The DIA’s treatment of the National Library’s music collection illustrates Parliament’s increasing weakness at reflecting the public’s concerns.
Under New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements the Government’s ability to function depends upon Parliament’s willingness to fund it. I shan’t be surprised if after our election the new government’s mandate will depend on one or more minor parties’ willingness to provide it with ‘confidence and supply’, supply meaning voting the government sufficient funds to run its policies.
Over the years the practice has been for Parliament to specify the broad categories where the funds should be spent. However, that power has been steadily eroded. Prior to the 1988 Public Finance Act Parliament funded the ‘inputs’ of each department. For instance, the Opposition would indicate its dissatisfaction with how an agency was functioning by voting to cut a nominal sum (£5 as I recall) from the specified remuneration of the agency’s chief executive.
Since 1988 Parliament has voted to fund the ‘outputs’ of each department’s program leaving its chief executive to determine how to spend it. So a CEO might decide to cut back on salaries by spending more on computers. To add to the flexibility, the department was allowed to switch up to 5 percent of total funding among its programs. But as a general principle it was Parliament which determined the size of each program.
Over the years, parliamentary control was eroded. Don Gilling, a retired professor of accountancy, showed that the Department of Internal Affairs was able to transfer more out of the Archives NZ vote by increasing the charge for departmental overheads, thereby cross-subsidising other departmental activities.
In 2022 Parliament passed the Public Service Act, which further weakened Parliament’s control by giving Chief Executives even more power to switch around the departmental vote. I do not recall any protest about this weakening of parliamentary control by even a solitary MP.
This may not matter so much for an agency like Treasury which has a single coherent purpose. Were I a MP, I would be comfortable with voting a single amount to the Secretary of the Treasury to control. However, we seem to be moving to a system of mega-agencies with multipurpose responsibilities, about each of which MPs – or the citizenry – may want to have a say.
This is well illustrated by the diversity of activities in the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA). One’s eyes glaze over its 30-item list. (Skip the next paragraph if you are so inclined.)
DIA activities cover: anti-money laundering, Archives New Zealand, citizenship, births, deaths and marriages, charities services, citizenship, community advice and grants, complaints and prosecution, the congratulatory message service, consultations across government, daylight saving, digital identity services, digital identity trust framework, digital safety, document authentication, dog control regulation, dog safety information, flag hire service, gambling, govt.nz, identity theft prevention, Lake Taupo harbourmaster, National Library, New Zealand Gazette, offshore island administration, the open data directory, passports, the rates rebate scheme, the RealMe service, translation services, use of royal arms, names, and images.
Whew! I doubt you can see any coherence in the list. Rather, the DIA is a residual place for locating services for programs which the government cannot think where to house. It is a ministry of miscellaneous affairs.
So when the government decided to revoke the independence of Archives New Zealand and the National Library it dumped them into the DIA, despite the two being very different from anything else with which the department was then concerned. That explains why the DIA has managed the two institutions so badly – they require quite different management cultures.
When the government cuts the funding to the DIA, and Parliament acquiesces, it is the Secretary of Internal Affairs (with the Senior Leadership Team) who decides how much each activity should be reduced; the proportion to cut dog safety, the proportion to cut the National Library ...
The Secretary is not charged with making the cuts according to the judgement of Parliament or the public at large. The cuts will reflect the pressures on the department; inevitably, they will be affected by its preoccupations and perceptions.
For instance, the Official Information Act (OIA) is a key component of the New Zealand constitution, assisting citizens to hold the government to account. Its processes are trying for officials, as indicated by the number of occasions they bend or break the law to subvert them. (The Office of the Ombudsman receives over 2,200 complaints annually involving the OIA, while the High Court typically receives up to 270 new judicial reviews a year challenging the legality, fairness, or reasonableness of government decisions.)
Underpinning the OIA is the Public Records Act 2005, administered by the Chief Archivist. Without high-quality archives the OIA would be ineffective. That would suggest the Chief Archivist is a key officer in the Government. In practice they are a third-level appointment in the DIA; fourth level if the Public Service Commissioner is included in the hierarchy.
The DIA goes a step further to downgrade this key constitutional institution by treating it as a cultural agency. Obviously, culture is important – you may want to know why your great-aunt was bullied by the government back in the nineteenth century, but ultimately your legal right to know is based on a constitution of which the OIA and Archives New Zealand are an integral part.
We need not be surprised, then, that the financial cuts imposed upon the DIA seem to have been disproportionally greater on Archives New Zealand and on the National Library.
The National Library is proposing to cut its national music hire service which is used by choirs, orchestras, bands and schools. It holds the country’s largest collection of music performance material, all available to hire; or it will be until November when the service ceases. It is also proposed to disestablish the service’s specialist music librarian.
Its substantial collection (donated in 1987 by Radio New Zealand) spans more than 5000 orchestral sets, 3000 choral sets, and a number of band sets, while outside organisations have made their own collections available through the Library’s catalogue. Musicians, schools, community ensembles and organisations throughout New Zealand rely on the service to access repertoires that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to perform.
The music community, led by the NZ Choral Federation, which represents about 20,000 choristers, is in uproar, fearful of the impact on their activities. In the latest year surveyed (2023), 68% of those over 18 said they listened to New Zealand music, 23% said that they had attended a live performance of New Zealand music in the previous year; 15% had played an instrument, sung or otherwise been involved in musical creation. That is an awful lot of voters.
Such has been the inevitable uproar, the National Librarian has changed tack. She confirmed the music service as currently delivered is to cease and then promised that she ‘would work with kaimahi [staff] to consider what transition arrangements may be needed to minimise customer impact.’ That suggests that the termination decision was made with only the vaguest idea of what would come after.
The considerable community interaction is underpinned by a complex ‘ecology’ of musical institutions. The weakening of the National Library’s musical services is a threat to that ecology.
Who made the decision? The National Librarian explained that faced with financial pressures something had to give. The DIA Secretary would say they were not thinking about music when they made the cuts that government funding imposed, they just had to give priority to dog safety or whatever. The government would say they were not either; they set the funding framework and let the agencies to decided where the cuts fall. Nor can we leave out an ineffective Parliament which has repeatedly weakened its constitutional powers to set and monitor public funding – like safe lap dogs.