One of my favourite movies is Usual Suspects, released in 1995. The film contains some memorable dialogue,
but the one line that has stuck in my mind is probably the most often quoted:
“the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t
exist”. This quote refers to the
deceptive practices employed by the ‘Evil One’ to divert attention away from
the role he/she plays in the madness and pain of everyday life. A similar deceit frames the New Zealand’s
Policy Industry’s on-going attempts to convince both the public and its
political masters that it is politically
neutral. In my experience the Policy
Industry in New Zealand is much more successful in this endeavour with the public,
while most politicians are well aware of the politicised nature of the public service.
These comments are qualified, however,
by acknowledging that many members of the public service, in particular those doing
the technical work (let’s call them the ‘policy proletariat’) try hard to
adhere to the public service code of
conduct and the theoretical and practice bases of this thing we call
evidence-based policy (EBP). However, apart
from the odd exception, in my experience policy-making is a fraught process
which often requires its practitioners to compromise these core values on a
regular basis. Why? Because in reality, contemporary policy making
in New Zealand is not much different from the supposed bad old days of
opinion-based policy that existed before the rise of EBP. In fact I argue that the ‘Industry’ is no
less ideological than it ever was, and it certainly is far from the objective,
politically neutral beast its exponents claim it to be.
There are a number of ways we can
evidence the argument that the Policy Industry is political: firstly, it is a
given that a number of the public service are members of registered political
parties. Some keep their political
affiliations to themselves; while others openly declare them as is encouraged under
the Public Service Code of Conduct
(PSCC) (State Services Commission, 2007).
The PCSS stipulates that while it is the right of all policy workers to
affiliate politically they must be circumspect when carrying out duties on
behalf of any political entity. More
significantly it is possible to also argue that the public service is wedded to
the political system through the fact that officials and institutions are
compelled to support the implementation of the policies of the Government of
the day. The myth of the political
neutrality of the public service is built in part on the fact that the PSCC
directs officials to give full and frank advice to government ministers. What this should mean in practice is that if
existing evidence does not support the policy directives from Cabinet and
indeed may cause harm to the public, then it is the duty of public servants to
advise Ministers’ of this fact. However,
in reality this rarely happens, especially in the crime control sector, and
when it does it is often more about protecting the reputation and resources of
the agency and their Ministers’, and less about protecting the public from ‘bad’
policy.
The political nature of the Policy
Industry is, however, much more insidious and far reaching than these benign
examples demonstrate. The Industry can
be charged with being political and partisan (as opposed to neutral) via the
fact that while directed by Cabinet and beholden to it, it holds extensive
power over the development and
implementation of policy itself. If
you live in Wellington, New Zealand and work in the Industry long enough, you
will hear politicians and media (and sometimes, but rarely, policy workers)
state that policy is not made or dictated by Cabinet, but is controlled by the
policy mandarins in the small geographical triangle that takes in the
parliamentary precinct, the Terrace and much of Lambton Quay. This point is often made tongue-in-cheek, but
my ten years of experience working in the Industry leads me to argue that it
holds true in many cases.
The myth of political neutrality masks a
two of sub-surface truisms that are not easily observed by external audiences. These are that i) part of the ‘art of
politics’ and therefore of policy-making (which is the textual articulation of
political theory/ideology) is a theoretical or conceptual framework for
explaining the world and how it works; ii) while individual members of agencies
will have their own ‘theory of the world’, agencies utilise specific
theoretical paradigms that match their institutional view of how the world
works, and form the ideological bases for policy development. For example, neo-liberal economics has been the dominant political and economic
theory/philosophy for the development of economic policy by New Zealand’s
Treasury agency since the mid-1980s; the Psychology
of Criminal Conduct is the dominant theoretical paradigm in the development
of prison policy by the Department of Corrections from the mid-1990s
(Department of Corrections, 2013); and a form of neo-tribal orthodoxy underpins policy making in the Ministry of
Maori Development (2013); and iii) agencies employ various rituals and
associated activities that either mask the theoretical underpinnings of their
processes or validate them over others.
