Abstract
Public leadership is being tested to its limits. Polarisation within societies is vying with polarisation in geopolitics in confounding long-established habits of leadership. Public trust in most countries is declining. This lecture, presented by Professor Ngaire Woods, will look at what public leaders across the world are doing to enhance public trust in the state, to repair economic and social damage wrought by COVID, and to chart new paths in their international relations.
About the presenter
Professor Ngaire Woods is the founding Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government and Professor of Global Economic Governance at Oxford University. Her research focuses on how to enhance the governance of organisations, the challenges of globalisation, global development, and the role of international institutions and global economic governance.
Ngaire Woods serves as a member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’s International Advisory Panel and as a Non-Executive Director at Rio Tinto. She has published extensively on international institutions, the global economy, globalisation, and governance.
She was educated at Auckland University. She studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a New Zealand Rhodes Scholar. She won a Junior Research Fellowship at New College, Oxford (1990-1992) and subsequently taught at Harvard University (Government Department) before taking up her Fellowship at University College, Oxford and academic roles at Oxford University.
Video recording
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Transcript
Caralee McLiesh:
And welcome also to those who are online. We've got a number of people who've been dialling in. It's great to have everybody join us this morning. I know it's an extremely busy time of year, so wonderful to have you all here for this special event. This event is part of our Wellbeing Seminar Series, which was launched back in April. And the purpose is to provide insights to support the Treasury's wellbeing report, which was launched in November, just last month. But also to generate dialogue, to generate discussion on really important wellbeing issues that can inform our policy work. So, Te Tai Waiora, the Treasury's first wellbeing report was released just last month, and it's an independent report that draws on the Living Standards Framework, and He Ara Waiora, the Māori wellbeing framework to generate insights on wellbeing, the state of wellbeing in New Zealand, the trends in wellbeing over the last 20 odd years, and the risks to and the sustainability of wellbeing in the future.
For those who haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it, and we're really proud of the work. And we're also proud of this Wellbeing Seminar Series, which has helped to inform that work, and generate some really good debate and discussion on the critical things that matter for New Zealanders. So today we are absolutely delighted to have Professor Ngaire Woods with us. Ngaire is the Founding Dean of the Blavatnik School of Public Policy at Oxford University. Her research focuses on how to enhance the governance of organisations, challenges of globalisation, global development, and the role of institutions in economic global governance. Ngaire serves on numerous boards and panels. She's a member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank's International Advisory Panel, and a non-executive director of Rio Tinto, just to name a few.
After studying at Auckland University and Oxford, Ngaire went on to teach at Harvard University before taking up her fellowship at University College Oxford, and academic roles at Oxford University. Ngaire was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, CBE, in the 2018 New Year's Honours for services to higher education and public policy, and she's the Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and many more honours that we could keep reading [inaudible 00:02:33]. So today we really are privileged to have Ngaire share her insights on what public leaders across the world are doing to enhance public trust in the state, to repair economic and social damage that's been brought by COVID, and to chart new paths in their international relations. And this is obviously a topic of great relevance to us in New Zealand. It's great relevance to our work around wellbeing. Te Tai Waiora, our wellbeing report identified trust as one of the really significant foundations of wellbeing.
Here in New Zealand, our response to the COVID-19 pandemic was underpinned by what were relatively high levels of trust and social cohesion. Trust actually increased at the start of the pandemic, but we also saw trust in institutions come under very real pressure as the pandemic stretched out. New Zealand, of course, is a ... we're a small, we're an open economy, and international connections, international context is crucial to our living standards as well. So I'm really looking forward to hearing what Ngaire has to say about the increasingly complex international environment that we are operating in, and also her observations about how other countries are seeking to repair some of the damage that's been wrought upon by COVID-19. So we're going to hear from Ngaire for around 45 minutes, but very flexible, and then have a conversation after that. I welcome those in the room to put up hands, but also all of you online, please do enter questions and comments in the chat for the conversation in a moment. But over to you Ngaire, welcome again and it's great to have you.
Ngaire Woods:
[speaking in te reo Māori] Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa. What an honour to be back here. [speaking in te reo Māori] Nga mihi nui for the invitation. It's a real thrill. And it's a thrill to see old friends online. Bronwyn Croxson sitting there. Hi, Bronwyn. And friends in the room as well. It's lovely to see you. 12 years ago I began building the School of Government at Oxford University, and most people simply thought that my alternative was to be in a psychiatric institution, partly because Oxford had tried many times before to build a School of Government, and it had always failed, and partly because a lot of people in the world's reaction to government, to public service, to elected office is one of either disdain or despair. It's a perception in almost every corner of the world that politicians are self-serving and corrupt and incompetent, and that the public servants who serve them are sometimes lighter mix of the following.
Why did that not put me off? Because government, as every one of us in this room knows, and that's why we're here, that's why we do what we do, is absolutely essential for humans to do almost everything that humans can positively do together. Human beings didn't invent government as some kind of weird exercise in masochism. Human beings invented government, because there were some problems that communities couldn't come together to solve unless you had government there to help make that possible. And so what I'd like to do today is to talk about first what I would call three of the miraculous feats that governments are going to have to perform over the next year or two, and the costs of governments failing to step up to that. And when I say governments, I mean both elected governments and the appointed officials who stand behind them, and play a critical role.
And then I'm going to talk about some of the challenges for public servants of having governments actually fulfil those miraculous feats that the world is relying, and that no one but governments can actually fulfil, and then end with how we can think about addressing those challenges. So that's the plan. Can I just say interrupt me all the way through. Please, make this a dialogue. I thrive on disagreements. I learn from them. Please, let's crowdsource throughout this next hour and a half, I think. Is it an hour or an hour and a half that we have for this conversation? Let's make it a conversation. It's far more lively than the default that I see across the world's academia, which is I talk and you stay on Amazon shopping, and buy the [inaudible 00:07:51]. Let's break that model and make this a real conversation.
I'd like to start with the miraculous feats that you, me, governments, elected officials, public servants around the world are going to have to pull off over the next year or two. Let's start with climate. The UN IPCC report. So thrilled to see Kiwi authors on that report including Bronwyn Haywood, who I'm distantly related to, so I'm particularly pleased to see her. But brilliant to see Kiwis in that group. And in that incredibly important report, which underscores the urgency of action now, the biggest lift to make all the efforts that communities and governments are making, the biggest lift is going to have to be taken by business and by government itself and shared by government itself on how they use energy. And that is pretty obvious to most people. As Caralee mentioned, I sit on the board of one of those companies that needs to make a big lift, the board of Rio Tinto.
