Does this apply to the university sector? Universities have a very high degree of institutional autonomy, which is a critical safeguard that protects academic freedom and research integrity. In return for this freedom, universities bear duties. Our ability to innovate and meet the needs of our society depends on nurturing the resources of the university sector wisely and well.

So it’s pretty important that those in charge of universities do their jobs well, and unless we assume they are both infallible and paragons of virtue, there needs to be accountability somewhere in the system. 

Holding universities accountable: the Commission and the councils

Who holds the universities to account? The current law provides for two main avenues of accountability: one via the universities’ annual reporting and funding agreements with the Tertiary Education Commission and the other via the council that each university is required to have. The law endows university councils with a lot of authority. Councils formally make or approve university decisions and internal policies (or delegate responsibility for them) on pretty much everything the university does as a corporate entity. Of course, the actual day to day running of a university is delegated to the Vice Chancellor, who is effectively the CEO. Councils have the critical responsibility of appointing the Vice Chancellor and holding that person to account for his or her management of the university.

This means it is a big deal who gets to be on the council and how they get to be there. What does the law say? Actually, not that much. The law says councils must have between 8 and 12 members, with 3 or 4 of these appointed by the minister. A few types of people are disqualified (undischarged bankrupts, for example) and a few types of people must be included: a student representative, two staff representatives (one academic, one non-academic) and at least one council member must be Māori. And there’s general language about needing to ensure representativeness, appropriate skills and experience, and ability to perform their duties as members.

Beyond that, the law basically leaves university councils to decide for themselves how they will operate. Section 279 of the Act says: ‘An institution’s council may make statutes relating to the appointment of members..’ Even the minister responsible for the universities needs to consult with the council before deciding on the 3 or 4 individuals he or she gets to appoint: Section 278(7) says that ‘Before making an appointment under this section, the Minister must seek, and consider, nominations from the relevant council.’

Council roles to be filled at the University of Auckland

So councils get to write their own statutes setting out how they appoint members. What do these statutes say? I’ll take the University of Auckland’s one as an example. Others may be different, but the University of Auckland is our country’s largest. It is also in the process of appointing four council members. And, because the current Vice Chancellor resigned only a few months after being reappointed by the current council, the council is tasked with the weighty responsibility of choosing a new Vice Chancellor over the coming months.

The council revised its procedures for appointing its own members three times in the last three years. Its 2023 statute sets out desirable qualities in council members and notes they can be appointed for a maximum of four years and a maximum of three times – so one could serve for up to 12 years. The statute says the Vice Chancellor is always a member of the council, by virtue of being Vice Chancellor. The statute also sets out the procedures for the election of staff and student representative members. There’s another document – made by the council – that gives a bit more detail on how exactly members get appointed or reappointed. This shows that the central role is played by something called the VCRERC – the Vice-Chancellor’s Review and Executive Remuneration Committee. This committee gets to specify what skills and experience members should have, before a call for expressions of interest in joining the council is made. The VCRERC also gets to view these expressions of interest and draw up a shortlist, to present to council, along with its recommendation. 

The powerholders answerable to.. themselves

Who is on the VCRERC? It is a committee of the council itself and comprises just four people: the Chancellor, who chairs the council, the pro-chancellor (effectively the deputy) and chairs of the council committees for finance and audit.

A look at its responsibilities shows that the VCRERC really is the centre of power on the council. As well as reviewing and recommending appointments or reappointments of council members, it also has the responsibility of ‘Reviewing and managing the performance, composition and succession of Council.’

What all this boils down to is that the council, the body charged with holding the university’s paramount manager, the Vice Chancellor, to account: a) includes the Vice Chancellor; b) determines for itself how it will operate; c) appoints and reappoints itself (with the exception of the 3 elected members and the minister’s appointees – but it gets to nominate ministerial appointees; d) reviews its own performance.

Managing conflicts of interest

All pretty cosy. There’s a cute provision for managing conflicts of interest in the appointment of council members: ‘If any member of VCRERC is a candidate for appointment as a Council member, that VCRERC member will not be present or participate in any part of the appointments process for the relevant position including the receipt and consideration of expressions of interest.’ So (for example), when considering the expressions of interest in positions that are currently vacant or up for reappointment, should the current Chancellor wish to be reappointed as the alumni member, she will excuse herself as a member of the VCRERC, which she has led since 2021, while the rest of the committee considers any competing expressions of interest received for the alumni role she currently fills on council. No problem at all.

Another quirk of the council appointments process is that the council’s appointments statute stipulates that the university’s Pro Vice-Chancellor (Māori), a member of the university’s executive team, ‘is to be invited to attend meetings of the VCRERC to assist the VCRERC… when the appointment of a Māori member is being considered.’ So the council member with particular responsibility for monitoring the university’s performance with respect to Māori interests – performance which is led by the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Māori) – is appointed on the advice of that same Pro Vice-Chancellor. Taken together, we may not have a chumocracy, but we surely have a system vulnerable to chumocracy and all the risks associated with it. Of course, everyone may be doing their job honourably and competently. Nothing I have written here suggests otherwise. But it’s a system that bears some similarities to what historian Peter Hennessy calls the ‘good chaps’ theory of British government. That’s a system that depends on everyone being a self-restrained good chap – which is to say, a system that is vulnerable to decay and capture.