Case
Study: the Organised Crime Strategy
To demonstrate the political nature of
policy making and the myth of the primacy of evidence, we need look no further
than the highly inflammatory issue of gangs and crime. On 7 May 2007, a two year old girl was
murdered in Wanganui, the victim of a gang-related drive-by-shooting. Understandably the incident caused outrage
amongst the wider public and politicians.
Through the media, public figures, such as the Mayor of Wanganui,
Michael Laws, called for ‘something to be done’ about the perceived violence
and general lawlessness of ethnic gangs in the region (Wanganui District
Council, 2007). The Government’s
response was swift: just a few days after the incident, public service
officials were called upon by Ministers to brief them on the issues and
potentially effective policy options. Up
to that point the only meaningful, albeit largely ineffective policy
initiatives in place were the Ministry of Social Development-led inter-agency
project called the Plan of Action:
Improving Outcomes for Young People in Counties Manukau (Ministry of Social
Development, 2006) and a joint Ministry of Maori Development/New Zealand Police
project which utilised established (adult gang) leaders to mediate directly
with so-called youth gangs in an attempt to dampen down tensions and reduce the
potential for further violent confrontation between these groups. The reality was that over the preceding
decade or more the crime control and social policy sectors had an unwritten
rule of not working with gangs, meaning no funding for gang members to develop
social programmes or support for activities that involved gang members or their
associates (although there are exceptions to this rule, such as the Ministry of
Maori Development/whanau ora funding for gang-focused social programmes, but
these are very exceptions to the unwritten rule of non-engagement which must surely be in violation of the 'rules' of EBP).
Officials’ response to requests from
Ministers about how best to respond to the Wanganui incident, was to revive the
then grossly overdue Organised Crime
Strategy (OCS) (Ministry of Justice, 2002) that was initially part of the larger Crime Reduction Strategy signed off by the Labour government in May
2001. The Strategy identified seven
priority areas for the wider criminal justice sector, of which organised crime
was designated Priority Area 5 (family violence and community violence and
sexual violence were priority areas one and two). By the time of the Wanganui gang shooting,
priority area five was the least developed, and certainly any formal strategy
was by then almost six years overdue.
Work began in earnest on resurrecting
the OCS in mid-2007. It involved some of
the usual strategies, tactics and rituals officials utilise in order to be seen
to be busy when potentially nasty coordination problems arise in the public
sector: firstly, lead agencies were empowered (in this case, Ministry of
Justice, followed closely by the New Zealand Police); other important players
were identified (for example, DPMC, Ministry of Social Development, and to a
lesser extent the Ministries of Maori Development and Pacific Island Affairs);
an inter-agency group established; a schedule of meetings agreed, along with
priority work items (background papers, briefings to Ministers, Cabinet papers,
etc) and tasks identified and allocated.
Given the political capital inherent in the gang-related incident in
Wanganui, work on developing the OCS was given priority by Government, and
therefore by participating agencies. The
fact that the lead agencies had failed to deliver on the promised organised
crime strategy for some two to three years was never discussed at formal
meetings and overlooked in official documentation. Regardless, this overdue strategic item
provided agencies with a ready vehicle to be seen to respond meaningfully to
what Cabinet clearly considered to be a politically-charged, perhaps even
electorally damaging issue.
All of the above strategies and
activities can be viewed, individually or collectively, as rituals of (in)activity. In
the event of a highly charged, political issue arising, agencies (individually
or collectively) swing into ‘action’, utilising the well-established rituals of
activity outlined above to serve as markers of responsiveness, concern for
public safety and expertise. The long
overdue OCS became a vehicle through which officials and agencies could
demonstrate their ability to respond quickly and efficiently. Having no doubt briefed Minister(s) on the
situation, including claiming that the Strategy was an appropriate and
effective mechanism for responding to the Wanganui incident, officials then
moved to deploy another set of rituals, referred to here as the rituals of deception. This set of rituals is commonly used by
criminal justice officials who need to retrofit policy to a social issue for
which it is unsuited.