And what is striking on the corporate sector side is that there are now several hundred of the world's largest companies completely committed to net zero targets. But what almost every single one of them lack is a credible plan of how they're going to operationalize those commitments. What makes it extremely difficult for any company in the world to come up with an operational plan is the absence of a clear long-term government regulatory framework. In other words, without clarity around whether there's going to be a price on carbon and what that price will be, without clarity about what the tax regime and trade regime is going to be, it's very difficult for companies to make multi-billion dollar commitments that will transform the way they use energy, the way they use transport that will transform their greenhouse gas emissions.
So the first thing I want to say here is it's not for government or public servants to solve the problems, it's for government and the public service to create the framework, to create the ecosystem which makes it possible for companies, for communities to step up and actually make those targets into a reality. And my takeaway from COP27, apart from the positive headlines that came up from the negotiators, was that on the plus side, we have huge levels of commitment from the companies and governments that can drive this process. But on the negative side, when you actually look and ask who has an operational plan on how they're going to deliver that the basket is fairly empty, and that over the next year or two, the only way I think we're going to fill that basket is if governments, individually and collectively, come up with clear long-term frameworks.
And I want to move to that. Because what does it take for a clear long-term framework? It goes to a deeper issue about where democracies around the world got to, because what won't work is for a government to win office as happened in a country quite near here that's a bit bigger than us, and then to pass climate legislation through which their successor government of a different party immediately reversed, because the private sector and communities around the world know that that's how politics works, so they're not going to trust and invest on what one party is doing as a partisan agenda. It requires a cross-party, it requires a broad coalition, so that the message to the private sector and communities in this country and across the world is one that this is here to stay. This is a framework within which you can actually commit billions, because it's a stable framework that will stay.
And that is not impossible. I just want to mention two governments that we're seeing beginning to do this. One is, obviously, the German government, which now is a coalition. Its’ name is Traffic Light Coalition of the Green Party, the reds, which are the centre-left, and the amber, the orange as it were, the FDP, which is the centre-right, very business-friendly, pro-market. And everybody said this coalition cannot work. There's just no triangle ... there's no centre to a triangle which has the Greens, the Social Democrats, and the FDP together. And it's working. And it's really interesting, particularly looking at the way the climate discussions are going forward from three very different places, and the way in which that combination is able to be.
Now, it doesn't have to be a coalition government. It can be agreements outside of a coalition government as well. The other example I would give you is Brazil, where Brazil's ... the newly elected government of Brazil is President Lula, well-known to the world, man of the left, and Vice President Alckmin who's from the centre-right, from the PSDB, the longest serving governor of Sao Paulo. And they've come together, and the climate agenda they are forging likewise, and I just hosted at the Blavatnik School in Oxford, the 17 newly elected most powerful governors, ministers, mayors, senior officials from Brazilian government to work on building these cross-party coalitions, building coalitions that go across from the government of Rio, who's a Bolsonaro man to some of the far left governors from other provinces, and some of the officials and experts that sit behind them. Getting them to actually work together on some concrete things that they are going to take forward together. That's really important.
And that's the positive side. But, of course, there are headwinds to that. It was never supposed to be like this. When the 1990s heralded what the world called an era of democratisation, the hope was that the democratisation would spread not just election campaigns, but the institutions of liberal democracy, which involves three things. Elections, a rule of law that all people can rely on, and a protection of minorities. A protection of minorities, because otherwise it's not democracy, it's mobocracy, it's majoritarianism. So those three elements of democracy are really powerful.
And you'll recall in the 1990s the literature that said, "Oh dear, by the end of the nineties, this might not be working out how we wanted." Michela Wrong's book about Kenya, which has the title Now It's Our Turn to Eat, which is a refrain that I've had leaders from different continents say to me "Ngaire, yes, what you're saying is important, but you've got to understand, the people in my party, having just won an election after a decade out of government, believe it's their turn to eat." And eat is winner takes all politics, which in some countries looks more obviously like corruption, and in others might not look like corruption, but is corrupting of the possibility of these broad long-term coalitions. It's a belief that you have won government, you get to clean out the top of your public service, you get to clean out those who are heading your regulatory agencies. I live and work in the United Kingdom where this is happening even with the government appointments to boards of art galleries and museums in this new, as they call it, anti-woke policy, where they believe that diversity and inclusion has gone too far, that the world is better run by, if I were being facetious, the world is better run by white Etonians than anyone else, so get the others out.
We're actually starting to see the huge costs of that kind of blindness. The arguments that are being made in this country's public service about diversity and inclusion are not arguments about fairness. This isn't a debate about fairness. It's that government ... the people most affected by government in every country of the world are the people who are least likely to be represented in government. When British local government expenditure was cut by 40% over the last decade, the people in the southeast in government don't even notice. But it's people from all kinds of different other walks of life who are profoundly affected by those cuts and who are not present in government. And that means government flies blind.
There's no point sitting in a comfortable room in Wellington thinking we can alter welfare benefits, and we can commission a report to see how that's going to work out. In Britain, it worked out disastrously with Universal Credit, with the group making those decisions, it was incomprehensible for them that so many families in Britain had zero savings or close to zero savings, and therefore having a six week wait period for their Universal Credit was going to put them literally on the streets with their families. And then you create cycles of far more costly services that governments have to provide. Yes.
Speaker 1:
So it's a bit nerve-racking being the first one to upset-
Ngaire Woods:
Jump in. Jump in. Terrific.
Speaker 1:
But what I've been thinking about as you've been saying this, Ngaire, is about the force of past dependence where institutions often in the centre keep motoring on, actually, despite the kind of change that happens above that, because the power of that part is so, so strong versus affecting change through an exogenous shock to the system which can actually break it apart. And when you were talking about climate change, I wonder in your research whether you've observed that exogenous shocks are things that can actually accelerate decisions that are needed to force massive complex change or whether you think it is possible endogenously, which is sort of what you pointed at the beginning of your talk.
Ngaire Woods:
I've got a sort of glass half full glass half empty response to that, because on the negative side, there's things that governments around the world treat as unexpected shocks like demography and climate change, which are not actually unexpected shocks. They are completely foreseeable trajectories, but it's convenient to keep putting them off, on the one side. But on the other, you're absolutely right that crisis is actually one of the few moments where you see governments genuinely work collaboratively. It has to be all hands on deck, and you pull people ... and you saw that with COVID responses around the world. Then suddenly the silos of government had to be broken, and you saw ... and trying to capture that is one of the things we are looking at in school. How do you capture that moment of collaboration and take some of the habits forwards?
