Engagement in the Public Sector in New Zealand: A Masterclass in Going Around in Circles
By Natalia Albert – Original Substack article
It’s unreasonable and unrealistic to expect the Gov to engage with everyone for everything all the time. However, we keep thinking public engagement is a holy grail… it’s not.
Government can’t build relationships, so can we stop banging on about this?
Public service institutions aren’t built to build relationships, it’s impossible, unreasonable and creating ridiculous expectations that will never be met. Government institutions role is not to build relationships, it’s to help govern a country, yes engagement is important and required, but not through relationships with individuals, its just not something Government can do.
Sure, the people within the institutions can build relationships, but what happens when that person within the institutions that holds all the Iwi or Hapū relationships, for example, leaves to a secondment to another agency, or gets sick, or leaves for whatever reason, or decides to gatekeep those relationships essentially holding the agency hostage to their social capital? It isn’t a resilient or robust way of engaging with government or for the government to engage with people. So then what?
Well, it’s very hard and it will never be perfect.
Public engagement has been a huge part of my professional life for the past six or seven years. I’ve seen all sides of it—engaging as the Crown from inside government, engaging as an individual outside government, engaged with Māori as the Crown and engaged with very broad communities like the LGBTQI+ Communities, Disabled Communities, Migrant and Refugee Communities, Senior citizens, children, everybody! And over that time, I’ve learned that there are a lot of myths and misunderstandings about what public engagement actually is, what it’s supposed to achieve, and how it works in practice. And a clue, it isn’t about building stronger relationships.
I held different enragement roles within the government, like being Manager for Strategic Engagement in the Office of the Chief Exec in one agency and leading the MSD social cohesion policy work that came out of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the 15th of March attacks.
The MSD role was where my knowledge, literacy, capability, confidence, and interest in public engagement skyrocketed. The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the 15 of March didn’t just talk about the need of better quality engagement—it set a clear mandate for what level of engagement between the Crown and the public should actually look like.
The Royal Commission report has a whole section—Part Nine—on social cohesion and embracing diversity. In its introduction, section 1.4 is dedicated specifically to community engagement and explaining why the Government had to endgame at the Involve level.
The Royal Commission’s mandate was to use the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) model of engagement, which i s similar to the Te Arawhiti old engagement model, which I couldn’t find online anymore. The IAP2 framework lays out a public participation spectrum, which categorizes different levels of engagement:
- Inform – The lowest level. You tell people what’s happening. That’s it.
- Consult – You ask for feedback, but decision-making power remains with the government.
- Involve – The public is included in shaping decisions, but the government still makes the final call.
- Collaborate or co-design – The government and the public work together to develop solutions, sharing power more equally.
- Empower or Partner– The highest level. Decision-making is handed over to the public.
In 2013, New Zealand joined the Open Government Partnership, which committed the country to improving how the public sector engages with citizens. The IAP2 framework aligns with that, and it has a set of core values that outline what good engagement should look like. These include things like ensuring affected people have a right to be involved, making sure public input actually influences decisions, and seeking out participation in meaningful ways understanding that the Crown has the final say.
So, in theory, all of this sounds great. But here’s where things get complicated.
The Government’s Engagement Problem
The distinction between “inform,” “consult,” “involve,” “collaborate or co-design,” and “empower or partner” is really important. But in government, these terms get thrown around interchangeably without a real understanding of what they mean. You hear agencies talk about “co-design” when they’re actually just consulting. You hear “partnership” used when the power balance is nowhere near equal. These aren’t just semantic issues—they have real implications for communities who think they have a bigger say than they actually do.
The Royal Commission’s mandate was that any policies or projects coming out of it had to involve communities in their development. That means working together to identify issues and co-develop solutions. But crucially, the final decision still sits with the Crown (which is a bit that often gets left out of the Cabinet papers and Discussion papers, for obvious reasons). That’s a major sticking point that doesn’t get talked about enough. We have all these engagement models that suggest shared decision-making, but at the end of the day, the Government still gets to make the call. And that creates tension, particularly under the Te Tirtti of Waitangui, which I have written at length in previous articles.