Photo by Roberto Carlos Román Don on Unsplash

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As cancelations go, it didn’t make waves. It was covered by the Free Speech Union, some nonmainstream websites and Britain’s Daily Mail. An eminent professor of history withdraws from his proposed talk at the National Library because the Library requested a change to the description of the talk on the event’s publicity. The offending phrase? A quote from a nineteenth century historian that the British Empire appeared to have been acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind.’ It’s a well-used quote that captures the haphazard processes of imperial expansion from ancient Rome to the United States. 

The initial explanation given by the National Library staffer who requested the quote be removed was that ‘our [the Library’s] director wasn’t keen on the quote.’ After being queried as to why, she replied the quote was ‘of concern’, that it ‘could be seen as us agreeing with Britain conquering the world’, that the matter was ‘political’, and that it was ‘the director’s wish to have it taken out.’

I am able to quote these emails because the historian involved, Professor Paul Moon, has made them available to me. The two emails are sent from a named official using a @dia.govt.nz email address (the National Library sits within the Department of Internal Affairs) and dated 12 December 2024. 

From censorship to misrepresentation

What happened next moves from censorious to something worse. Someone unknown to Professor Moon wrote to the National Library requesting, under the terms of the Official Information Act, ‘What is the reasoning behind the National Library director’s request for Paul Moon to drop a quote from his work?’ In its formal response dated 30 January 2025, the Office of the National Librarian asserts ‘the quote referred to was to be used in an event listing and was too long to fit within the six lines available for the proposed event listing to be used on the National Library website and social media.’

This response is plainly, factually, wrong. The National Library’s email exchanges with Professor Moon did not mention word count, and did very explicitly refer to political sensitivities. Professor Moon’s initial text was well below the limit stated in the Library’s own ‘Information request for speakers & audio/video consent form.’ And the first email from the Library requesting the change asks for the quote to be replaced with ‘a sentence or two’ of something else. Clearly, the Office of the National Librarian is misrepresenting basic facts. 

So we have a National Library that is censorious and untruthful. Disturbing, given the National Library is custodian of many official records of the nation’s history. It exists to preserve and disseminate information. An agency prone to distorting the record in favour of a sanctimonious vision of what is politically acceptable belongs in the propaganda toolkit of authoritarian regimes. 

Truth and spin

Sadly, this kind of distortion is unusual only for being so clearly documented. Many professionals regularly engage in processes of tweaking, toning down, rewording and selective editing in order to serve their bosses or their own advantage. For some, it is an explicit part of the job. Corporate comms speak, or PR, refers to the art of massaging the record in ways that work for the client. We can expect the record to be strategically edited when it comes to corporate press releases and political messaging coming from politicians. 

It’s a betrayal of public trust and purpose when those staffing ‘truth-seeking institutions’ – libraries, universities, the press – engage in this kind of agenda-driven censorship. 

Why do they do it? Why would a professional whose entire professional ethos and purpose is to discover and disseminate accurate information sacrifice this commitment to political expedience or piety? 

One can only speculate, but it seems to me that two things are likely to be going on when well-intentioned professionals appear to lose their minds in this way.

The moral imperative

First, I’d guess they have a pretty elevated sense of moral righteousness, a conviction that being morally right is what matters. Most of us, including officials staffing state bureaucracies, like to maintain beliefs about ourselves as essentially good people. It’s one source of cognitive bias that has repeatedly been shown to lead to all sorts of distortions and selective interpretation of evidence. This may be inherent to human nature, but surely becomes more salient the more overt moralism is adopted as part of an organization or professional sphere’s set of operating norms. And it’s not hard to find examples of such moralism becoming increasingly espoused in statements of organizational purpose. 

It’s no longer enough to run a competent library service that informs the public accurately, or a university that pursues knowledge. Instead, our libraries and universities give prominence to statements of moral purpose and commitment. The University of Auckland, for example, says its purpose is to have ‘globally transformative impacts’, its vision is to be recognized for our ‘our unique contribution to fair, ethical and sustainable societies’ and its ‘fundamental principles reflect our foundational relationship with tangata whenua and our commitment to Te Tiriti.’ The National Library itself headlines its strategic directions to 2030 as ‘Turning knowledge into value.’ 

Fear

Second, it’s likely that a dose of fear helps professionals make sure ‘knowledge’ gets turned into the right sort of ‘value.’ Fear of upsetting the narrative. Fear of asking questions that might yield the wrong answers. Fear that kills curiosity.

Surely there is some very effective killing of curiosity behind the National Library’s request to delete the offending quote that the British empire was acquired in ‘a fit of absence of mind.’ The mere suggestion that colonial empire advanced in a haphazard manner, rather than according to some grand plan of imperial domination, is too uncomfortable to headline. Coming from a professional in a supposedly truth-seeking institution, this looks like losing one’s mind. 

To be uncomfortable with historical interpretation means being uncomfortable with historical enquiry. Historical judgements such as how empires were acquired are very obviously not simple statements of descriptive fact. If one were the slightest bit interested in how and why colonial rule advanced, the motives and perceptions of colonial agents would seem pretty relevant. This should be a central question for anyone interested in either the past or present-day legacies and parallels. Far from condoning ‘conquering the world’, some of the sharpest criticisms of colonial intervention have been based on archival sources of colonial bureaucracies and neo-imperial ventures. Such research has shown that pathways to disastrous interventions were frequently buffeted by events and forces that officials did not control, along with an array of contending beliefs, assumptions and aspirations. Agents of imperial intervention often believed themselves to be doing the right thing, even as some also expressed doubt and dismay at how their ventures were working out. 

