Loose Threads: On Being a Good Client

Also, choose your clients wisley

A note before we begin

I owe you an apology for the silence.

The past several weeks have been absorbed, almost entirely, by the final push on the doctorate. Checking data. Verifying references. Attending to the kind of precision that, by this stage of the process, feels both essential and quietly relentless and, to be honest, a grind. I am close enough to see the end, and near enough to know that one careless footnote could matter. Thank you for your patience.

I was also quietly a little overwhelmed by the response to the Margaret Mahy Playground post. I had not anticipated quite how many of you would find something in it, old readers and new ones alike, and I am grateful for every message. Several of you asked, in one form or another, the same question: beyond the private sector, what else made a difference in the rebuild?

I gave various answers, depending on the conversation. But the one I kept returning to was this: in the end, the Crown became a better client. Not a perfect one. Not a swift one. Not the entire Crown. But in the bits important to the rebuild, a better one. And that mattered more than most people outside the process would readily appreciate.

A number of you encouraged me to write about that directly. This post is my attempt to do so.

The part nobody tells you

In my last post, I argued that the rebuild of Ōtautahi needs to be told as a story of private-sector courage. The bets placed by Richard Peebles and his partners at Riverside, by Antony Gough on the Terrace, by Philip Carter at the Crossing, by Alasdair Cassels at the Tannery: those decisions need to be acknowledged, celebrated, and written about more.

But courage needs something to respond to. And for a long time in the rebuild, the Crown was not giving the private sector enough to work with.

The anchor project programme, announced with considerable ambition in the 2012 Blueprint, was late. Most of it was very late. The Auditor-General said so plainly in early 2017: CERA and its central city unit had begun well, commissioning the Blueprint and getting projects moving, but had then failed to manage the programme with the coherence it required. Governance was confused. The central city unit operated semi-independently of CERA and reported directly to the minister, leaving contractors, private-sector developers, and community stakeholders unable to determine who was actually in charge. Funding decisions were made without adequate consideration of their effect on the wider programme. Milestones slipped.

One analyst, writing in the Lincoln Planning Review, described the Crown’s approach as reflecting a level of faith in market self-correction that had not been seen even in Thatcher’s Britain. That is a pointed observation. And it captures something real about what poor client behaviour looks like at scale: not malice, not incompetence exactly, but an organisation that had not yet worked out what kind of client it needed to be.

When it changed

The turning point, or at least one of them, was the playground; the other one was SCIRT.

The Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team was the alliance formed to repair the city’s horizontal infrastructure: the pipes, roads, bridges, and retaining walls. Three public entities, five civil engineering firms, a $2.2 billion programme, and a governance model that put all parties’ commercial interests in explicit alignment with the outcomes. Performance drove allocation. Those who delivered well got more work. Those who did not, did not. Cost estimates, built with rigorous risk modelling, came in within one to two per cent of actual spend across more than 700 projects. The programme was completed in June 2017, on time and essentially on budget.

SCIRT worked because the Crown, in that context, knew what it was trying to achieve and had structured its engagement with the market accordingly. It had not delegated the outcomes to the private sector and hoped for the best. It had not pretended to be a commercial entity while operating with the decision-making pace of a public institution. It had set clear objectives, aligned the commercial framework with them, owned its decisions, and held the line.

The horizontal infrastructure going in was also the precondition for everything else. Roads and pipes do not generate headlines. But without them, no amount of anchor project ambition produces a functioning city. SCIRT understood that. I am not saying SCIRT was perfect or comprehensive. It wasn’t. But it set the benchmark.

Ōtākaro and the second chapter

The other shift was structural. In 2016, when CERA was disestablished, the Crown created Ōtākaro Limited as a dedicated Crown company to finish the anchor projects. It was a significant signal. The Crown was acknowledging, implicitly, that the governance confusion of the CERA years had cost the programme, and that what the remaining work required was an entity with a clear mandate, clear delegations, and a structure that allowed it to act commercially without losing sight of the fact that it was not a commercial entity.

