HeyJaredDeborah Te Kawa
He Pōneketanga: An insider-outsider view of how public administration, public policy, and delivery really work in Aotearoa: we go beneath the surface, beyond the slogans, with a little hope, the peer reviewed literature and some positive stories.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 8
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- Sep 23, 2026
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- Jul 3, 2026
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Te Rā Whakamana (opens the original)
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Aotearoa has been trying to manage for outcomes since at least the late 1980s, and each attempt has left the system much as it found it. This post puts forward accountability, or rather the ambiguity surrounding it, as one of the reasons: the public service operating model¹ made officials answerable upward, to ministers, for inputs and outputs, and ministers nominally answerable for outcomes, which left nobody answerable to the public for the results. The post below begins with who answers for w
Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays: From Articles to Principles and Back Again (opens the original)
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Three weeks ago I argued that Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Te Tiriti) can be understood as a diplomatic relationship. That post read the articles of Te Tiriti as a schedule of undertakings, article by article, and ended with an invitation to use Te Tiriti the way an official uses a bilateral or multilateral agreement between autonomous entities. Today’s post is the practical side of that invitation. It follows what our policy advisory systems have done with Te Tiriti over the past four d
Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays: A diplomatic relationship (opens the original)
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This is the first of four longer posts. It begins with a simple proposition: that Te Tiriti o Waitangi is best understood as a diplomatic relationship between enduring authorities rather than as a legal artefact, policy problem, or constitutional relic. The argument matters because if that reading is correct, it changes how we think about authority, consent, disagreement, and the obligations recorded in the text itself. This post sets out the diplomatic reading. The three that follow trace what
Te Rā Whakamana (opens the original)
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I have been quiet for a while. I am finding it difficult to write this winter. Part of it is the post-doctoral lull: a strange flatness that settles in after years of sustained thinking and writing. But most of it is the state of our information environment, which is volatile, saturated with misinformation, and so thoroughly politicised for petty and passing advantage that sometimes it feels like I am just adding to the noise. So I am being more careful. I am still pottering away on the various
Loose Threads: The Capability That Walks Out the Door (opens the original)
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Loose Threads is my space for quiet observation, where I return to threads in the public conversation that have been left unfinished, dropped, or miswoven. This one is about the people who do the work, and the teams they do it in.In 2025, Te Kawa Mataaho asked public servants how they were doing. The Public Service Census is a large and careful instrument, and it is easy to read it as a scorecard: a set of percentages to be compared with the last time. I read it another way: as something more hu
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