Far from condoning imperial rule, these historical interpretations provide a useful reminder of both institutional capacities for self-delusion and the futility of populating history with nothing but a cast of cartoon heroes and villains. 

I would be surprised if a professional such as the director of the National Library actually espouses a heroes and villains view of history. Indeed, the willingness to invite Professor Moon in the first place suggests that the Library does wish to foster discussion of different ways of interpreting history. 

If so, the forces driving censorship and misrepresentation can co-exist with sincere efforts to do the right thing. 

Photo by Cliff Johnson on Unsplash

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They’ve been hanging around for a while, those principles. A mention in an 1975 Act passed mostly unnoticed, but a low profile reference in a 1986 law on state-owned enterprises proved consequential. That mention paved the way for a landmark court decision in 1987. Since then the courts and the Waitangi Tribunal have been interpreting references to the ‘principles of the Treaty’ now scattered plentifully across legislation. In doing so, they have been changing New Zealand’s constitutional order.

Parliament has never defined these principles.  The principles are also not fixed. So somebody has to continually interpret them. That somebody turns out to be judges and appointed members of the Waitangi Tribunal. As noted in a government-issued guide that the Waitangi Tribunal references on its website:

 ‘The Courts and Tribunal have emphasized that the principles of the Treaty are not set in stone and that they may change as the Treaty partnership evolves. Accordingly, they have not developed an exhaustive list of principles and continue to refine their explanations in response to new circumstances.’

The principles now affect almost all areas of law and public policy. Few of us are untouched, with the principles regularly cited to justify public policy decisions on everything from health and education to conservation and urban planning. It is now common to hear legal professionals refer to the Treaty and its principles as forming part of New Zealand’s constitution. Indeed a group of King’s Counsel, in marking their objections to the Treaty principles bill, also appeared ‘to be questioning the constitutional right of Parliament to legislate in these circumstances.’ Judges and other public sector decisionmakers defer to these principles as if they do have constitutional status.

A constitutional revolution

This makes for a de facto constitutional revolution. One of the country’s foremost Treaty scholars, Claudia Orange, has referred to the change in the status of the Treaty as revolutionary.

Most attempted revolutions fail, so it is interesting to figure out why this one succeeded. The ‘principles Treaty’ bears little relationship to the actual historical Treaty. The courts have explicitly rejected the possibility of an ‘originalist’ interpretation of the Treaty.

So how did the constitutional hijack happen? After all, New Zealand is a democracy in which parliament has traditionally been regarded as sovereign. Did the legislature vote to curb its own powers? Sort of. The constitutional hijack required parliamentary complicity.

Palmer’s plan to clip parliament’s wings

The story starts with a politician-cum-legal scholar who, way back in 1979, decried the ‘unbridled power’ of the New Zealand parliament. That man, Geoffrey Palmer, got himself elected to parliament and attempted to legislate for constitutional change that would clip parliament’s wings and entrench the Treaty of Waitangi. It appeared initially that he failed: over two years, public submissions were largely opposed. The resulting Constitution Act of 1986 did not mention the Treaty of Waitangi (except in a parenthetical schedular amendment to the Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975), let alone elevate it to constitutional status. New Zealanders were very explicitly not prepared to go along with Palmer’s ambitions.

But Palmer was not deterred. What he could not achieve openly, he set about bringing about by stealth. His plan was to litter legislation with innocuous-sounding references to undefined ‘principles’ and ‘procedures’; things so devoid of substance that most parliamentarians would not bother to oppose them. He counted on the courts to then give teeth to the new order over time.

We know this was a deliberate plan because Palmer himself tells us about it. In 1992, soon after retiring from politics and returning to educating law students (and many of the current generation of judges), he published New Zealand’s Constitution in Crisis. There, on page 76, he writes:

‘The logic of the approach was as follows… Some parliamentary action by way of legislation was needed to make a base. But if that legislation itself redressed the grievances it would run into the problem that the majority of the community would oppose it. If, on the other hand, legislation was used to set up processes, and procedures and the principles on which decisions should be based were stated, it may be possible to get even a majoritarian legislature to act. The initial commitment required was to a process. No tangible outcome was provided by the legislation itself. What should be done was to be decided only after judicial or quasi-judicial processes had assessed individual cases. First it was necessary to give the courts something to interpret. Such was the nature of the approach I brought to both statutory incorporation of the Treaty in statutes, and extension of the Waitangi Tribunal to examine grievances back to 1840.’

The intent to sideline parliament is explicit:

The hijack appeared to work precisely as planned over the following decades. Whether it can continue to work is another matter.

The architects of New Zealand’s Treaty principles bill, whether they are aware of it or not, are part of a broader pushback against perceived excesses of judicial power in many countries. The ‘judicialization of politics’ has been underway for more than thirty years, moving decision-making away from arenas subject to democratic control and accountability to tribunals, courts and quasi-judicial panels of experts. A backlash now looms in many places.

