Accountability in the Public Sector

VIEWS FROM OUTSIDE THE APIARY: IAN FLETCHER

Concerned by recent controversial, and catastrophic, failures of the public service, former top bureaucrat Ian Fletcher analyses the occurrences, sets out the lessons that need to be learned, and identifies what could be done if we want to achieve greater accountability from our leaders.

By Ian Fletcher

Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park was struck by a landslide on January 22, 2026, killing six people. An independent report has described the event as “entirely preventable” throwing the culpability of Council staff into public discussion.

There have been important (I’d say underestimated) controversies in recent weeks about the conduct and the professional fate of the CEOs at the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and at Tauranga City Council. The two controversies are different, but there’s a common theme, and it worries me.

Let’s Recap the Facts First

Tauranga City Council chief executive Marty Grenfell is under pressure after the review into January’s fatal Mount Maunganui campground landslide. It found the council had long known of the hazard; 2023 and 2025 advice to create an evacuation trigger plan was not acted on. The bottom line was that the deaths would likely have been avoided had the area been evacuated. The review does not blame a single person, but Grenfell – CEO for eight years – has become the focus. He says he is accountable for ‘organisational performance’ and is best placed to fix it. So far, he has the Mayor’s support.

MBIE chief executive Nic Blakeley faces a personal integrity controversy. The failed Immigration NZ $33m Biometric Capability Update ran for seven years and delivered nothing. It was finally stopped. Blakeley only became CEO in January, after the project had been cancelled. But the parliamentary Privileges Committee (effectively Parliament’s version of a court) found that he and former Immigration NZ head Alison McDonald deliberately misled MPs in March by not disclosing the cancellation. They found contempt of Parliament – a serious finding.

Nic Blakeley has survived as MBIE CEO despite $33m in sunk costs to a never-eventuating project, hidden from the government. Backed by his bosses, a wider integrity report is pending.

Blakeley apologised and offered to resign; Public Service Commissioner Sir Brian Roche has declined the resignation, citing Blakeley’s short tenure and tasking him with reform. Immigration Minister Erica Stanford supports him. A wider integrity inquiry remains pending.

Blakely’s apparent problem was not telling the truth, in circumstances where he seems to have known the truth. However, careful reading of the Privileges Committee report suggests a more nuanced situation, where he (ill-advisedly) tried to protect what were said to be commercially confidential elements. Grenfell’s problem was not seeing that the organisation he ran over a number of years was ignoring repeated, serious warnings. These are different problems.

What Do They Teach Us?

Firstly, it raises the question whether senior officials should get second chances when things go wrong? The case against a second chance is a simple: you get the big bucks; you carry the can when things go wrong.

The case for a second chance is that the “off with his head!” solution is emotionally satisfying, but means the organisation learns nothing except how to scapegoat the next guy. This seems to be the sort of reasoning behind the continued support for both CEOs in these cases.

Yet, the truth is that these things keep happening.

This leads to the second question: How should public organisations actually learn from their mistakes? And, how do we (the tax-paying, voting public) actually know that lessons have been learned and implemented? I know how complicated these organisations can be, how defensive the public service is, and frankly how reluctant public servants are to admit mistakes.

This is not an abstract point: on beekeeping business, I have asked MPI officials in recent years why they are so defensive, so reluctant to make decisions or to even think new thoughts. They readily admit the diagnosis; then they blame Ministers (“they won’t support us”), and point (privately) to a public service leadership culture that has excessive focus on risk, and too little on innovation, responsiveness and simple intelligence. They have a point.

Three Lessons

So, there seems to me to be three real lessons to draw from these two CEO-related incidents. The first is not that CEOs should automatically be chucked out when things go badly wrong. But second chances should not be automatic.

Marty Grenfell, CEO of Tauranga City Council. How culpable should chief executives be when failures, such as those leading to the January 22 landslide in Mount Maunganui, be?

The second lesson is that ‘learning the lessons’ needs to be a tough process. The CEO or senior official involved has to explain themselves and face the burden of proof – the process needs to assume they messed up and they need to show either that they didn’t, or that there are genuine extenuating circumstances. This all needs to be used to expose whatever needs to be fixed. This is what the effective militaries do when things go wrong. We can learn from that.

I see the failure to foresee the Tauranga landslide as obviously and tragically serious given the avoidable loss of life. The MBIE incident suggests a want of candour somewhere in the system that corrodes trust, which in turn strikes at the heart of the legitimacy of government. So, these are both big, serious issues. Both CEOs should indeed face searching, uncomfortable inquiries.

The final point is that rank confers power, as well as handsome salaries. CEO-level and other very senior officers in the public service and local government should not be able to hide behind employment processes if there are questions to be answered. Quite simply, they should have less contractual protection than that afforded to less powerful people.

This might be seen as politicising the public service (as ministers would be more easily able to remove people they found politically uncongenial). But I think that’s a price worth paying for a better match of power and accountability. It’s what Australian jurisdictions do, and it works well enough and is widely accepted. The price we all pay for a politically neutral civil service should not be that it is inept, incompetent or deceitful.

All this raises – again – the question of why the New Zealand public service (and local government) is so pedestrian in its performance, and so unimaginative and process driven, at a time when it’s not hard to see that we need a combination of energy, imagination and a culture of careful innovation if we are to start to tackle the future.

I can hear the excuses being marshalled – that it’s for Ministers to come up with ideas, that risks must be managed (as they so sadly weren’t in Tauranga), that there’s a Code of Conduct for officials, and so on. Excuses are easy. Let’s have the moral and political courage to say that we can do better. And do it.

Ian Fletcher is a former head of New Zealand’s security agency, the GCSB, chief executive of the UK Patents Office, free trade negotiator with the European Commission and biosecurity CE for the Queensland government. These days he is a commercial flower grower in the Wairarapa and consultant to the apiculture industry with Honey and Bees New Zealand.