New Zealand

Outgoing Sydney Metro chief executive Dr Jon Lamonte has been named head of Auckland’s water supplier, Watercare.

The important role ministerial advisers play in government has evolved largely without design or structure.

The paper aims to inform future policy development in the transport sector by providing governments and industry participants with a comprehensive review of the range of public transport service contract models currently in use in Australia and NZ.

It is hard to know how common instances of bullying and sexual harassment by other staffers and their bosses in ministers’ offices and electorate offices is, as the world they inhabit is secretive.

Ronald Reagan famously remarked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’

The NZ government has set standards for what good policymaking looks like, with the Policy Project, a set of online frameworks and toolkits.

As soon as the subject appears on the horizon, a tangled web of defensive arguments and anecdotes will accumulate to obscure it.

Too many government organisations take their subject matter experts and task them with writing policies, standards, and procedures without ever providing them training on how to actually do it.

Developing objective measures of what works and what does not, and what caused a policy to fail or succeed, is nigh on impossible. What we can gather, nonetheless, is that addressing three key issues can certainly improve the chances of producing a successful policy.

Each of us can choose whether to be the ‘innocent’ bystander to unfairness in the public sector, or the protagonist willing to speak up about it. Which will you choose to be?

Today, what is now known as ‘Te Whare Waiutuutu Kate Sheppard House’ will be opened by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

New Zealand’s COVID Tracer upgrade is unlikely to help, as both countries are still using different contact tracing systems that can’t communicate.