The Treaty principles bill will no doubt fail to clear its second and third readings. But the attempt at clawing back parliamentary control has already made a difference. No one can now say with any credibility that the Treaty principles are ‘not political.’

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The bigger issue is a basic problem of information asymmetry between the universities that “sell” research and education services and the students and taxpayers (represented by public commissioning agencies) that “buy” their services. They are not selling shampoo or even silicon chips. The 18 year-olds signing up for 3 to 5 years of debt and foregone earnings don’t know if they are being sold a lemon. If they peruse the public resources that supposedly help them choose a university, they are advised to consider the “vibes” of the place, along with amenities and support services. The internet bears traces of an earlier initiative to make information on degree costs and career outcomes available to students, but the promised ‘key indicators’ are so well-hidden I suspect they do not exist. There are no accessible, independent measures of how well  universities have taught their students. It is inherently hard to assess the value of university research. If it could be assessed on the basis of commercial outcomes, it would not need to be publicly funded. The case for public funding of both research and teaching is a strong one: there are enormous potential positive externalities to both. But only if the research and teaching are well done.

If the research and education are not well done, simply freeing the universities to compete and innovate will waste public and private resources. For a vision of such a future, we can see what has happened in the United Kingdom. There, attention tends to go to the small number of elite universities that enjoy high prestige. But freeing the system as a whole to compete and innovate on the basis of taxpayer-subsidized public lending to students has led to high fees, grade inflation, and a proliferation of mediocre degree programmes.

New Zealand universities are facing more than a cashflow crisis. In the words of one senior academic, ‘we no longer deliver on the most important part of what we promised.’ Why not?

Managerialism

The sector excels at regulations, policies, metrics and documentation requirements. Centralized, intrusive directives have created a compliance culture heavy on paperwork, processes, and performative quality assurance systems. This is likely one reason for the bureaucratic bloat that universities carry: New Zealand universities appear to lead the world in the ratio of non-academic to academic staff. Managerialism also diverts academic time. In some faculties, the number of academics with some sort of “dean-ship” or equivalent in their job title has increased nearly threefold in a decade. The compliance work affects all academics, making the creeping growth of managerialism an enormous barrier to quality and innovation at the coal face.

Moralism

Universities have become very preachy places. Moralistic goals adopted by university leaders are distorting almost every aspect of what we do. This moralism is often justified under the general banners of “equity”, “fairness” and “inclusion” which have been adopted across the English-speaking world. Here in New Zealand, we have a specific version driven by deference to the Treaty of Waitangi, which has become a trojan horse for politicization – as it must, in a country where very obviously there is no broad social or political consensus about the role of the Treaty. An agenda of  “indigenising” the university radically overturns the traditional mission of the university.

The moralism makes institutional neutrality – the idea that a university in its corporate form should not take sides on issues of current social and political contestation – impossible. Evident institutional non-neutrality erodes the credibility of teaching and research.

Moralism of the protective sort, that seeks to prevent “harm” and protect “wellbeing”, to promote “diversity” and “honour Te Tiriti”, also curtails academic freedom and freedom of expression. Not only does such moralism create an overall chilling effect on freedom of expression, it is given bite in official speech codes, research ethics requirements, promotion criteria and curriculum requirements. The university policies that put the decolonization agenda into the myriad managerial policy frameworks of the organization ‘invoke a particular, static, idea of the Treaty as if debate about it has been resolved’; they also place the individual academic in the peculiar position of being an agent of the Crown, unable to contest supposedly foundational Treaty principles as asserted by university management.

Disciplinary degradation

Academic disciplines are the guardians of knowledge. They are responsible for the gatekeeping that maintains standards and rigour. For a whole variety of reasons, including managerialism and moralism, the disciplines have become degraded as institutions for responsible, scientific gatekeeping. Moral agendas, rather than scientific merit, now overtly influence editorial policy at many major science journals, to the detriment of disciplinary rigour.

Epistemic relativism – the idea that there is no objective knowledge (even as something to pursue or work towards) and that science as a method of knowledge discovery is just one of many ‘knowledge systems’ or ‘ways of knowing’ – has moved from the fringes of the humanities and social sciences to take hold in much of the institutional apparatus of the university. Not all academic research is infected; much of the academy retains rigorous peer review processes.  But the creeping relativism makes it harder for those who want to defend disciplinary standards.

Institutional incoherence

It is impossible to see any strategic direction for the tertiary sector. The government’s tertiary education funding agency and watchdog, the TEC, has a “tertiary education strategy that talks about wellbeing, achievement, identity and other platitudes. It could be talking about the kindergarten sector. The other so-called guardian of our education system, the NZQA, is so agnostic about actual educational quality it will accredit colleges of wellbeing and homeopathy. The last government’s review of public sector science and research funding looked more concerned with embedding the Treaty of Waitangi across the entire science system than actually producing a more effective one. No wonder New Zealand suffers from long-term and severe educational mismatches: the percentage of the school leaving cohort going on to university has expanded hugely since the 1990s, but large areas of society suffer from critical skill shortages.

I initially thought of these problems as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, university-style. But on reflection, they haven’t come galloping up brandishing messages of doom. Instead, managerialism, moralism, disciplinary degradation and institutional incoherence are more like termites. They are largely invisible to outsiders and they silently eat away at the foundations of the university system.

