Surfacing

An apology and the month ahead

I owe you an apology for the silence.

What no one adequately prepares you for is the peculiar low that follows a PhD draft’s completion. The fieldwork is finished, the chapters are written, and you can finally see the full arc of the argument, and then, rather unexpectedly, you find yourself somewhat submerged. That is where I have been these past four weeks.

I am genuinely pleased with where the thesis has landed. But this project began in 2016 at the School of Government at Victoria University, where I spent several years trying to answer what appeared to be a simple question: what is free and frank advice? I was attempting to answer it without political theory, which made the task nearly impossible. For free and frank advice, is not, at its core, a technical or administrative question. It is a profoundly political one about how democracy and bureaucracy fit together, how power is constrained, and how the legitimacy of the various policy advisory systems is maintained.

After some years away from academia, building my consultancy, I returned to the question at the University of Canterbury at the start of the pandemic, but this time with the full toolkit of political theory, and some profoundly supportive academics. The shift to Te Waipounamu changed everything.

But the reckoning that follows a long project has occupied my mind more than I anticipated. Thank you for your patience.

Now, to what comes next.

From tomorrow, the Free and Frank Advice series resumes with rationalist theories: the idea that the democratic legitimacy of public policy officials rests not on consent but on the quality of reasoning and why it sounds appealing until one asks who gets to decide what counts as reason, and whether that question can even be answered within a single constitutional tradition. Sunday brings a puzzle. Tuesday restarts the implementation series, where we have been exploring the interpretive hinge: how policy advisory systems actually connect, or fail to connect, with delivery systems.

Thursday sees the return of the Waitangi Tribunal series. I am in early conversations about developing this into a book and a video format, which holds some promise. The series kicks off with a philosophical piece.

Friday launches a new series on administrative burden. I confess this is partly motivated by growing frustration with the Ministry of Regulation’s apparent failure to grasp the real costs of regulatory systems on regulated parties. Their cost-benefit framing seems to extend only to costs to the Crown, the mechanics of running systems, and abstract market effects. It remains strikingly blind to the costs of complexity, compliance burdens, learning burdens, and psychological burdens: in short, what it actually takes for people to participate in regulatory systems at all. This literature illuminates a significant blind spot in our local regulatory thinking and offers deeper insight into access problems in service delivery than we have yet to fully acknowledge.

I also have a piece forthcoming on performative governance, a term currently being deployed rather loosely by people who do not fully grasp either its analytical value or the fact that performance is itself a legitimate and powerful political tool.

Finally, I am also writing a reflection piece to support two peer-reviewed articles that are nearing publication. It will be no surprise to most of you that one is on system performance, and the other is on why we teach public administration in post-colonial states as if politics does not matter.

I am looking forward to the year ahead. I hope you are too.

DTKx