Imagine hiring someone to run your business. Except you did not hire them. Someone else did. You cannot fire them if they ignore your instructions. You work in a different building. And the person who hired them decides whether they keep the job after five years. 

That, roughly, is how New Zealand governs itself. 

Ministers answer to Parliament for what their departments do. But they do not choose the chief executives who run those departments. The Public Service Commissioner does. 

If the relationship does not work out, the minister must wait out a chief executive’s five-year term. 

In 1988, someone had the bright idea of putting chief executives on fixed-term contracts. This was supposed to make them more responsive to their ministers. 

Instead, it made them more responsive to the Commissioner, who controlled reappointment. A reform designed to strengthen accountability to elected politicians strengthened accountability to the bureaucracy instead. 

Nobody planned this. It accumulated, one sensible-sounding reform at a time, over four decades. 

Some departments answer to as many as twenty ministers. Ministers sit in the Beehive. Their departments sit elsewhere. The result is government by correspondence, filtered through several layers of people the minister did not appoint. 

Virtually every other developed democracy gives its ministers at least some say over who leads their departments. France, Germany, Sweden, Italy and the United Kingdom all figured this out long ago. 

In Germany, ministers appoint their top officials from a pool of qualified candidates. When a new government takes office, incoming ministers can replace the top officials with people committed to delivering their programmes. Ninety per cent come from within the career service, not from party backrooms. 

The officials below are protected by statute and cannot be removed on a whim. A new government changes only the top officials. Everyone else stays. Germany gets plenty wrong, but on this question, it found an answer that works. 

Our new research note, Who Runs the Country?, examines three international models and argues that New Zealand’s public service requires reform based on these learnings. We are calling on the government to give ministers the power to appoint their chief executives, with proper safeguards to stop the process becoming jobs for mates. 

Voters elect governments to govern. Letting ministers appoint senior officials who will help them do that ought to be the least controversial idea in politics. 

Explore Oliver's research through our new research note, our NZ Herald column and our podcast.