There is still great value in our universities. I want to see the sector thrive and believe it has an essential role to play. But these termites function as de facto taxes on the research and education spend. And that’s the optimistic reading of the situation. The worst-case scenario is that they threaten to bring the whole house down.

This is an edited version of an address delivered by the author at a symposium on the Future of the Universities organized by the New Zealand Initiative, Wellington, 15 May 2024.

Photo by Roberto Carlos Román Don on Unsplash

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Variation in willingness and ability to tax can be traced to broad differences in institutional endowments and historical legacies. They also reflect different political settlements: battles won and lost over what the public sphere is for, and who controls it. None of these are static. In democracies, citizens can generally choose between higher and lower-taxing alternatives. Their choices reflect personal calculations and beliefs about the relative merits of paying for things like public versus private healthcare, education, infrastructure and police protection.

Tax and community feeling

These choices are not made in a vacuum. Voters will take into account the credibility of the state. Will higher taxes actually mean better schools and roads, or will they disappear into black holes of corruption and waste? We can also expect voters to be swayed by a more emotional factor: how much do they care about their fellow citizens? Do they actually feel a greater obligation to those who happen to inhabit the same tax unit (also known as a sovereign state) than to people elsewhere on the planet? How strong are the bonds of nationhood? Do we even imagine ourselves to be a part of a national community?

We can expect the answer to vary from person to person, and to change over time. This is because all nations are imagined communities, as expressed in the hugely influential work of the late Benedict Anderson, under whom I was lucky to study many years ago. The apparatus of the modern state may wield distinctly material means of coercion and protection, but the sense of being part of a nation depends on our ability to imagine this shared community.

The nation-as-community has to be an imagined one: each citizen can only ever personally know a tiny fraction of his or her fellows. But we can imagine ourselves tied to a common project and bound by something of value that holds us together. In the current world system of sovereign states, the nation is the imagined community that endows the state’s enormous coercive powers_­ with some legitimacy. We pay our taxes not just because we must, but because many of us recognize that mutual commitments to the “commonwealth” make our lives a great deal better.

The calculating rationalist can be stingy

Take the sense of community away, and we are left with a more grudging, transactional dynamic. The rationalist calculations that can find an efficient equilibrium between what blood and treasure we are prepared to contribute to the commonwealth, weighed against what we can expect to receive, provide a thin basis for the provision of public goods. And that is for public goods strictly defined as goods that are non-excludable and non-rival in consumption – things like national defence, for which there is no private option. A calculating rationalist can find even more reasons to begrudge tax payments that fund goods such as healthcare and education.

A calculating and conditional logic can probably sustain the night-watchman state, tasked with the administration of law, basic public security and the protection of private property. A more expansive public agenda requires more than this. It is all very well to make the case for public education, healthcare and income redistribution on the basis that such interventions are efficient, but I wouldn’t bet on the calculation always standing up to scrutiny. Actually caring about one’s fellow citizens as members of a shared community smooths the calculation. “Tax is love”, as ambitiously opined by a Green Party leader, will strike many as a bit too close to a declaration that war is peace. But feeling a bit of love for one’s fellow citizens probably sets one’s tolerance for tax at a higher point than one would choose if calculating strictly.

If a sense of being part of a national community is a useful foundation for bending the machinery of state to serve public purposes, those in favour of greater public provision through the tax system should wish to preserve it. After all, the bonds of nationhood can loosen.

Can we have a national community and a plural society?

It is not hard to find examples of countries where competing bonds – or religion or race, for example – are the primary imagined communities. When such identities replace a sense of shared nationhood, the political arena becomes dominated by the transactional logic of the plural society. The term “plural society” comes from the work of former colonial official-turned-scholar, J.S. Furnivall, who described its emergence in colonized territories of Southeast Asia. But the concept applied well to many other areas, where deliberate policies created or rigidly reinforced racial and religious identities, often pitted against each other.

The architects of such schemes claimed the best intentions, and they were often driven by limited administrative capacity more than any grand plan of domination. Nonetheless, the logic of divide and rule was also apparent at least by the later stages of colonial rule. As one colonial administrator observed, ‘the existence side by side of the hostile creeds is one of the strongest points in our political position in India.’

All of this sounds very old-fashioned in a modern, multicultural democracy in which, historically, there has been strong commitment to delivering shared public benefits. Even in the nineteenth century, New Zealand lawmakers stood out for their readiness to infringe on freedom of contract and private property in order to expand the protective and redistributive work of the state. They developed this impulse to grow the commonwealth in material ways with the advent of the welfare state in the 1930s. It is hard to see how these advances of the welfare state could have been made without a strong sense of shared, national community.

It is somewhat peculiar, therefore, that much of the political left in contemporary New Zealand appears bent on elevating the salience of group identities and loyalties that potentially compete with the nation as imagined community.

From one vantage point, the left need not worry. The redistributive state is secure, if judged by the share of GDP taken in taxes and mostly paid out again in welfare payments and public services. On this metric, the welfare state shows no sign of retreat. From another perspective, the situation is more perilous, given competing and urgent demands for spending on infrastructure, decarbonizing energy and other tasks. The political willingness to pay for an expanded public sphere depends on the credibility of the state that will spend and distribute the tax take. It matters how the public sphere is imagined: is it the common ground that we all share as citizens? Or is it booty, up for distribution among competing identity groups?