So sorry, I sort of sidetracked a little from the first theme, which is on climate it's not just ... and my bottom line is this is not just a policy issue, this isn't just, although it is a policy issue as in the policy experts, the public servants have to have the kind of framework that I'm talking about ready for governments to take forward. It's a political issue as well about how we cement these coalitions to take forward so that the signal to those who really can invest is a clear and long term one. I'm going to come to why this is politically difficult in a moment. So the first challenge I'm pointing to is the climate one, because coming out of COP27, as we read in the IPCC report, it's very clear that there's an urgent need, that there's a willingness, and the thing that's now missing is actually what only governments can do, which is the clear long-term regulatory framework. And that's what governments have to deliver on if the rest is going to happen. And that's a policy challenge and political challenge.
The second miraculous feat that governments have to pull off is about how we deal with what is a very grim global economy. I don't need to rehearse, this is Treasury, you guys all know the effect of COVID, the Ukraine, energy and fuel crisis, the strengthening of US dollar, the increasing interest rates, the stagnating of global growth, and what it means for every economy in the world, but with some very uneven effects. Some countries already being plunged into desperate debt crisis, others queuing, and some having a little bit of resilience because of measures they've taken to build up their own foreign exchange reserves, develop swaps and arrangements, create some resilient buffers.
The IMF in their World Economic Outlook last month, I'm not sure if it's helpfully or not, it's definitely sobering, point out all the ways that governments can screw this up. So they point out that governments could, and there's almost a subtext of might likely miscalculate to reduce inflation. They might exacerbate the US dollar appreciation. They might trigger debt crises in emerging economies. They might undermine growth. And you can go to the WEO to kind of check out their reasoning around those things. It's a sober reminder that navigating this global economy is going to take governments to be extraordinarily deft, but also to rethink some paradigms that are quite entrenched in Treasuries around the world, and we shouldn't underestimate that challenge. And let's be sober about this. The World Bank's report, produced at the same time highlights that COVID plummeted an additional 70 million people around the world into the most dire category of poverty. That the health and education costs of COVID, even in wealthy countries, are huge. There is a generation that stands to be lost because of the COVID learning deficits and health deficits. That's the negative side. But there is a positive side to this. And the positive side, also in the World Bank’s report, is about the kinds of investment decisions that governments can make that will both recover those health and education gaps, and that will actually prevent the staggering of growth, that will actually reduce, stand better chances of producing growth. And just to give you the flavour of that.. And they also point out that in a number of wealthy countries, it was government actions during COVID that actually offset the poverty effects of COVID.
And there's some really stark evidence comparing different wealthy governments’ responses to COVID, which you can take a little bit as a story of what governments can do when they set their mind to it, and when they set themselves up in crisis mode, as you put. So pretty crucial. The Bank highlight, and I want to give my own overlay to what the Bank highlights, because they say, "Look, there are some really worthwhile high return investments that governments can make in health, in education, and in infrastructure that governments must now focus on." And they say these governments can actually pay for, but when they're thinking about how to pay for this, they need to think about which taxes do not affect the poorest in their society. Because it's those poor that have grown and formed the heaviest brunt of COVID already, which points us towards property taxes, carbon taxes are the top two.
Now, with your politics hat on, everyone in the room knows that property taxes and carbon taxes are going to be the least popular politically with those who are most likely to be funding major parties, to those who are most likely to have the ear of the political class in most countries of the world. So what needs to be done and what's going to be politically expedient is quite difficult.
The second area that's difficult is the Bank's implication that we should be using direct cash transfers and not broad subsidies. We don't need to go into Britain's energy subsidies to point to government’s not using evidence about broad subsidies. But what the Bank is telling us is that when governments do do broad energy subsidies, by far the greatest beneficiaries of small energy subsidies are the top 20% population. And that's really problematic for us, not just because of who suffered during COVID, but actually if you take the last 10 years since the Global Financial Crisis and you look at the redistribution of assets due to monetary policy as well as fiscal policy, it's not the top 20% that have taken the hit and that is having huge political effects in all of our countries.
So in other words, navigating the global economy, it's possible. We've got a lot of information about what governments can and should be doing to navigate the next two years. It's going to require a lot of political deafness, not just policy deafness. And again, I'll come in a moment to the relationship between those. The third issue, and I'll be very brief on this issue, is on which the go governments need to pull off a miraculous feat is the geopolitical. That's to say, to navigate a world not just of superpower rivalry between China and the United States, which for small countries mean a feat of deciding where, when and with whom to align, when both superpowers will want blind, unconditional allegiance, which argued a bit controversially, is not in the interests of small countries.
It's not just that. It's if you look at SIPRI, the Swedish think tank that tracks military expenditure, military budgets, we are seeing a dramatic ramping up of military budgets and military capacity in the world's largest powers. And if we look at history, we see that there are three risks to this. And one is military procurement, notorious for its waste and corruption. Two is to offset the costs of militarisation. In the 1980s, most industrialised countries increased armed sales not always to stable countries. So they created problems for later in order to offset the price of militarisation. And third, that once you increase the military capability of large powerful states, they start using it in their diplomacy in ways that are not always long sighted. So I think it's with a certain regret that policymakers in the United States look back at the US funding of the Taliban in the 1980s to help in their war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, because it's that Taliban that grew very quickly after that, that's become a problem.
Likewise, Israel's covert support for Hamas as part of their fight against the PLO in the 1980s that's had unfortunate longer term consequences for the stability they were hoping to achieve in that proxy conflict. So it's to say we need to remember these lessons in the government security decision rooms around the world. I'm already starting to hear too much of, "My enemy’s enemy is my friend, let's support them." And I think the Ukraine example is firing up an enthusiasm for supporting other people's militaries in fights that are felt to be important to win in a new superpower, rivalry and conflict. So those are the three miraculous feats that governments are going to have to pull off over the next year. Navigating the creation of a long-term framework that permits everybody else to step up on climate change. Undertaking the deaf economic policies instead of pulling out the playbook that every Treasury has, which I call the austerity playbook. It got pulled out in 2009/10, it's been deployed for the last decade in most industrialised countries.
Instead of looking at the last 20 years, if we look at the last 90 years and we say, "What are the options?" The options are far richer than that. If we look at the evidence of the last 10 years, particularly that which every one of our countries pays for in the IMF, in the World Bank, in the OECD. If we start looking at the evidence closely, we can see that there are far better options if we want to sustain growth than the simple austerity playbook to that. So let me finish then my comments with what does this mean for the public service and for public servants working within it?
It means we need some of the best, smartest, most innovative people in our societies in the public service, because what I've just described are the most difficult problems that every society is facing. They are problems that the smartest, most successful people in the private sector cannot solve. They neither have the solution, nor can they implement the solution. And therefore we need not all, but some of the smartest, most innovative people in the public sector. Once we have them in the public sector, which a lot of countries do, look at this room, we need to think about how we are giving them the responsibility, motivation, and support to actually rise to that challenge, those miraculous feats that we're asking them to pull off and support them so to do. There are lots of headwinds to that. In many countries we're tracking, there's been a gradual erosion of public sector pay.