Take the old Te Arawhiti engagement matrix, for example. This was a model specifically for Crown-Māori engagement, which had similar categories to IAP2 but tweaked for the New Zealand context. Instead of “empower,” it had “partner,” and instead of “collaborate,” it had “co-design.” But again, the issue remains—who actually holds power at the end of the day? And what does “partnership” even mean when one party (the Crown) holds all the institutional timeframes, resources and authority?
Social Cohesion and the Gaps in Government Commitment
The Royal Commission’s mandate was clear—community engagement had to be a core part of the government’s response. This wasn’t just a vague suggestion; it was a directive to ensure that policy changes following the attacks were informed by those most affected. On paper, the government embraced this. Then Hon Andrew Little, as the Lead Coordination Minister for the Royal Commission response, acknowledged in a 2023 letter to Kāpuia (the government’s advisory group on the response) that “ongoing engagement between government and communities is critical” and that agencies needed to improve their capability to ensure community voices actually influenced decision-making.
To that end, the government introduced the Policy Community Engagement Tool, supposedly to standardize and improve engagement across agencies. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) was tasked with overseeing its use, providing workshops, and collecting feedback before rolling it out across the public sector. The Public Service Commission was meant to take it even further, embedding it into government-wide practice as part of New Zealand’s Open Government Partnership commitments.
In theory, this sounds great—another step toward meaningful engagement, right? Not quite. As someone who was directly involved in government engagement at the time, I can tell you that the reality was far messier. Agencies were expected to take on a more significant engagement role without the necessary resources or expertise. Communities and different NGOs, already fatigued from endless rounds of consultation, were expected to provide feedback yet again. Becase let’s not forget that the same groups and peak bodies are consulted on for all sort of things. And even when engagement did happen, in a meaningful way, starting early and following all best practices, there was little clarity on whether their input actually influenced policy.
The hate speech consultation debacle in 2021 is a perfect example. The government launched a massive public consultation on hate speech reforms, translating the documents into multiple languages and formats. But how many people actually read through them? How many people had the time and expertise to meaningfully engage with what was a very legal technical document? And how much taxpayer money went into translation of all the relevant documents, only for Hon Chris Faafoi, the Minister of Justice at the time, to quietly shelve the proposals because the engagement process was such a mess and quickly put in the too hard basket?
The reality is that while the government publicly committed to engagement, the structures to make it meaningful were never fully in place. As Andrew Little himself admitted, accessibility of information remains a huge issue, and the government still struggles with making its engagement processes transparent, clear, and actually useful. Like for example, does anybody talk about the cost of “meaningful” engagement? High level engagement ain’t cheap or free.
This is what happens when engagement becomes a box-ticking exercise—well-meaning policies, flashy commitments, and ultimately, very little real change. It is also what happens when nobody understands the difference between inform, consult, involve or pattern? Or how the legislation or Cabinet process influences engagement. For example, did you know that if an agency wants to run a public consultation they must go to Cabinet for approval? And that will drive the timeline, not the needs to communities or Iwi, but the Cabinet process.
The Practical Realities of Public Engagement
Here’s where people get it wrong: they assume the government can just engage with everyone all the time. That’s simply not how it works.
- Engagement costs money and time. Running proper engagement processes takes resources. When people say the government should engage more, they often ignore the fact that this means funding facilitators, venues, translators, consultants, and travel. And that money has to come from somewhere, like your taxes.
- Engagement requires Cabinet approval. Like I said above, if a government agency wants to go beyond just informing the public, they often need a Cabinet mandate. That means ministers have to approve it, which creates timelines, constraints, and political oversight that people don’t always realize will drive the engagement.
- The government engages with organizations, not individuals. Outside of formal public consultation processes (where anyone can submit feedback), most government engagement happens with peak bodies, associations, and institutions—not with individual people. That means if you don’t belong to a group, you’re probably not getting engaged with. And for groups, engagement can feel repetitive and exhausting because they get asked the same questions by different agencies over and over again.