If the imagined beneficiaries of public spending are seen less as fellow citizens and more as parties to a transactional bargain, it is likely that a more stingy, calculating logic will come to the fore. It is relatively hard for ordinary people to evade taxes in New Zealand, but quite easy to vote for lower taxes.

Photo by Guillaume Didelet on Unsplash.

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Sex is based on a person’s sex characteristics, such as their chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. While typically based upon the sex characteristics observed and recorded at birth or infancy, a person’s sex can change over the course of their lifetime and may differ from their sex recorded at birth.

The glaring error in this statement is of course the claim that a person’s sex can change. We all know humans cannot change sex. Our grandmothers knew it, and their grandmothers before them. I suspect the earliest humans knew this. A standard child development textbook will tell you that human children grasp the immutability of sex roughly by the time they reach primary school (page 535 of the eighth edition, if you are curious). If you are wondering whether ‘the science’ has changed, it has not. You don’t need to take my word for it. Here’s Professor Robert Winston, a specialist in human reproduction with an illustrious career: ‘I will say this categorically that you cannot change your sex.’

The other error by StatsNZ is to reduce sex to ‘sex characteristics.’ Not only is this circular, it opens the door to a misperception that chromosomes simply are sex: XX for female and XY for male. Taking this view would imply that people with nontypical chromosomes – XXX females for example, or XXY males – are some kind of ‘intersex’ or sex other than male or female. This is what StatsNZ gets close to implying, with its new question on ‘variations of sex characteristics.’ In fact, it is more accurate to say that, in humans, specific genes drive sex differentiation into one of two genetic developmental pathways that produce male or female reproductive systems. In particular, the presence of an SRY gene sets an embryo down a male developmental pathway. SRY stands for Sex-determining Region Y; this gene is almost always on the Y chromosome. So sex is a matter of what kind reproductive system an individual has. 

It follows that people with nontypical chromosomes are all either male or female. A man with Klinefelter syndrome has XXY chromosomes. He is most definitely male. Similarly, a girl born with only one X chromosome has Turner syndrome. As Britain’s NHS notes, it is a female-only genetic disorder. Women with Turner syndrome will in almost all cases be infertile and most will need particular healthcare in order to live a healthy life. It is insulting and cruel, as well as inaccurate, to imply that people with such disorders or variations of sexual differentiation (often abbreviated as DSDs) are something other than male or female. 

So, our government’s statistics agency is either lying to us or is inexcusably ignorant. Sure, most people probably get through life without knowing the details of DSDs or even the precise relationship between chromosomes and sex. But we all know that humans cannot change sex. And a government agency that has gone to great lengths to include questions on sex, gender identity and DSDs in its census questionnaire ­– but makes such elementary mistakes – is either grossly incompetent or worse. 

Do the lies matter? Lies and damned statistics

I am going to call obvious false claims ‘lies’, even though probably nobody at StatsNZ consciously intends to deceive. Humans find ways to manage the cognitive dissonance that occurs when there is gap between what they know to be true and what they are actually saying – we can predict they will sustain illusions in order to avoid the negative feelings that come with consciously lying. But right now I am not so interested in how the officials at StatsNZ live with themselves, but rather with what happens when authorities make obviously false statements.

A lying government statistics agency is a problem. It matters, first, for the accuracy and usefulness of the statistics collected and disseminated. StatsNZ is introducing these new census questions as part of its ‘gender first’ reporting policy. This policy means that data on ‘males’ and ‘females’ will ordinarily be based on a person’s subjective gender identity rather than his or her sex. This is more than an irritation for people who don’t have a gender identity – who don’t particularly feel an affinity for gender stereotypes and regard themselves simply as being either male or female, regardless of dress, habits or feelings. I don’t have a gender identity any more than I have a species identity. I am human, regardless of how I think or feel about it. 

The real problem, however, is not that people like me are irritated. The real problem is the loss of integrity in the census data and all the other official sources of data that either use census data or adopt the StatsNZ guidance on how to gather data. That includes data on male-female income gaps, educational achievement and any other type of data you can think of where there is a legitimate reason to report results by sex. As argued by Professor Alice Sullivan, a leading social scientist, conflating sex and gender in official statistics is a bad thing to do. Neglecting to gather sex-specific data, already a problem, is particularly harmful to women.

To be sure, the absolute numbers of those reporting a gender that differs from their sex will be small. In the UK’s most recent census, only 0.2% of the those responding to the gender identity question reported a ‘trans man’ or ‘trans woman’ identity, and a minuscule 0.06% identified as non-binary. But in areas where sex ratios are hugely imbalanced – for example, male-female differences in the prison population or patterns of sexual offending – even small numbers will substantially distort official figures. Even when the numbers are small, deliberately introducing a policy that defines basic categories in misleading ways is still wrong.

StatsNZ might claim that, by asking about sex and gender, it is not conflating the two. But it is. First, by giving an inaccurate and misleading definition of sex, as something that can change over a person’s lifetime. Second, a gender-by-default reporting policy means that data relating to sex will end up mixed in the reported data on gender. Questions answered on basis of sex are going to be reported, in most cases, as referring to gender. StatsNZ will do this through matching census data with administrative data and by imputation, although they are still officially consulting on exactly how they will do this.