In Britain in the last 10 years, private sector pay has increased by about 5.9%. Public sector pay over that same period has been eroded by almost the same amount. In other words, an ever increasing widening. But actually, if you ask civil servants, it's not about pay. That's why some really great civil servants are prepared to stay the course even in the face of this erosion of pay. It's much more about aspiration, about responsibility, and about being committed to do a truly great job. That's very difficult if you've had six different ministers in the last two years, I'm talking about Britain, and each one brings a brand-new agenda, which usually involves reorganising the department for the sixth time in two years. I think very, very corrosive, what I see, not just in Britain, in the US and in a number of other governments, which is really very corrosive of keeping your best people in the public service, is turning instead to outsiders each time you have a major strategic challenge, outsourcing it. Because every time you outsource those major challenges. So if you look in Britain, the civil service headcount went down a decade quite dramatically. Chris Hood depicts this in his brilliant book. But the cost of government actually increased by 40% because the consultants that were brought in to cover for the headcount loss were actually much more expensive. But what they were doing was neither increasing the skills within the public service nor increasing the aspiration and innovation capacity of the civil service. In fact, they did the opposite. They demoralised the civil servants who felt that the most interesting and important jobs were always being outsourced. And I would compare that, just on this point, every time I ever mentioned Singapore, everybody goes, "Oh, but Singapore, human right." I'm not talking about holding Singapore abrupt, not that at all. Just saying just on the issue of how they keep the best in the civil service. The tool I see the most effectively and usefully used with their best and brightest, when they come to want to leave, they don't give them a pay rise, they give them a really important strategic responsibility. They say, "We need a new strategy on X and we want you to lead it. And yes, you might feel slightly out of your depth, but you are going to learn." And that, I think is a lesson for all of us to learn. There's a real risk in the austerity playbook scenario. And in Britain, it's not clear how this is going to play out, but that you just do a headcount reduction without thinking. And sadly, we can think of multilateral institutions that have done this in the last decade as well, without thinking about whether you are losing your best and keeping your worst, or whether you've actually planned it in such a way that you keep your best and perhaps encourage those who want to cling to their jobs to leave.
And I have an instinct, and I don't have the data on this, but it feels having watched this, including in the IMF and World Bank in previous decades, that sometimes what all large organisations and governments suffer from is a kind of compliance risk averse mentality, right? "Let’s cling to what we do." "Let's not take responsibility." "I'm going to get covered by taking this through the process." "I'm going to show that I've ticked the process rather than focus on taking some risks, daring to do it differently, achieving the outcome for the citizens who I'm serving." And my observation in the Bank and Fund is that the very people who stayed were the people who cling to compliance and process, and stopped those organisations being nimble and adaptive and innovative. And the people who left were the people who instantly got offers elsewhere, who were more innovative of spirit, more likely to get things done. So it's quite easy to lose your best. And I'm not saying that everyone that stays as the worst. Some truly brilliant public servants stay just because they're totally dedicated to their mission. And I really respect that.
Let me just finish. I was going to talk about misinformation. Let's do that in questions, about the headwinds of misinformation. I just want to finish with two reflections. So one is, as I've said, our experiments at the Blavatnik School in very polarised countries, Brazil, Malaysia, Nigeria are that there are ways to bring together people from opposite ends of the spectrum to work on very specific, practical, pragmatic things. This is not what one of my colleagues called depolarisation, which I think is insulting to people whose views are very deeply held, who do sit at opposite ends at the spectrum. The point is not to change their beliefs. The point is to have them work on a very pragmatic clear plan.
And the OECD produced a report on climate change communication, which actually backed this approach, which says, "Trying to persuade people that they're wrong because of the facts just doesn't work, stop. It doesn't work. They just think those are your facts and I've got my facts. But what does work in building these coalitions, is presenting people with absolutely practical, pragmatic “let's do this, this year” without going to the ideology, without going to the principles. But coming back to very pragmatic, clear frameworks."
And that's why I think the people in this room, the people in this zoom are really important, as public servants, that's exactly the terrain in which you can be helping governments pull off these three miraculous feats. And the last thing I just wanted to say is my big theme today is government's got the hardest jobs that need the most innovative, resilient, extraordinary, collaborative people to solve. And that's why people who are extraordinary, innovative, brilliant creative, can and should go to the public service and the public sector.
The public sector in every country could do better trying to attract such people. In my 10 years being Dean of the Blavatnik School, and Tanya heard me say this earlier today, Ron, you probably heard me say it before as well. Every week, I get at least one of the world's most innovative companies or largest companies, Amazon, Facebook, Meta, Google, TikTok, McKinsey's, BCG, PwC, et cetera. Every single week they email me an incredibly exciting sounding job to circulate to our students and alumni, a really exciting job. And what's striking about what they email me is they've made it so easy for our students to apply to them. It's just like one click, a friendly chat. Here it is. Here's the promotion, here's the thing, bing bong bang, right? It's just so easy and good on them, right? Because that's how they go out and find really great people to work for them.
In my 10 years as Dean of the Blavatnik School, not one single public agency or multilateral institution has ever sent me something to circulate to our students. So I thought about this last summer and I rang a couple of them that do actually hire some of them and said, "Why is that?" And they said, "No, no, no. We advertise our jobs on our website," which is what all of them, well, I didn't talk to all of them. I talked to two or three and that's what they all said. "We advertise our jobs on our website." And you're like yeah, but 30 years ago that might have worked. But in today's world, do you have children in their twenties? That's not how the world works. Do you want to go find those amazing people? You need a very proactive strategy.
So we've started working on this in the Blavatnik School. We've created this public service careers accelerator. We want to start, not just bridging the information gap, but thinking about how we could help public services around the world be more proactive and actually leap from some of their private sector counterparts, learn from the different ways. I've got a couple of tech sector folks on my international advisory board who've got some quite exciting work that they're doing at the front edge about how you use different technologies to find the kinds of people that you now need in the public service.
So I will stop there Caralee, so that we can jump into questions and discussion.
Caralee McLiesh:
Thank you so much, Ngaire. That's been fantastic. What a wide range of challenges that have traverse from the policy questions around climate, tackling distribution to how we think about talent management in the public sector. It's just been wonderful. I've got a number of questions that have been coming in online, so I'm just going to jump straight to a conversation, and we'll alternate between questions in the room and then questions online. If anyone in the room want to start? And while you warm up, I'll start with one of the ones online then.
