NZCPR Newsletter: Who Really Runs the Country?

Voting for the 2026 General Election is well underway. At the last election, 60 percent of voters had voted by Election Day. It looks as if it could be higher at this election.

There is no doubt the contest between the left and centre-right blocs remains too close to call.

The Opportunity Party could be a deciding factor. As a result of the mainstream media’s disinformation campaign, promoting a dangerous left wing party as ‘centrist’ and a ‘kingmaker’, TOP’s support climbed above the 5 percent threshold to Parliament, potentially giving the left-bloc a greater chance of winning the election.

Strategic voting is also making predicting the election more difficult – and while the left has received little media criticism for the practice, that’s not the case for the centre-right.

The Maori Party’s call for supporters to split their vote by backing their candidates with their electorate vote while giving their party vote to Labour or the Greens looks likely to deliver up to five of the seven Maori seats. This would create a five-seat overhang in Parliament, requiring the Coalition to secure 63 seats to win the election.

For those wanting a second term for the Coalition, the prospect of split voting has only arisen because National’s party vote has collapsed from 38 percent at the last election to around 28 percent, while its electorate vote is holding steady with the Party on track to retain 37 or more of its 44 electorate seats.

On those numbers, if National’s party vote slips below 33 percent, it is too low to deliver any list MPs. That means all National’s party votes will be wasted – they will not add a single MP to the Coalition, nor contribute in any way to its re-election. Only voting for ACT or New Zealand First would do that.

So, based on current polling, with the Maori Party’s overhang and TOP hovering above the threshold, the only way centre-right supporters can secure a Coalition win is through splitting their vote – voting for National candidates in the electorates to maximise the number of National MPs and giving party votes to ACT or New Zealand First to ensure no centre-right party votes are wasted.

For many New Zealanders, however, choosing who to vote for will be determined by how well they believe the sitting government has performed.

Right now, voters are assessing the Coalition’s record, weighing up its achievements against its shortcomings, and deciding whether to support National, ACT and New Zealand First for another three years, or whether to give Labour, the Greens, the Maori Party, and TOP (if it doesn’t slide below 5 percent) the chance to run the country.

That’s how democracy is supposed to work.

But before passing judgement on the Coalition’s performance, it’s worth asking a more fundamental question: How much power does an elected government actually have to implement the programme voters elect them to advance?

Most people assume the answer is straightforward: political parties campaign on promises, win elections, form governing alliances, and then work out plans to put those policies into effect. This is exactly what the Coalition did in 2023, when they entered office with a clear mandate to reverse the disastrous agenda enacted by the Ardern-Hipkins Government.

But while voters wanted swift action, progress was often slower than expected, with some reform areas barely touched.

Naturally, the failure to advance election promises in a timely manner is attributed to ministerial and government incompetence.

National, in particular, copped the blame for the Coalition’s lack of progress in delivering the reforms voters expected, especially around co-governance, Treaty activism and race-based privilege. Its slide in the polls reflects a growing perception that, when it comes to contentious issues, the party lacks the backbone to honour its election pledges.

But there’s another factor that also deserves consideration, and that’s whether the actual machinery of government is fit for purpose.

Between election promises and policy outcomes sits an expanding bureaucratic minefield of officials, procedures, protocols, institutional interests, and entrenched conventions – all designed to resist changes to the status quo.  

In addition, activist judges, unions, and the media, are all capable of significantly influencing the agenda voters endorsed at the ballot box.

In other words, while the elected Government is held accountable for outcomes, in reality, their ability to control the institutions responsible for delivering them, is limited.

Activism within the public sector was, in fact, something voters were particularly concerned about in the run up to the 2023 election. They had seen the Wellington bureaucracy explode during the Ardern era from 46,000 when they took office to 65,000. And, with many of the new recruits hired, not on merit, but on the basis of “diversity, equity and inclusion” – to advance Labour’s radical identity politics and He Puapua agendas – they called for reform.

However, instead of cutting numbers back to 2017 levels, National prevaricated – and we witnessed the results in obstruction: directives issued by Ministers to fulfil election promises such as prioritising English over te reo, or delivering public services on the basis of need, not race, largely ignored.

But evidence is now emerging that the problems associated with a hostile bureaucracy are far more serious and widespread than previously realised.

The public policy think tank, the New Zealand Initiative, has undertaken research which suggests a “bureaucratic priesthood” is operating within the public service. These power­ful Wel­ling­ton officials think they, not the demo­crat­ic­ally elec­ted government, should judge what the pub­lic wants and what it’s going to get.

Over 700 current and former public servants were surveyed for the study, which is due to be released in mid-November.

Early findings indicate that only 30 percent of public servants believe their job is to serve the elected government, with 70 percent agreeing with the statement that “the public service serves the public, not the elected government”.

Only 60 percent agreed with the state­ment that “because min­is­ters are demo­crat­ic­ally elec­ted, they should decide policy”, with 40 percent of pub­lic ser­vants believing that they, rather than the elected administration, should be the ones to determine Gov­ern­ment policy.

