Whither the New Zealand Experiment: Thermidorean Reaction or Rediscovering the Importance of Capacity ‐ Some views from New Zealand

• Published in: Australian Journal of Public Administration
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2003
• Subjects: New Zealand; Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j..2003.00344.x; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj..2003.00344.x; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j..2003.00344.x

To trace the main trajectory of New Zealand's public management reforms, let us take some recent assessments from two Prime Ministers ‐ one who initiated the reforms, the other who inherited them. ‘In our first three‐year term we undertook a program of market liberalisation and public sector reform which I am certain was needed before our economy collapsed under its own weight. In the second term the government became hopelessly and publicly divided over the pace of and direction of reform. Some of us wanted to call a halt and give the changes we had already made a chance to work. The rest of us seemed consumed by ideology. They wanted to press on.’ (former Prime Minister David Lange 1997). ‘The capacity of the public service has been so eroded that it simply cannot perform its core function — advising government… Top management has let down the public and it has let down the loyal hard working public servants…’. (present Prime Minister Helen Clark 1999). Then the comments of an international scholar charged with evaluating the reforms: ‘The World Bank and other international organisations have show‐cased New Zealand's reforms at various conferences, and some of the architects of the reforms have crisscrossed the globe extolling the virtues and portability of their country's version of results‐oriented public management. Despite the interest and the sales effort, only a few developed countries (such as Iceland and Singapore) have adopted selected features of the model; others (such as Sweden and the United Kingdom) have embraced a managerial ethic without subscribing to the hard‐edged contractualism that differentiates New Zealand's reforms from those tried elsewhere… not a single developing or transitional country has installed the full New Zealand model.’ (The Spirit of Reform, Allan Schick 1996).