Roger Partridge: NZ Initiative report co-author on the call to cull and consolidate ministerial portfolios

There’s a call to cull some of New Zealand’s ministers.  

A new report from the New Zealand Initiative found New Zealand has 81 ministerial portfolios, while comparable countries have a third of that.  

The think-tank says we should be more like countries with comparable populations, like Norway which has 17 portfolios, and Singapore with 16. 

Co-author Roger Partridge told Mike Hosking we keep slicing off pieces of portfolios and giving them new names, resulting in important policy areas being split across multiple ministers.  

Housing for example, reports up to 12 ministers, he says, and when you splinter key portfolios you get fragmented decision-making, a lack of accountability, and higher costs.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Another crack at the size of government New Zealand initiative

(00:02):
calling for an overhaul of our systems. We've got They
argue one of the most complex cabinets in the developed world,
three times as many portfolios as similar countries. We need
a cabinet with about fifteen to twenty policy areas and
departments being cut from forty three to twenty. Roger Partridge
is the co author of the Reporters Back with It's
Roger Morning, Good morning, Mike. We've been here before, haven't we.
I mean, there's too much self interest in New Zealand

(00:22):
politics to ever make this happen. Oras.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
I don't think it's so much. I didn't think it's
so much self interest. It's just a developed in a
haphazard way, and it's time to step back and have
a look at it. We've got eighty one ministerial portfolios
split across twenty eight ministers and forty three government departments.
Other countries have about twenty of each, and so when

(00:47):
you look at the organizational structure of executive government, it
looks more like a maze than an org chart, or
as we call it, spaghetti.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yes it does. Brian Roche is sort of doing some
of the worky, you're hopeful in that.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
I am hopeful and it's good as we've been working
on this over the last two years. We produced a
report in twenty twenty four Cabinet Congestion the Growth of
a Ministerial Maze, and then we started consulting on this
report earlier in the year and hand in hand with that,
Brian and Minister of Public Services Judith Collins have been
looking at how they could consolidate some of our fragmented

(01:22):
government departments. But it's more than that, it's ministerial positions.
What we've done is we've just kept slicing pieces off
portfolios and then giving them a new name. As a resultant,
important policy areas like housing split across multiple ministers. Housing

(01:42):
reports to up to twelve ministers. If you think about
the most important ones, the Minister for Housing, the Minister
for Building and Construction, the Minister for Local Government, the
Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Environment, and when you slice key
portfolio areas and splinter them across multiple ministers, you then

(02:03):
get fragmented decision making, a lack of accountability and higher costs.
One of the former Prime ministers we consulted with said,
if a proposal needs a sign off from six different ministers,
that's six opportunities for other ministers or their officials to
kill it. And we've got to do something about that.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Well, let's hope we do. Roger. Appreciate your work, Roger
Partridge with the New Zealand Initiative, of course.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
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