With more than half of all policy advisers, managers and leaders surveyed believing that if they disagreed with the direction of the Government, officials should “brief stakeholders and the media so a minister’s policy becomes politically untenable”, it is no wonder that leaks and other forms of bureaucratic disloyalty repeatedly undermined the Coalition’s reform agenda.

So, while the Pub­lic Ser­vice Code of Con­duct states that pub­lic ser­vants must act in a polit­ic­ally neutral man­ner and respect the author­ity of the Gov­ern­ment of the day, it seems that for a majority of key public servants, personal views over-rode professional conduct resulting in the deliberate obstruction of the Government’s mission to deliver on their 2023 election policy pledges.

Under our constitutional arrangements, public service officials are expected to provide free and frank advice to Ministers. In that role, they are expected to challenge assumptions, identify risks, expose weaknesses and test whether proposals are workable. But once Ministers have made their lawful decisions, officials are expected to implement them professionally, regardless of personal preference.

However, it now appears, that a substantial number of public servants do not accept a central principle of representative democracy – that because elected ministers carry the mandate of the people, they have democratic legitimacy and are entitled to determine policy. Officials with no mandate have no such legitimacy.

This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator, Dr Oliver Hartwich, the Chief Executive of The Initiative, believes ‘the machinery of government’ has seized up and must be reformed – as he explains in his article, “If I Were PM”:

“The New Zealand state can no longer carry out big reforms in the time it has in between elections. Before promising anything new, someone should ask what got in the way of all the earlier promises.

“You do not have to look far: New Zealand has 43 government departments, 28 ministers and more than 80 ministerial portfolios. Norway, hardly a failed state, governs with 20 ministers and 17 ministries.

“Ministers can neither appoint nor remove the chief executives of their departments; that power belongs solely to the Public Service Commissioner. No minister even works inside the department they lead. All of them sit in the Beehive, which is better suited to the game of politics than to directing public officials.

“My work programme for the first 100 days would start right there. On day one, I would cut the number of portfolios to fewer than 20. In the same week, my ministers would move across the road, into the departments they are responsible for. A minister who walks the corridors of her own ministry learns more in a month than a year of briefing papers will ever tell her.

“The move would also make clear who works for whom.

“The most contentious step comes next. I would abolish the Public Service Commission and let ministers choose the leadership of their own departments. The rules that keep the career public service below them neutral and professional would be tightened, not weakened.

“Critics would call this politicisation. It is not. A minister who answers to Parliament for a department should decide who runs it.”

It turns out that by having limited political involvement in the appointment of departmental heads, New Zealand is an outlier. Other democracies allow Ministers to have a major say in who runs the departments they are held accountable for.

The public service, however, is not the only institution that can prevent the government from delivering its mandate.

Concerns have also been raised about the courts. New Zealand’s constitutional conventions are clear: Parliament, which is accountable to voters, makes the law, and Judges, who are not accountable to voters, interpret and apply it. And while judicial independence is fundamental to the rule of law, so too is judicial restraint.

The Supreme Court, in particular, has, however, become increasingly politicised – moving beyond interpreting legislation into the realm of lawmaking: as evident in their attempt to stop the Coalition from passing the Marine and Coastal Area Act amendment to prevent the tribal capture of our coastline, and in their use of the Ellis case to effectively corrupt the Rule of Law in New Zealand by unleashing “tikanga” or Maori custom as ‘first law’.  

But it’s not just the public service and the courts that can prevent a government from delivering on its agenda. Powerful unions affiliated to the Labour Party and embedded within the institutions of government can also derail progress – especially when working in cahoots with biased journalists, almost 90 percent of whom self-identify as ‘left wing’.

While the public wants the news reported in an unbiased manner, with both sides of an argument presented so they can make up their own minds, most journalists now regard ‘educating the audience’ as their primary role. That means that even if a government succeeds in overcoming bureaucratic resistance, union opposition and legal challenges, if every reform introduced is routinely reported as controversial, divisive, harmful, dangerous, underfunded, racist, anti-Treaty, or a threat to vulnerable groups, public confidence can erode long before any objective assessment of results becomes possible.

In such circumstances, success becomes politically irrelevant if voters have already been persuaded by the public service, the unions and the media that failure is occurring.

Those are the underlying forces that have been shaping the Coalition’s performance: a bureaucracy that has frustrated implementation, courts that have rewritten legislation, unions that have obstructed reform, and a media that has defined success as failure before results are even known.

Democracy is not just about electing governments – it’s also about ensuring they can govern. If the Coalition wins a second term, it needs to address these barriers as a priority for reform.

Because if a government cannot implement the programme it was elected to deliver, we really do need to ask: who on earth is running our country?

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THIS WEEK’S POLL ASKS:

*Do you believe unelected institutions such as the public service, courts, unions and media now have too much influence over the ability of elected governments to implement their policies?

Dr Muriel Newman established the New Zealand Centre for Political Research as a public policy think tank in 2005 after nine years as a Member of Parliament. The NZCPR website is HERE. We also run this Breaking Views Blog and our NZCPR Facebook Group HERE.