So this one's kind of due to my heart, a question around intergenerational equity, which is one of the big themes that we've drawn out in our wellbeing report. I personally think it's one of the mega themes of this century, is a growing gap between young and old and how we can orient policy towards long-term perspectives, thinking about the impact of what we do now and in the future. So you talked about the need for inclusiveness in democratic decision-making. So how does the government make sure that we are representing the interests of those who are least likely to be represented? And just a question about how you think of that question in terms of intergenerational equity. So how do we think about the voices of those in the future and build that into our policy making today? And we can bring in some people, bring in some into the tent who are here today, but it's very difficult for us to do that for those who are children today are not even here today.
Ngaire Woods:
I've seen different governments try doing this by sort of inclusion, by having a youth representative in staff. And I think that's too superficial. So I mean I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I'm just saying there's no point having a youth in the room who may or may not know what the distributional consequences of policy are, if you haven't done the work without the distributional consequences of policy. And I think the younger generation, they have every right to be absolutely furious. If you look at what's happened with pensions, if you look at what's happened with pay, particularly in the public sector. If you look at what's happened with housing prices. If you've looked at what's happened to the average provision and quality of health and education. If you look at what's not been done on climate, then I think frankly the younger generation have every reason to be furious at those of us who have stewarded our countries into a place which is so different.
About three years ago I was in New Zealand and I spoke to a group of CEOs and I began by just asking, "Who in the room like me had gone to just a normal Kiwi state school?" And every single CEO in the room put their hand up. And my second question was, "Who in the room kids are in that same kind of school?" And not a single hand went up. And that's one generation in New Zealand. And so if you think about, McKinsey Global Institute did a great study “Poorer that their parents” which just looked at the percentage of people in the wealthy countries, in the OECD countries of the world. The percentage of families who have seen their household revenue stagnate or decline. And it's pretty extraordinary. If you... In the UK, 70%. In the United States, 80%. In Italy, 97%. And this was up to the beginning of a series of elections which brought populists to power in these, and the dying of the establishment political parties in Europe. And I think that's really important because what stake are we asking... What stake are we assuming people have in the political system and the economy we're creating? And it's one that we need to take seriously. An American said to me, "Oh, I followed New Zealand. It's like everything that happens in America seems to arrive in New Zealand about 15 years later."
And I stop and go, "Well, that's worrying." In the United States at the moment, and you guys are probably tracking this, just as I am, but the new right movement is one which is now defining democracy as a dirty word and talking about the republic. And the slippage from the polarisation we saw in 2016 to an increasing number of people talking about the republic and why democracy has failed. And talking about the political opposition as rumours is really... Yeah, we don't want that, providing, I don't think in this country.
Caralee McLiesh:
[inaudible 00:47:52].
Speaker 2:
Thank you, Ngaire. That covered huge number of topics and insightful as ever. One of the things that you mentioned towards the end was about capability. We obviously have much more of a up close view of what New Zealand looks like and therefore lack probably in the comparative view of how capability looks around the world compared to what you see every day, which is different public service leaders coming from around the world. Do you get a sense of what capabilities and particularly of being leadership capabilities or behavioural capabilities within the public service are strong within New Zealand or that we need to be focusing on?
Ngaire Woods:
Yeah, no, I'm going to... I've got this marvelous report just produced by Public Service Commission on the state of public service. But I did get it about an hour ago. I will be reading it though. Come back to you with that question. So now, I cannot comment comparing this country because this country's public service, I do want to know. I think in other public services of the world, the biggest headwind is actually the political headwind and it's the in countries that have benefited from a permanent civil service. It's the politicisation of that civil service. So when I say they've benefited, I'm talking about the work that [inaudible 00:49:20] and others have done that shows that countries with a permanent civil service correlate very strongly with less corruption. And it's corruption of two kinds, the straight financial corruption, but there's also the corruption of patronage.
And when you think about it, so in the Americas, when the government changes in Mexico, I think 30 or 40,000 civil servants change jobs. When the government changes in Denmark, it's a dozen. And if you think about what that means, it means that if you're a civil servant and you know you lose your job if you lose the election, then you are basically an election machine just like the politicians because your job depends on the election. So the whole system becomes an election machine. If you have a permanent civil service, you've got at least some people looking beyond the election.
So I think that's... The politicisation is of the... Not politicisation, but the removal of this kind of permanency in the civil services is really important. And that's... Sorry I'm answering in too long a way, but the point that I somehow skipped over but had wanted to end on was something I see in almost every public service and in every group of politicians around the world is an adversarial vision of good politics against good policy where public servants are saying, "We've got the good policy, we've just got really bad politicians." And the politicians are saying, "We've got public, we win votes." But those public servants won’t institute the things that the public want us to do.
And I think that both sides are becoming too trapped in that. There's no such thing as good policy without good politics and there's no such thing as good politics without good policy. And that's why I began today with climate, where you need the good policy and you need a good politics, which is cross coalition, which is not going to be very pretty, it's going to be messy. But if you don't marry those two, you're not going to end up where you want to end up.
Caralee McLiesh:
Thank you. I'm wondering if I can just build on that with a question that's come through in the chat here. And so the challenges that you've outlined have really significant political dimensions as well as more technical policy challenges. And we think about the capabilities that public service needs to address those challenges. And how do we think about the capabilities for helping to steer politics over the medium term and not overstep the public service role and operate in a political sphere, but nonetheless think about navigating through and supporting ministers to manage their political challenges. And have you seen any examples where public servants have performed that role and in a way that politicians might even be great, not overstepping down but actually supporting the political process?
Ngaire Woods:
Yeah, I think that's the essence of this. In a country where you have a new government about to be elected, the pressure on all public servants is intense. In the worst case, you have a new group of ministers who do what I call stand on the tarmac screaming at the 747, which doesn't seem to move when they scream at it. So they scream louder and then they start taking a hammer to it and smashing it. I mean, that's the worst case. And in the best case, it's new ministers who realise that they're going to have to actually co-pilot or pilot the 747 and climb up to the cockpit and start learning as quickly as they can, how to make the machine government work in order to achieve their own priorities. And that is everywhere in the world. There's no country anew. So because you get an elected democracies, that's just the reality. The essence is how do we load the politicians up into the cockpit and actually work with them to teach them to fly a plane?
What do they need to understand? We at the School of Government we’re thinking a lot about that because we're starting to work with groups of leaders and help them to understand how to fly a private plane. What is it they don't know that they need to know and how are they then going to actually keep learning what they need to learn when they're sitting from the plane? It's some pretty clear stuff that public servants need to help new politicians understand. The first really obvious one, and I get sick of people saying it, but it is about priorities. If you have more than three, you don't have priorities, you have a shopping list. So there's no point having a government with 85 things they want to do. The compelling examples that I use are after the Arab Spring beginning, the utterly corrupt government of Tunisia fell and a brilliant political dissident who had spent 18 years in prison waiting for the government to change took power. And 18 months later, he resigned.