Retrofitting in the case of the OCS,
refers to the fact that other policy mechanisms and strategies already existed
through which to create meaningful policy; the original intent and focus of the
proposed OCS did not correlate to the type of social issue that developed in
Wanganui, and the lack of evidence that an OCS-style approach would
demonstrably alter the social conditions which led to the Wanganui
incident. Rituals of deception are
common in situations of policy retrofitting: they enable officials and agencies
to mask the fact that their activities are more about managing potential
coordination problems than about constructing meaningful ‘real world’
solutions. The coordination problems
that were the target of the OCS-related rituals of deception were masking a
long-overdue piece of supposedly important strategic work, the historical lack
of meaningful policy response to gang-related violence and gangs per se and the
complete failure of the preferred suppression and surveillance policies since
the mid-1980s to solve the so-called gang problem. All of these coordination problems carry the
potential to negatively impact institutional credibility with Cabinet and the public
and inter-agency relationships.
Why
the deceit?
There are a number ways to explain and
understand why supposedly neutral policy mandarins become involved in the politics of policy and utilise rituals
of (in)activity and deception. At base
level it has to do with affinity and access: the higher up the managerial
decision-making structure one gets, the closer you are to the political
decision-making process and the politicians who ultimately make those
decisions. Accordingly, the more one has
ready access to political authority the more one pays attention to the
political consequences of policy design and implementation. In other words, the higher up the management
food chain you move, the less concerned with the technical development of
policy you become, and the more you focus on what is referred to in Wellington
as the ‘front page of the Dominion-Post test’: namely, how will a particular
policy or policy issue look in the news media when it is released? A further issue for consideration is what is
the risk of negative media publicity to Cabinet and the policy sector? In other words, senior managers can be viewed
as political commissars who carry out
the dual roles of educating the technocrats on the political expectations of
Cabinet and the Ministry, and providing political risk assessment and
protection services for Chief Executives, their agencies and Cabinet
Ministers.
Of course it can be countered that the
argument I present here robs policy workers of their ‘agency’. However this position presupposes that policy
workers are empowered to carry out independent articulation of ‘free thought’
in the politically charged environment of a policy shop to begin with. The authors experience was that this was rare
and most definitely discouraged. The
reality of the policy environment and the position of the policy proletariat is
effectively summarised by legal theorist Stanley Fish
(1989: 141) who describes professional analysts not as free agents, but as
"embedded practitioners" whose values, canons of evidence, normative
measures and theoretical schema are proscribed by his or her professional
community. As a result, the potential
for professional objectivity or political neutrality are, by definition,
curtailed significantly by their personal, and their agencies proximity to,
political power.
The policy commissars and their direct
line managers, who may be referred to collectively as the Policy Elite, also
have the unenviable task of adhering to and implementing the policy platforms
of incoming (newly elected) governments, along with new policy initiatives
dreamt up by the current government.
This can be a nightmare at times, especially if the government’s policy
goes against the majority or all of the available research evidence, as often
occurs in the criminal justice sector (see below). The case study of the OCS and policy response
to the Wanganui incident highlights the myth of the political neutrality of the
public service. This example also underlines
the role of ritual in masking the way(s) in which officials and agencies will
bow to political and media pressure and construct policy responses ill-suited
to the specific social issue that is dominating front page news at a particular
time.
References
Department of Corrections (2013) Annual
Report 2012/13. Wellington: Department of Corrections.
Fish S (1989) Doing What
Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and
Legal Studies. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Ministry of Justice (2002) Crime Reduction
Strategy. Wellington: Ministry of Justice
Ministry of Social Development (2006) Plan
of Action: Improving Outcomes for Young People in Counties Manukau. Wellington: Ministry of Social
Development.
State Services Commission (2007) Public
Service Code of Conduct. Wellington:
State Services Commission.
Wanganui District Council (2007) Toddler
Death: A Sad, Appalling Tragedy. Wanganui:
Wanganui District Council.