That last distinction matters more than it might appear. Ōtākaro’s stated purpose was to balance good commercial outcomes with the Crown’s regeneration objectives. Not to maximise commercial return. Not to transfer all risk to the private sector and call it value for money. But to hold both things at once: the discipline of commercial engagement and the accountability of public purpose. Ōtākaro also understood it had a social licence to maintain, to the people of Christchurch, to the families still waiting, to Ngai Tuahuriri, to the broader commitment the Crown had made when it took control of the recovery in 2011. That licence was not tradeable against a return hurdle.

Te Pae, the convention centre, opened in 2021. Parakiore, the metro sports facility, followed. The South Frame and the Avon River Precinct were completed. The city that had been waiting for its anchor projects to arrive finally began to feel like a city again. I am not saying these projects were perfect; I am saying they were delivered.

What this tells us

The rebuild does not offer a simple lesson about the Crown as a good client, because let’s be honest, the Crown was not a consistent client across the decade and a half of recovery. It was, at different moments and through different entities, a confused client, an absent client, an overreaching client, and eventually a capable one.

What changed was not ambition. The ambition was there from 2012. What changed was organisation. Clarity about who owned which decisions. A commercial framework aligned to public outcomes rather than substituted for them. An understanding that the market needed something credible to respond to, not just something large.

Vision without organisation produces the early anchor project years: a Blueprint on paper and a programme that keeps slipping. Organisations without commercial clarity produce a procurement process that scares off developers, as people noted publicly in 2014. Commercial clarity without public purpose produces the Residential Demonstration Project failure: a naive faith that the market would deliver urban regeneration on its own, if only the Crown got out of the way.

What the private sector was waiting for, what Peebles and Gough and Carter and Cassels were watching for before they moved, was evidence that the Crown had worked this out. It knew what it was trying to achieve. That the people in the room could make decisions, and those decisions would hold. That the outcomes it had promised were real.

The playground was part of that signal. SCIRT was part of it. Ōtākaro was part of it. None of them was perfect. All of them were better than what had come before.

And this is not a story that belongs only to Aotearoa. I also train and conduct Gateway Reviews across Australia, and I see the same patterns in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Queensland. When the public sector has not done the foundational work on its own current state. When the procurement strategy reflects internal assumptions that are untested against the market. When nobody on the client side can tell you who actually owns the commercial decisions. When an agency borrows commercial language and engages in commercial practices without acquiring commercial discipline, it drags the private sector into the web of public-sector decision-making. These are all red flags, and they are not uniquely local failures.

When the public sector is a poor client, everyone loses. Contractors absorb costs they cannot recover. Counterparties price uncertainty into their bids, and value for money becomes elusive. Capable people stop putting their hands up. The outcomes the public was promised are revised into new timelines, amended business cases, and ministerial statements about complexity.

When the public sector is a good client, the opposite is true. It knows what it is trying to achieve and can say so clearly. They have tested the market before committing to a process, so they know what is possible and affordable. It owns its decisions internally and holds them under pressure. It understands the difference between acting commercially and being commercial, between engaging the market on its own terms and forgetting that it holds a social licence the market does not. And it stays the course.

I apply the same thinking in my own practice. DTK and Associates is a small consultancy, and I have learned, not without cost, to choose clients carefully. Wellington is a particular discipline. There are agencies in that system that will run you in circles: scope the work with you and never contract you for it, change direction mid-engagement, commission the wrong thing and cancel it, query invoices for work delivered to the brief. The day rate never compensates for what it actually costs. Make no mistake, there is always measured risk and high cost when contracting with the public sector. I mitigate this by working with the best people in the best agencies.

To those of you who wrote after the Margaret Mahy post and asked what really made the difference: I hope this answers your question more fully. The Crown becoming a better client was not a small thing. It was the condition that made everything else possible. The playground, the market, the city. All of it rested, in the end, on that.

And back to the playground

I still look at it every morning. The same steel and timber, the same families unbothered by the history beneath their feet.

What they are enjoying is the proof of a proposition: that the Crown, when it learns how to be a good client, creates the conditions in which other people can do extraordinary things. Not by getting out of the way. Not by pretending to be something it is not. But by being organised enough, purposeful enough, and honest enough about what it is actually for.

That is a harder thing than it looks. The rebuild showed us what it costs when the Crown has not yet learned it, and what becomes possible when it has.

Ngā mihi maioha.

More soon. The thesis is nearly there.