Published in The Australian (Sdyney), 23 June 2026
Most people carry a comforting picture of government. They may have no time for politicians, for sure. But they assume the machine behind them is sound, that sensible officials somewhere are working at the right things, in good faith.
So, when something goes wrong, their first instinct is to look for the minister. The department has failed, so the minister has failed. If she cannot fix it, she should go. Someone must be in charge, so someone can be blamed.
It is a reassuring story. Much of the time it is a fiction.
A minister can never quite admit how little she really controls. To say that she is at the mercy of her own officials could be fatal. You are the minister, the public would say. You are the boss, so sort it out.
The officials cannot admit the other half. They cannot say that they do not really answer to the minister, still less that they keep her in the dark. That would come close to admitting a serious breach of duty. They are there to serve the government of the day, lawfully, of course.
And so, the show goes on. The minister plays the boss, the department plays along, and everyone keeps a straight face.
But every so often the performance slips. And last week, in New Zealand, it did far more than slip. It blew apart, live on radio and television.
The technical detail hardly matters. It was an IT project, buried inside the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
MBIE is a behemoth, more than six thousand staff reporting to some twenty ministers, with a hand in areas as diverse as immigration, the minimum wage and science funding. It is, in effect, the Ministry of Everything. Most people outside would have no clue what it does, and plenty inside would struggle too.
In one of MBIE’s myriad units, a project to modernise New Zealand’s border identity system ran for seven years. More than thirty million dollars went in. Nothing usable came out. Late last year, the department finally gave up and cancelled it.
Naturally, nobody resigned. Instead, a review was ordered, no doubt so that, in due course, lessons could be learned. Wellington is very good at administering a scandal until it stops moving.
But this time the minister did not play along. Erica Stanford did what few ministers would. She let rip.
She told parliament she had been fed “pure fiction”, and that she no longer trusted her own officials. Ministers almost never say such things out loud. The spell had been broken, and the rest came tumbling after.
She is not the first minister to be misled. Across two governments, those before her had heard the same reassurances, all from the bureaucracy. Whatever this was, it was not party politics.
Stanford had been told the project was robust and on track. But people she trusted warned her to look closer, and the assurance fell apart.
The warnings had been there in nine outside reviews. One, in late 2023, doubted it would ever work. Yet months later, officials told Stanford the reviewers had confirmed the approach was sound. In truth, they had confirmed no such thing, and the chief executive later apologised.
In New Zealand, a minister does not even share a building with her department, but works a few hundred metres down the road, in the Beehive.
The project was not really Stanford’s. By the end it sat in a separate technology unit, outside the immigration branch she ran. But she held the responsibility. Others, out of sight, did the work.
As the bill climbed towards the thirty-five million dollars at which Cabinet would have to look, money was moved about and the project split, keeping the totals below the line. The review records staff calling this, with a candour you have to admire, “creative accounting”.
The man sent to find out what happened is Sir Brian Roche, the Public Service Commissioner. He does not outrank the prime minister. But in Wellington’s machinery he may count for more, because he appoints the chief executives who run the departments. Ministers are consulted, but the choice is his.
He spent what he called a “gloomy Saturday” reading the review. By his own account, it left him appalled.
The project had been stopped months earlier, and no one had told him. Keeping ministers in the dark may be routine by now, but doing so to the head of the public service is not.
When news of the review broke and Stanford spoke out, the familiar theatre played out. Winston Peters, the New Zealand First leader, wanted the culprits in prison, tough talk in an election year. The talkback hosts had their story of the week.
Sir Brian took the most delicate role. In radio interviews, he blamed a few individuals, not the public service. A small number of people, he said, an aberration. He may have been right about the individuals. But pressed on how it could happen, he reached for something bigger.
MBIE, he allowed, might simply be too large, its units little kingdoms of their own. He glimpsed the real problem, then stepped back from it.
Roche’s response was to launch an investigation, the proper step, but also one more process, piled on a project already studied to death and overseen by boards whose minutes recorded no decisions.
So, the repair began, in the only language the department knew. There would be new checks, bolted onto the old ones, which had caught nothing.
Most of those responsible had already moved on, which is an advantage for the investigation. The current chief executive arrived only afterwards. There is hardly anyone left to punish, which is convenient, because nothing will get too messy.
The department welcomed the investigation. In a year, it will welcome the report on why the investigation changed nothing.
Before too long, the dust will settle and the usual performance will resume. Ministers will play the boss again. Departments will play along.
And no one will ask the obvious question. Who is really running the country?
Not the ministers, though they are the ones elected to do it. Not even the Commissioner, who learned of it months too late, as startled as anyone.
Much of the time, the machinery simply runs itself, accountable to no one, and now and then spends thirty million dollars on nothing.
The only thing that disturbs it is a minister who refuses to play along, as Stanford did.