When the state lies: the erosion of trust

We lose trust in agencies that lie. We know they are lying and we also know that they must, at some level of consciousness, know they are lying. And the only possible reason for this insistence on lying is a decision to put political expedience or ideology ahead of the truth. 

When public agencies chose to lie in this way, they invite something worse than ridicule: profound mistrust. Once a public authority is known to lie out of expedience or pressures for conformity, all of its claims potentially come under suspicion. Why believe a government agency or a public scientist about climate records, if they can’t even get sex in humans right? Why believe the health ministry about the safety of vaccines, if the same agency claims that men can get pregnant? 

Truth matters. The world’s climate either is or is not changing as a result of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Either vaccines save lives or they don’t. The sum of our knowledge on both of these things remains incomplete, of course, and will be added to and revised over time. And no doubt there are many complexities: room for caveats and nuances. But unless you are willing to abandon the idea of truth entirely, not all claims about climate change and vaccines can be equally true.

And for those who care about truth, trust matters. I think there is overwhelming evidence to conclude that the climate is changing as a result of human activity, but what I believe on this issue is entirely dependent on my trust in public authorities and the credibility of scientists. I am not any kind of atmospheric scientist, so I rely on these people to tell the truth. Just as I rely on the work of research scientists and statisticians in order to form a view on the safety and efficacy of vaccines. 

Credible, trustworthy sources of information and analysis are vital for democracy and good public policy. We’ve seen much handwringing about misinformation and disinformation, about how some people are disastrously ready to believe conspiracy theories and junk science. About how false and misleading information can be put to work to undermine attempts to solve real problems, from public health to climate change. About how extreme and deliberate lies can threaten democratic institutions.

There is no easy fix for these problems. Censoring misinformation is unlikely to work and will often in fact undermine trust, or even play into the hands of those responsible for deliberate disinformation. 

Public agencies could at least avoid making things worse. They could stop lying. 

Cover image: photo by Shot by Cerqueira on Unsplash

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The current law does not, however, seek to penalise or restrict all harmful speech. The political mood in some parts of our country seems to regard this as a problem. Local government organizations and universities, for example, have introduced codes of conduct that prohibit speech that causes harm. Sometimes this is qualified as speech that causes harm to vulnerable groups.

Who could object? For those in favour of restrictions on harmful speech, the answer seems to be that only people who actually want to cause harm (or are heedless to the harm they cause) would object. And of course, those would be pretty nasty people, who should face penalties, such as denial of access to public facilities, education or employment. And maybe they should face the sanction of the law too, as implied by the government’s proposal in 2021 to broaden the definition of hate speech. That proposal has now been shelved, but the government is proceeding with plans to regulate online content in the interests of reducing the risk of harm, even though current law already contains provisions against online bullying and dissemination of illegal material such as child sexual abuse content. 

In fact, some even say that restrictions against harmful speech are necessary in order to maintain the conditions of open debate and democracy. How can people engage in a debate if speech that harms them is given free rein? They thus appear to accept much of the case for free speech as repeatedly advanced by successive generations of advocates, from J.S. Mill to Jonathan Rauch, Karl Popper to Jacob Mchangama: that free speech is essential to personal liberty, that knowledge advances through contestation and critique, that the possibility of progress requires allowing critiques of policy and law, and that those who lack material power are especially reliant on robust protections for free speech. 

Can we have all that, without accepting speech that causes harm, particularly harm to vulnerable groups? It is an appealing proposition. ‘The bliss of freedom enjoyed by those who have power should never mean the right to cause pain to those who are comparatively powerless. And no one’s exercise of free speech should make another feel less free.’ The words of the late Dr Moana Jackson reverberate widely.

Threats, denigration and a lack of respect for the truth rapidly undermine civic discourse and create a toxic atmosphere of political polarization and worse. But is a civility norm the equivalent of one that penalises harmful speech?

Both rest on some underlying shared understanding of what is civil and what is harmful. But harm is a much more expansive notion. It is not just that the experience of harm is subjective. One could say the same of civility. Different cultures have strikingly different rules of civil conduct. Most New Zealanders are pretty rude if judged by the standards of cultures that require a great deal of deference to age or social status, where failing to use honorifics and speech markers that reinforce status differences can cause offence. 

Hearing the words that your spouse no longer wishes to remain married to you, for example, is likely to cause significant harm. ‘Broken heart syndrome’ is a physical response to emotional distress. Pain itself – as captured by neuroimaging – is multidimensional and includes emotional state, anticipation and expectations of pain. Sexual and social rejection is harmful and can cause lasting damage.

And yet most of us – at least those of us outside the incel community – will recognize that we all have the right to reject unwanted sexual advances and to move away from friendships and relationships. And we have that right even if asserting our boundaries causes non-trivial harm to those we reject or whose wishes conflict with ours.

These examples are not far removed from the contentious issues that we now see triggering code of conduct complaints or other moves to shut down speech. In 2021, complaints of ‘harm’ were used to prevent discussion of upcoming legislation at council-owned community facilities. In this case, the ‘harmful’ discussion was one that featured objections to legislation that would allow any individual to change the sex recorded on their birth certificate simply by making a declaration. It took a High Court ruling to overturn one Council’s refusal to allow use of its premises for discussion of the bill before parliament. While the law has  now passed (despite most public submissions being opposed to it), the issue is one that continues to generate controversy. The definition of what is a woman may be one that tears apart the British Labour Party, with accusations of harm and hate speech regularly made against those who wish to stick to a definition based on biological sex. 

