recommendations for positive change are made.

Evidence-Based Policymaking and Public Management. Emerging empirical approaches

Kyle Higham, Bernardo Buarque, Troy Baisden — Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article demonstrates how emerging data sources and analytical tools can be applied to better understand evidence-based policymaking and its relationship to public sector capabilities. By analysing policy documents and their citations, we show how these methods can explore uses of evidence in policy processes, highlight gaps in knowledge integration, and evaluate the balance between local and international research inputs. Using New Zealand environmental policy as a case study, we show how these tools may be applied to complex policy areas, with broader implications for public sector decision making.

Pussyfooting Around? Companion cat by-laws in Aotearoa New Zealand

Natalie Blackstock, Dyanna Jolly, Jon Sullivan — Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cats have a significant impact on Aotearoa New Zealand’s biodiversity. While national legislation can help reduce the impacts of feral and stray cats, managing companion cats is more complex due to bonds between cats and their owners. Local councils can use by-laws to regulate companion cats, although it can be difficult to gain widespread public acceptance. This research analysed public submissions from five New Zealand councils to gain deeper insight into community attitudes towards cat control by-laws and consider the potential role of national standards. The submissions indicated that the majority of submitters supported by-laws, although regional differences suggest the need for localised approaches.

Estimating the Additional Income Needed to Address Higher Deprivation Levels of Children in Households with Disabled People

Moira Wilson, Keith McLeod, Jonathan Godfrey — Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Children living in households with disabled people have a rate of material hardship three times that of children living in households with no disabled people. The rate of severe material hardship is almost four times higher. This article aims to improve the evidence base to inform policy responses to these inequities. It uses pooled Household Economic Survey data to estimate how much additional income is needed to reduce levels of deprivation to match those of households with children with no disabled people. Examples of the estimated additional income needed range from $8,400 to $24,000 per annum on an equivalised income basis and vary depending on where the household’s income sits in the income distribution. The additional income needed is higher when there are two or more disabled people in the household than when there is one disabled person.

Navigating the Boundaries of Digital Platform Content Regulation in New Zealand

Bronwyn Howell, Petrus Potgieter — Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article examines the complexities of implementing online content regulation in a small jurisdiction such as New Zealand. Three attempts at hate speech and online content regulation have faltered, in part due to the difficulty of crafting precise legal definitions and different possible conceptions of harm. The ‘safer online services and media platforms’ policy is the most recent. Given New Zealand’s limited market size and the global reach of online platforms, enforcing local content standards is both impractical and potentially ineffective. Most content originates offshore, beyond the scope of domestic legislation, and technological solutions to tailor content to individual user groups are costly and easily circumvented. Existing domestic laws and voluntary industry codes combined with the spillover effects of regulations in larger jurisdictions and international multi-stakeholder efforts likely offer more effective solutions then local legislation. Hence, fostering international cooperation, leveraging global standards and encouraging voluntary compliance should be encouraged.

Policy Challenges Of Managing Naturally Occurring Respirable Mineral Dust in Aotearoa New Zealand

Wendy Liu, Kristiann Allen, Marc Tadaki — Sun, 18 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Researchers and environmental planners have raised concerns about human exposure to naturally occurring respirable mineral dust (RMD), including erionite and naturally occurring asbestos. However, it is unclear how existing policy frameworks address and manage the risks of exposure to RMD, and little has been offered regarding how satisfactory policy frameworks could be developed. We draw on international research, policy documents and key informant interviews to examine how these risks are presently addressed globally and in the context of the Aotearoa New Zealand policy landscape, identifying key domestic challenges confronting effective risk governance.
We recommend a collaborative effort from various disciplines to understand these new risks. We further recommend the development of an independent mechanism to evaluate risks from long-term or latent hazards such as these.