And I had him come to School of Government to tell us why he resigned. It was one of the most powerful things I've heard, and I so regret not videoing it. Because his message was this, he said, "18 years in prison, I knew there was so much we had to change, and we tried to do everything. And after 18 months, I realised we had done nothing and I had to resign." So that's a very powerful example of why you've actually got to work out what's important. The positive example I would give, it's the example of Rwanda after the genocide, whether Rwandan government were under... this is a brand-new government after the genocide, every international organisation, every consultancy in the world pouring in on them, "Here is what you need to do, here's the 20 things you need to do. The macro framework, the stabili... All the things that you've got to do."
And they add the voice to sit and say the most fundamental thing that we need to do after this genocide is to begin to restore people's faith in the state and in government itself. So they asked the question, "What is people's connection to government?" And they decided it was schooling. They knew they couldn't give a place in primary schools to every Rwandan child. And so they focused like a laser on rolling out a system of allocating primary school places so that... And their goal was that every Rwandan would believe that the system was fair. It's pretty cool and it was one priority and they drove that priority like nothing else, knowing that it was their one priority. And from that, felt some quite amazing things in that first period of government. But that priority gave them the strength to turn to the IMF, to turn to the World Bank, to turn to the donors coordination group, to turn to the Europeans and say, "No, we're not actually doing that, because here is what we are positively doing, so please help us to do this because this is the most important thing."
So helping politicians, you'll have stories of your own public servants of the... Use those stories with... Politicians love anecdotes. Use those stories to help them understand that they really need to work at a priority. And it's very difficult. Don't forget, they're coming off the campaign trail. The skills and abilities you develop on the campaign trail are almost mutually exclusive with the skills of being a good minister. And they're coming caught off the campaign trail, having... They're all bad, they're all... And now they've got to actually sit and collaboratively work with their new team of public servants and with each other in the cabinet. And that's an extraordinarily difficult transition. And we have to also have some empathy for what they're trying to do in that transition and then help them understand what they're going to need to do to make the department work.
And just one last thing on that. So one thing I think is quite important is being very explicit with them about what those skills are. I have these eight little field cards, which I get politicians and public service to order, in right order of what they think is most important doing their job. And it's so interesting because a politician straight off the campaign trail always put communication skills, vision, et cetera, in positions one and two. And yet all the data and research about high performing teams and achieving outcomes tells us is that the number one quality is always your ability to coach your team. In other words, it's what I call the transition from being a force in your own right, which you have to be on a campaign trail. It's you, you are the force, to becoming a force multiplier because you can achieve nothing in government if you work on your own. Neither as a public servant nor as a politician.
And learning to make that transition from being a force in your own right, which is what got you to the top, and being a force multiplier and actually mobilising a whole group of people is really hard for people. And by the way, for the senior leaders among us, it's really hard to preserve. The longer you're in a leadership role, the more you're going to revert to being the force instead of being the force multiplier. Because too often, you'll walk into a room and you will know that you're the person that knows most in the room, that you're the person that's done it before in the room, that frankly, if you talk and everybody else listens, things will probably go quite well. And of course, it gets more and more delusional the longer you adopt that management style. So it's actually quite important.
Speaker 3:
I mean, is there a issue [inaudible 01:00:30] politics [inaudible 01:00:30] so that obviously [inaudible 01:00:35] politicians I think in terms of [inaudible 01:00:39].
Ngaire Woods:
Yeah. So a couple of observations I would make and thanks, it's an excellent reflection. And one is that in some experiments that people in Blavatnik School are doing in other countries, there's really quite good evidence that giving people, giving communities, through a trusted voice, so using local community organisations, to give communities clear, simple information that shows what the politicians they've elected promised and what they've actually done helps them make election decisions. So that's important information, which is simply about performance of politicians. Can or should the media play that role? So the media is, in almost all countries, the biggest loser from misinformation. So misinformation and fake news and such like, is quite interesting in its impacts because people just think it loses trust everywhere. It doesn't actually, but it does seem to make all people across the political spectrum lose trust in mainstream media.
The research that Harvard's just published about misinformation in the US is kind of interesting because it tells you that misinformation makes the kind of centre and the left distrust government more, distrust government. But actually, and it's probably because in the US, a lot of the misinformation is coming from kind of right-wing groups, but it makes voters who self-identify as being on the kind of centre-right and further to the right, it makes them actually trust their own government officials more. So it actually increases their trust in government, providing of course that their government is made up of those that they've elected, and it makes them trust the judges that represent their view more. So it has these rather different effects that we have to really, really think about, because what we're seeing is that translate in some countries to different election turnout figures, where the centre and left have become less trustful and more sceptical about government and therefore don't vote. And the right in those countries where that's the kind of misinformation being fed, become more trusting and less sceptical of government and come out and vote more.
When we look globally, we're seeing a shift in patterns of who stays home and who actually goes out to the polls, which I think is sort of interesting. But the mainstream media is the big loser. And if you look at either Pew and Edelman Barometer surveys, across the world, the percentage of people that are now relying on social media for their news is now at around 80%. So it's horizontal news, it's not going to an established news media. Now, some news medias are of course on social media and publishing in that way, but it's the big old mixture out there.
Caralee McLiesh:
Question that's related online since I get from this conversation is that proposition that distrust of government is based on misunderstanding and is that right? And if not, what’s the proper limit of trust in government? What's the proper role of public servants in building trust?
Ngaire Woods:
Yeah. I'm always a bit sceptical of arguments that say it's the people's fault but it's because the people are stupid or the people are misinformed or the people don't understand. And I think we should always step right back from that argument and say, "Hold on, what's actually being said here?" Because... And which is why I think some of the misinformation arguments are being overplayed. If we look at some of the deeper forces that have got us to where we are, for me, it begins with the end of the Cold War. And why do I say that? Because... Sorry, you’d say any professor always wants to look at history, but just indulge me for two seconds.
So if we go back to a period when the Cold War was born in the '40s, the late '40s, '45 to ‘47, you saw Europeans with great enthusiasm voting for communist parties in government, partly because of the link between the communist parties and the resistance against Hitler. But you saw these greatly divided populations and you saw a huge popular vote for communist parties. And that was immediately recognised as a huge threat to the West. So the Marshall Plan was delivered to Europe on condition that the communist parties were kicked out of coalition governments, so that you could cement a system which did not have a communist party element to it, because you didn't want to be losing the fight internally to the Soviet Union. And that meant that the Cold War was always a competition, not just military and geostrategic, but for the hearts and minds of your own people.