- Government agencies can’t easily share stakeholder data. If one ministry builds a list of stakeholders, it can’t just hand that over to another ministry for privacy reasons. Every agency has to build its own networks from scratch, which is inefficient and frustrating.
- There are real tensions between groups. Engagement assumes that communities are united, but that’s not always the case. The Royal Commission process made this especially clear—there were conflicts between Māori and migrant groups, between different iwi, between religious groups and secular institutions, and between different interpretations of what social cohesion should mean. You’re not going to get consensus on a lot of these issues, no matter how well the engagement is run.
Case Study: Wellington’s Citizens’ Assembly
A good example of all of this is Wellington City Council’s Citizens’ Assembly in 2023. The idea was to get a randomly selected group of Wellingtonians together to advise on council service priorities. They sent out 10,000 invitations, got 42 participants, and had four sessions. Their recommendations were submitted to the council, a report was written. Everyone was stoked in Wellington, there was a bit of buzz. Finally an effort to do citizen participation better. Right? Well, no. The launch happened and then… nothing.
We heard about the Citizens’ Assembly in 2023, and then it just disappeared from public conversation. No major follow-up, no clear impact on decision-making, no idea what recommendations where implement and which ones were not and why. If there are, I cant find them easily. And this is the problem—engagement efforts get rolled out, publicized, and then forgotten because there’s no requirement to keep the process transparent or accountable. (wellington.govt.nz) Like how much did it cost? What was the benefit? What were the challenges? Will it happen again? Will other councils adopt this? How do you find any of this, and when you do so what? We all still seem to feel a sense of chaos within the Wellington City Council, so what did this exercise actually solve? Who did it include and why? Who did it not include and why?
Below the few articles I could find on the Wellington City Council Citizens Assembly, if I have missed anything, very happy to stand corrected.
Case Study: The Incitement of Hatred Consultation – A Bureaucratic Marathon That Went Nowhere
In 2021, the Ministry of Justice launched a public consultation on proposed changes to New Zealand’s hate speech laws. On paper, it looked like a textbook example of broad, inclusive public engagement. The consultation documents were detailed, outlining six key proposals, and were translated into multiple languages—Arabic, Bahasa (Indonesian and Malaysian), Bengali, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Dari. Accessible formats included Te Reo Māori, large print, audio, New Zealand Sign Language, and even Braille upon request.
But here’s the thing: just because a consultation is available in multiple languages doesn’t mean people will engage with it. How many people actually read through the legal and policy-heavy documents in each language? How many took the time to submit well-informed, meaningful feedback? And how much did it all cost—translation, formatting, accessibility provisions—not just in money, but in the hours required to review, understand, and respond?
I had a front-row seat to this process because we were running our own public engagement on social cohesion at the same time. And from that vantage point, it was clear that this consultation was a mess from start to finish. The scale and complexity of the material alone made it inaccessible to the very communities it was supposed to serve. The level of engagement required—reading, understanding, providing detailed feedback—was completely impractical for the average person.
It’s no wonder that then-Minister of Justice Chris Faafoi essentially shrugged the whole thing under the carpet. After all that effort, the proposals were quietly dropped. This is what happens when an engagement process is designed to tick boxes rather than actually result in a meaningful policy outcome.
Let’s stop romanticizing engagement
Public engagement is not a silver bullet. It’s complex, expensive, time-consuming, and, at times, deeply frustrating. And if we’re going to have serious conversations about engagement, we need to move beyond the naive idea that it’s just about “doing more” or “doing better.” We need to acknowledge the structural, legal, and political constraints that make it so difficult in the first place. Otherwise, we’re just repeating the same cycle of consultation fatigue and unrealistic expectations.
Our cities are too big, too diverse, too pluralistic, too dense to do this effectively. We cant keep romanticizing this idea that the people and communities know better so they should develop, inform, decide, and design policy. In practice its a shit idea and it just doesn’t work. To conclude, and to be crustal clear I’m not saying the government shouldn’t engage, I’m just advocating for understating how it works a bit better so we can have more reasonable expectations and conversations and our trust levels in government can be based on what can actually happen vs what we think should happen.
Nat
