Published in The Sunday Star Times (Auckland), 23 August 2026
On my first morning as prime minister, I would deliver a speech. It would contain no slogans or platitudes about becoming the best country in the world. Instead, it would be a stocktake, and it would not be a pleasant one.
I would tell New Zealanders what they already sense: the country has been slipping down the income rankings of the developed world for decades. The Government’s books have been in deficit for years, and an ageing population will make both problems worse.
After that speech, my 100 days would depart from the usual script. Every new prime minister arrives with a 100-day programme of shiny new initiatives for health, education or transport. I would not have one. I would focus on the machinery of government first because I know that everything else the Government wants to do depends on it.
That machine that is meant to deliver such programmes has seized up. The New Zealand state can simply no longer carry out big reforms in the time it has in between elections. Before promising anything new, someone should ask what got in the way of all the earlier promises.
You do not have to look far: New Zealand has 43 government departments, 28 ministers and more than 80 ministerial portfolios. Norway, hardly a failed state, governs with 20 ministers and 17 ministries.
Ministers here can neither appoint nor remove the chief executives of their departments; that power belongs solely to the Public Service Commissioner. No minister even works inside the department they lead. All of them sit in the Beehive, which is better suited to the game of politics than to directing public officials.
My work programme for the first 100 days would start right there.
On day one, I would cut the number of portfolios to fewer than 20. New prime ministers can do that without legislation on their own authority. It is a fair test of whether they are serious about getting things done.
In the same week, my ministers would pack up their plush Beehive suites and move across the road, into the departments they are responsible for. Ministers who walk the corridors of their own ministries learn more in a month than a year of briefing papers will ever tell them.
The move would also make clear who works for whom.
The failing ministries come next, starting with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. MBIE is the 2012 mega-merger that runs everything from immigration to the space programme. It answers to 20 different ministers, so nobody is clearly in charge.
I would not repair MBIE, I would replace it. Routine administration would stay with the old ministry while it winds down. New, smaller agencies with clearer jobs would gradually take over the work that matters.
I would also put artificial intelligence to work on the policy process itself, with the technology companies that know how. The point is not to help bureaucrats write tidier emails. But advice that currently takes six months and arrives mediocre should take weeks and be excellent.
The most contentious step comes next. I would abolish the Public Service Commission and let ministers choose the leadership of their own departments. The rules that keep the career public service below them neutral and professional would be tightened, not weakened.
Critics would call this politicisation. It is not. In Germany, where I grew up, ministers appoint their top officials, and the career civil service beneath them remains neutral and expert. A minister who answers to Parliament for a department should decide who runs it.
A second objection is easy to predict: all of this sounds like beltway plumbing, remote from hospital waiting lists and cost of living concerns.
Yet every government I can remember has promised better hospitals and better-off families. The system has all too often failed to deliver.
Since arriving in Wellington in 2012, I have watched capable ministers work around their own departments because working through them was futile. This is how our failing system works.
None of my reforms of the state would be finished in 100 days. Rebuilding expertise in a hollowed-out public service will take years and repairing the public finances even longer.
But the first few weeks will tell the system that change is coming.
Whoever wins the election on November 7 could stand up to give that first speech. I would tell the public the truth about the state we are in and then start reforming the machine of government.