And I think that kept Western governments honest in a way because they had to deliver to all their people, knowing that their people have an alternative way to vote. So when that breaks down in the 1990s and suddenly there isn't an alternative, you could ask yourselves, what is it that keeps the Western democratic governments honest in delivering to all of their people? Is it a coincidence that that's where we see them starting to decline and starting to really shift in the distributional consequences of their policies? And if you look at the famous kind of Lakner-Milanovic Elephant Curve, which I'm sure Treasury officials look at, but it tells us about this dramatic redistribution since that moment, since the end of the '80s and the Cold War. And we've got to ask, so I'm a great believer that competition keeps human beings at the top of their game.
And I think that competition is important. And the reason why I'm thinking more and more about this is because a British general said to me three years ago that in his view, the biggest threat to Britain didn't lie from outside the country, it lay from inside the country. It lay from the kind of anti-establishment movement building within the country because of a deep disaffection within the country. A sense that is echoed across polling around the world that very large percentages of populations in Western democracies feel that the elite exists to feather their own nests. And that's not misinformation. If you look at the Milanovic Elephant Curve, they are not misinformed. They are right that the distributional consequences of policies over the last 30 years in most, but not all Western democracies, have been very adverse for a large percentage of the population.
Now, some people say to me, "Yeah, but Ngaire, that's just globalisation. That is just globalisation." So you take the McKinsey study I mentioned about “poorer than the parents”, and you say, "Yeah." I mean, look, globalisation, all countries have seen 70 or 80% of households see their household revenue stagnate or decline. Not true. For example, in the period that McKinseys look at, in Sweden, it was only 30%. So therefore, we can't say this is just about globalisation, this is actually about government policies. And I think that's a wake up call for public services. I think that there has been a kind of 30 year complacency since the end of the Cold War about to whom we're delivering and what the political consequences of that delivery looked like. And that's what we have to start reshaping now. It's an exciting, and it's a big challenge. And what we can't do is a politics and a public service of incrementalism saying, "My job is just to keep things turning over and to ensure that we reach 2% GDP growth this year." That kind of incrementalism is just going to lead to more and more radical politics. These are transformative times.
Caralee McLiesh:
And I think there's a real question there about what does that mean for the types of policy frameworks we have in the public service. So, moving beyond just understanding the static efficiency benefits of policies like COVID and making sure that we're looking to some of the longer term consequences like packing distributional consequences which can flow through, as you say, to political institutions and affect future straight economic outcomes. That's fascinating.
Speaker 4:
You were reflecting on the Cold War changes that happened since that ended. We seem to be moving into world where it is specific demobilisation effect or [inaudible 01:10:32] of blocks. Would you be willing to stipulate about what that might mean in the future for us?
Ngaire Woods:
I think the people have absolute clarity about a kind of trajectory line of confrontation between the United States and China [inaudible] certain about this. I think there's a couple of things that we have all cemented our mindset on, and one is a vision of a monolithic China controlled by a president who has now got complete control because he's taken off the term limit. He's appointed a public bureau of seven, all like-minded folks. He's created a court and we forget that court politics seldom deliver well, poor politics. Once people believe that you are a leader for life and that you are only going to promote people like-minded to you, nobody will tell you what you need to hear, but what you don't want to hear. And we can see that with Putin, actually. So it's very dangerous. It's taking a system which I would argue has worked extremely well to promote Chinese growth, which is the central party committee, public bureau and standing committee because it's a system of accountability.
Just as the United States has court, congress, president. China has benefited from a public bureau of seven, all of whom know that they have a chance every term of becoming leader. They would watch each other, competing with each other, holding each other to account. And we've just seen that system break and that's got consequences. That's number one. Number two is COVID as you know, has had a devastating effect on the Chinese economy. And let's not forget that before COVID began China Watchers were telling us that if Chinese growth went below 8%, there would be an internal revolution in China. I've lost the second thought, that's where we were before COVID began. Now we've seen COVID slow growth to, real growth is probably around 3%. We look beyond the figures and we look at some of the logistics figures. 3% is a government that's just not delivering to a massive population, which has become far more unequal and regionally unequal.
And in which there is a huge pent-up fury about the lockdowns and the length of lockdowns and now a fury about the ravages of COVID infections and the spread of COVID because of the kind of rather hasty exit from the COVID strategy. So we are used to thinking of China is a monolithic power, huge power, and huge resources. So the slowdown means that the government doesn't have the same revenue at its disposal. We can see it when we look at the way in which China has radically redraw its Belt and Road initiative, the way it’s no longer deploying its state funding in its international relations but working through its commercial banks with much harder loan terms than a much more transactional approach. We can see the monolithic powerful growing China was a China that before COVID was moving to the new self-reliant economy. Very hard to keep growing a self-reliant economy that was driven by three things, urbanisation, the property sector and infrastructure, when actually those are the three things that you're no longer doing.
This hasty attempt to recover the destruction of the property market is vital. But the infrastructure, the plan is to slow that right down as with the urbanisation. So, I'm not saying China's going to crash at all, but what I can see is a China that's going to need to find a much more diversified path to growth than the one that had pre- COVID when everyone was talking about decoupling. And that this China is a China that can't really, it seems to me, afford quite so dramatically to lose foreign investment. Now that poses a really interesting quandary, because a Chinese government that wants to lure back foreign investment, and don't forget foreign investment has departed not just because of the aggressive nationalism towards the rest of the world, but because of the Chinese government's own policies towards its own tech sector which have given foreign investors real fright.
Oh my goodness. That's how they treat their own. How are they going to treat us? So re-attracting the foreign investors back is going to require a toning down of the kind of xenophobic nationalism in the hope that bringing back investors will restore some growth and that growth will buy the compliance of Chinese people. But that's a huge bet because if that doesn't work, you need your xenophobic nationalism to draw people together. And that's not just in China, that's in most countries. We saw that in the United States. If you're not delivering economic benefits to your people, it's a sort of wag the dog scenario.
It's Putin's greatest strength is his ability to have Russian people believe that the West hates and wants to destroy Russia. Sadly, the West's lack of discipline in the response to Ukraine has handed Putin even more power in that. In other words, the disciplined response to Ukraine, if you want an international coalition is to say, we need to uphold sovereignty of Ukraine. The slippage of Western democracies into ‘we need to weaken Russia’ immediately plays to Putin's narrative at home, which is ‘the West hates all of you and I'm your saviour’ from that. And I find it dismaying to watch in Europe, people vociferously banning Tchaikovsky, banning. There was a concert of Shostakovich’s famous symphony that was written in critique of Stalin, huge demonstration, we shouldn't play Russian composers. I mean Russia's not going to disappear off the face of the Earth.
And we're playing into Putin's hands on that. So your question was about decoupling, and my answer is decoupling is not as simple as those would portray it. I think on both sides there's a recognition, it's the classic thing, we've got to compete, confront, and cooperate. There are some issues on which we must cooperate - climate, pandemics, the debt crisis in developing countries, fragile states, conflict. There are some issues on which we will compete - technology, trade markets, and there are some issues on which we will have to confront. But to conflate all three and to say that you cannot have any discussion with any Chinese citizen or government official without first elaborating everything you hate about China is profoundly unhelpful to understanding how we can actually build bridges to cooperate, just as it is in getting the left and right of Brazil together or the left and right in New Zealand together.
