Policy-making Under Pressure

Rethinking the policy process in Aotearoa New Zealand

Jeremy John Richardson, Sonia Pauline Mazey, Jeremy John Richardson, Sonia Pauline Mazey

• Publisher: Canterbury University Press
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781988503295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Public policy-making in New Zealand has a patchy track record. In many policy sectors New Zealand performs no worse than many other advanced democracies, and in some it is recognised as world leading. But it is clear that the system is under pressure. By international standards, New Zealand ranks poorly in some sectors, notably child poverty, affordable housing, youth suicide, water pollution and obesity. To better serve the 'team of five million', how can the public policy process be improved? Mazey and Richardson sought to answer this question with the help of people with extensive policy-making experience, including former government ministers, senior public servants, commentators and representatives of key stakeholder groups. Drawing upon these first-hand accounts and linking them to classic theories of public policy-making, Mazey and Richardson explain why government 'stuff-ups' happen, and suggest practical steps the policy establishment could take to improve policy-making in New Zealand. Written for a wide audience, the book will appeal to anyone interested in how we might be better served by our government, as well as to public policy practitioners, researchers and students

Part I

Reflections on the Aotearoa New Zealand policy process

Chapter 1

Governments stuff up all the time: why expect Aotearoa New Zealand to be different?

Sonia Mazey and Jeremy Richardson

Introduction: in defence of government

A political scientist colleague of ours, Keith Dowding, recently published an insightful book entitled It’s The Government, Stupid: How governments blame citizens for their own policies. His central argument is that ‘while there is individual responsibility with regard to our behaviour, the major responsibility for social failures is that of government’.1 We cite just one example from his book: obesity. He argues that western governments blame their citizens for the obesity crisis, rather than using regulatory and taxation powers to tackle the problem. For example, governments could ban the addition of unnecessary sweeteners in products or tax sugary drinks – yet they choose not to. Dowding believes in interventionist governments and so do we. What does this mean in practice? It means we believe well-designed public policies and government regulations are necessary mechanisms for securing the safety and wellbeing of a nation’s citizens.

This does not mean we believe all problems can be solved by government action. Nor do we believe that all public policies necessarily produce ‘good’ outcomes. Indeed many public policies fail in this regard. Here we review generic causes of public policy failure in order to better understand how we might achieve better public policy outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand. Saying ‘we need better public policy’ is rather like motherhood and apple pie. Who can object to that? The problem is that delivering better public policy is, in reality, extremely difficult. Why is this so? As highlighted below, public policy-making is a complex process and many policy proposals fall by the wayside during the journey.

Policy blunders, policy fiascos and plain old ‘stuff-ups’

Policy blunders, policy fiascos and government ‘stuff-ups’ have become increasingly common worldwide. Indeed the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed a possibly even more serious ‘pandemic’, namely a worrying decline in the capacity of national governments to solve problems that can be solved only by government. As McConnell and Stark point out, ‘in some contexts the global pandemic has been treated with due seriousness by governments and political leaders, while in others it has been downplayed to such an extent that it has been framed as a hoax’.2 There are other examples. Just think of climate change – now deemed by over 30 countries including New Zealand to be an ‘emergency’. The human causes of global warming and the potentially catastrophic consequences of this accelerating trend have been known for decades, yet governments around the world have failed miserably to take decisive action. The policy track record of traditionally strong and capable democratic regimes is far from reassuring. The Trump era in the USA astounded the world day by day; when ‘the leader of the free world’ suggested that drinking bleach might kill the Covid-19 virus, it prompted widespread concerns about the president’s mental wellbeing. Germany, the powerhouse of the European Union, also appears to have experienced a sharp decline in its policy-making capacities. The German policy style has been recently characterised as one where ‘policymakers adopt only incremental changes to existing policies unless there is drastic demand for or need of large scale changes.’3 Meanwhile in the UK, the Brexit policy-making ‘omnishambles’,4 which all but paralysed the nation for nearly two years was quickly overshadowed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s fumbling early responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Johnson’s former political advisor Dominic Cummings lifted the lid on the chaos that prevailed within the British government at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, likening the government’s response to the virus to a supermarket trolley swerving from one side of the aisle to the other, and describing the Department of Health and Social Care as a ‘smoking ruin’.5 As a result, Cummings claimed, tens of thousands of people in the country had died needlessly from the virus. His comments were echoed by the former pandemic advisor to the UK government, Professor Neil Ferguson, who told a parliamentary select committee in June 2020 that instigating a nationwide lockdown a week earlier would have reduced the death toll up to that date by at least half, saving between 20,000 and 30,000 lives. Similarly, one inside source told the BBC’s political editor that ‘it felt like the “government machine” was breaking in our hands, things were “imploding”.’6 That the traditionally ‘steady’ British state had come to resemble the aptly named TV comedy Fawlty Towers is concerning.

When governments make mistakes, the consequences are not just traffic jams, declining educational standards and a worsening housing crisis. People can die. Of course governments facing exceptional crises such as a global pandemic are bound to make errors. However, public policy blunders and failures are common even in business-as-usual circumstances. To return to Britain, working behind that beautifully painted, black front door of 10 Downing Street (surely, along with the Queen, one of the few remaining symbols of British stability), even in normal times, was likened by one insider to working in a hospital accident and emergency department.7 When people at the heart of what used to be thought of as a ‘Rolls Royce of a government’ make such observations, we should be worried. Meanwhile here in New Zealand – as several contributors to this volume acknowledge – we have a long-standing housing crisis, increasing levels of child poverty and inequality, lower productivity levels and wages than comparable countries, declining educational standards, grossly polluted waterways and failing infrastructure. We could go on. That policy failures are so common worldwide suggests there are some common causes, albeit in some cases exacerbated by the fact that voters sometimes make bad choices in electing leaders who are simply not up to the job. Below we suggest that there are indeed some generic features of democratic policy-making systems that help to explain why there are so many policy failures across so many countries.

An endless conveyor belt of problems: how do governments cope?

In liberal democracies, the political agenda is always crowded. Present-day governments face a much more active citizenry than that of, say, 50 years ago. The number of interest groups demanding policy change has grown significantly and the quantity and type of lobbying channels available has also increased dramatically; in particular, interest groups have become especially ad...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Part I
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Part II
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Part III
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Part IV
• Chapter 22
• Beyond muddling through: a reform agenda