Published by The New Zealand Initiative (Wellington), 8 April 2026 (PDF)
New Zealand’s ministers are accountable to Parliament for departments they do not control. The Public Service Commissioner appoints all chief executives. Ministers cannot remove them. Elected governments struggle to implement the agenda voters chose them to deliver.
Who Runs the Country? examines how New Zealand ended up with the weakest ministerial control of any OECD democracy: just eight senior officials per minister, compared to Germany’s 106 or the UK’s 169.
The report proposes a staged move toward the German model. Ministers would appoint their top officials from a qualified pool. A protected career service below would operate under a statutory duty to raise legality concerns. Australia’s Robodebt scandal shows what happens when appointment power lacks those safeguards. The American system shows what happens without any restraint at all.
In a first phase, ministers would gain the power to appoint chief executives. Later, departments large enough to justify it would get a dedicated State Secretary to bridge political direction and operational management. The goal is honesty about where politics already operates, combined with genuine protections where it should not.