Human beings don't cooperate best if they start by yelling about what they hate about each other. They work best together when they start with what they can pragmatically and must and need to do together and then work from there. This is a very unpopular thing to say in Europe at the moment. [inaudible 01:19:03] .
Caralee McLiesh:
That's a terrific leading to the question, we've got a couple of questions that are all grouped together online. So thinking about some of the practical aspects of bringing polarised views together or just different groups together to work through some of the [inaudible 01:19:22] needs that we need to achieve. So on polarisation, how do we generate those pragmatic actions to propose solutions in the absence of ideology, have you seen examples? Also in the example co-design between politicians and public servant and different perspectives? How do you think about policy processes that we need to put in place?
Ngaire Woods:
I'll do the first one first, polarisation. So there's a lot of very good social psychology about the fact that people are much more fearful of people or groups of people that they have no contact with. That you can hate and fear a group of people that you've never really counted. So if you look at a pattern in Europe or communities, most opposed to immigration, you would expect it to be the communities that have most immigrants because they feel burned or et cetera. But actually it's the communities that have no immigrants. With some exceptions now with the recent flows of immigrants putting stress on certain communities. But that face-to-face, just an anecdotal example. Tony Blair was in the School a couple of weeks ago and he was talking about his election campaign, his last election campaign where there was a lot of very powerful sentiment against him and his government because of the war in Iraq.
And his two teenage sons were out campaigning with him. And one of them, the youngest son went to one household and knocked on the door and the man opened the door and “I’ve supported Labour all my life, and Tony Blair just absolutely screwed this” and launched into a tirade full swear words and just saying how disgusting the man was. And the young son just goes up, okay, that's all. And then he goes up to his older brother and his older brother says, this is really tough, we're getting real heat. So he says to his older brother, as only a youngest sibling would, "oh, go to that house there, he loves Dad, you’ll have a great conversation." So older son goes to the house, knocks on the door, asks for support for Labour. Apoplectic man repeats, even more colourfully, everything he thinks about Tony Blair. And then the son looks at him, he goes, you're talking about my Dad. And the man just looks at me, he goes, ‘Son, I'm so sorry. Look, come in, have a cup of tea with me.’
And that story captures something that all of us know about, that you can hate a group in the mass and then have a human being in front of you that you respond to as a human being. Now the psychological evidence on this is interesting. It doesn't work to present people with one example of the community that they fear and distrust. If your president has said all Mexicans are rapists and you bring a very nice Mexican to a group that believe what the president said, it's unlikely to change their view. Meeting one person does not change their view. What you need is systematic, regular exposure to those other groups. And that takes me for the absolutely vital role of public spaces where people interact as citizens, not as the boss and the waitress, not as the boss and the cleaner.
But what's magic about public spaces is that they are owned by all citizens. So I think of my favourite public spaces would be the Corniche in Beirut where even only a couple of years after the Civil War where those communities have hated and been killing each other, you could see the kind of Christian billionaire Lebanese jogging because it's the only place that's fresh air, and the large Shia families with their stoves cooking all in the same public space. Now if you are jogging every night past these communities, watching them eat and laugh, and it's very hard to see them as this massive threat to your wellbeing. In Colombia, in Medellín, which was once the homicide capital of the world, most dangerous city in the world, a succession of a couple of men undertook these visionary policies to create public spaces, public parks, public cable cars, free public transportation that people would actually use to get the community mixing and using public spaces together.
So I think one of the things that got savaged in the eighties and then in the last decade with public parts was public spaces. The places that people can come together and mix as equal citizens. I think we've got to get back to that if we look evidence. Last thing on that Singapore example. People hate my Singapore examples, but it does make me smile because there are certain parts of the Singaporean government that take evidence very, very seriously. And public housing. There are public housing developers in Singapore where they allocate flats in the same variations of different ethnicities in the population across each floor, so that they have taken the evidence on social mixing and applied it to their public housing.
So instead of creating ghettos of different communities that created these mixed communities and it's quite interesting. It's quite a scientific application of the evidence. Sorry, the politicians and public servants. What was the question?
Caralee McLiesh:
It was about co-design between politicians and public servants.
Ngaire Woods:
What we do in the School on this is we bring politicians and public servants together. It works particularly well where there's an adverse relationship to do it across different countries. So they have ministers from one country, public servants from another. Because then they start to see. It’s easier to see the problems in other people's parenting than in your own.
And we give them a practical problem to solve together. And so they can start seeing what are actually the different talents and abilities that each other has to see because those complimentary, it goes back to good politics and good policy having to be done together. And public servants don't always recognise that the political antennae of politicians is really important to the work for any good policy and finding ways to tap into it and use it. You need sales people for policies, you need communicators in chief. These are the things that politicians tend to do well.
Caralee McLiesh:
It’s a great analogy for creating a public space. It's creating space for different groups of people come together and understand each other. Sadly, it takes us to the end of our time. I think we could keep going and going. It's just been a fascinating conversation, fascinating presentation.
Ngaire, thank you so much. So many rich insights from the big sweeping strategic questions about those miraculous feats and retreat from globalisation, polarisation, creating political, creating public spaces to some of the very practical steps. I'm going to send you job endorsements. And then I think also a number of reflections for us as individuals, how we can all be a force multiplier and mobilise change. So thank you for the inspiration. Thank you for sharing so many rich insights and [inaudible 01:27:45].
Ngaire Woods:
Thank you for inviting me. It's wonderful to be home. And it's wonderful to be home in Wellington. It’s this wonderful to see the government. And just that the last thing I would say is whenever you hear your private sector friends or your friends in other sectors complaining about government and putting down those who work for government. I think at this moment, it's the time to say, and which is why I began with these three miraculous feats that the world requires governments to pull off, is to remind them of that. To say you know what, everybody in this country and actually everybody in the world is relying on governments to do these three things that no one else can do. So if you're courageous enough to join, join, and if you're not courageous enough to join, don't sit on the sidelines and complain. So that's what I would say, and I'm grateful for the public service and what they do. I think it's fantastic.
Caralee McLiesh:
Thank you so much. Thank you everybody for joining.
[speaking in te reo Māori] Piki te kaha. Piki te Ora. Piki te Wairua. Mauri ora ē
Wellbeing Report seminar series
The first wellbeing report, Te Tai Waiora: Wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand 2022, was released in November 2022.
This online seminar is part of a Wellbeing Report programme of Guest lectures running in 2022 and 2023.