The issue here is not simply that we live at a time when conflicting views about what is a woman generate rage and anxiety. The issue is that we live at a time when many people regard certain beliefs to be harmful, no matter how politely the heretical belief is expressed. If debate itself is harmful, there is no acceptable way to say that humans cannot change sex or that, for some purposes, sex rather than gender identity is what matters. 

Opinions that run counter to the current establishment orthodoxy are frequently condemned as harmful in themselves, no matter how they are expressed. Take a heretical stance on the status of the Treaty of Waitangi, the relationship between mātauranga Māori and science, the limits of religious freedom, or the conflicts between individual liberty and the needs of people with disabilities.. and see the accusations of racism, bigotry and ‘able-ism’ flow in. 

Such denunciations can be seen as ‘pejorative bombs’ – a way of shutting down debate. This is not conducive to rational discussion of conflicting rights and views; but an open society can live with people calling each other names and passing judgement on the morals of others. We should encourage civil expression, particularly in workplaces and educational establishments (where rules against bullying and harassment should curtail certain types of personal denunciation), but ultimately the right to launch ‘pejorative bombs’ falls within an individual’s free speech rights, subject only to limitations of the current law against libel, threats of violence or incitement to violence.

The more serious damage comes from trying to prevent the expression of ‘harmful’ views. I admit to some scepticism as to whether any actual harm is caused by heretical opinions on the constitutional status of the Treaty of Waitangi or whether ‘woman’ is a category that anyone can freely identify into. But I can accept that some people really do feel harmed by hearing things they don’t like, and if they feel harmed then possibly they have indeed been harmed, depending on the measure one uses. Either way, it is impossible to maintain an environment conducive to free expression if debate become bogged down in attempts to prove, or disprove, the harmfulness of speech. 

Everything comes with a trade-off. Some speech can indeed cause harm, but the price of trying to restrict harmful speech beyond the current limits set by law is too high.

If we coerce dissenters into silence because their views are harmful, we will no longer live in a society that seeks to advance knowledge and resolve differences through reasoned debate. 

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What is being proposed?

The Green Paper makes some observations about high-performing science-funding systems and flaws in New Zealand’s current system. There is inefficient competition and fragmentation; Crown Research Institutes operate under a perverse legal framework; project-based funding leaves organizations unable to retain key talent when the project comes to an end. There are hints that the system is over-heavy on ‘governance’ requirements and red-tape.

This all rings true. Unfortunately, the Green Paper does not provide much detail and does not systematically assess the current system in comparison with the ones it considers high-performing. Instead, the main concern seems to be to ‘give effect to Te Tiriti’ across the whole funding system.

What does giving effect to the Treaty of Waitangi in this area involve? What benefits will it bring? How will it enable us to make best use of scarce public resources? What trade-offs might be involved? The Green Paper gives us an answer to the first question, but does not touch the others.

The chapter on Te Tiriti, Mātauranga Māori and Māori aspirations interweaves two fundamentally different concerns. The first is uncontroversial: if our research and science funding fails to engage with Māori researchers, fails to develop diverse talents, or fails to direct its resources in a way that proportionately benefits Māori, then obviously we have a system that is both inefficient (we should not squander the talents of our population) and unjust (if some segments of the population are systematically missing out from the benefits of publicly-funded research).

The Green Paper does not give us much relevant information here. How much publicly-funded research is directed to projects from whichMāori might be expected to benefit? We don’t know. What are effective ways of increasing Māori educational achievement and the number of Māori researchers? It is not enough to note that Māori, like some other demographic groups, are under-represented in some areas. We need to know how and where these differences arise.

The Green Paper is more focused on a different issue. It takes aim at our understanding of what science is and how knowledge advances. Injecting a ‘Te Tiriti-led’ approach across the whole system appears to mean embedding specifically Māori ways of knowing, Māori knowledge (mātauranga Māori), and partnerships with Māori as core pillars of the public research system.

Irreconcilable differences

Perhaps this sounds fair and inclusive. But if we as a country wish to reorient our entire research system in this way, we need to have more than a conversation among insiders. This is not about adding an extra strand to our research ecosystem, but changing its foundations.

Consider the claim that ‘Enabling mātauranga Māori in our research system gives effect to the obligations and opportunities embodied in Article 3 of Te Tiriti.’ Leaving aside the contentious nature of this interpretation of Article 3 (and whether it does or should create obligations in the present day), this would mean that the protection and advancement of mātauranga Māori is integral to a Te Tiriti-led research system.

There is more to this than directing resources to mātauranga Māori as a research area. Rather, the Green Paper seeks to embed mātauranga Māori and the Treaty of Waitangi at the system level, in the design and operation of the entire research, science and innovation system.

This is radical change. Mātauranga Māori differs in important ways from science. As a system of cultural knowledge that encompasses cultural, spiritual and ethical realms, in addition to practical and scientific knowledge, mātauranga Māori is ‘more than’ science. This point is made by proponents of enabling and protecting mātauranga Māori cited in the Green Paper and elsewhere: they make it clear that its processes and standards for generating and evaluating knowledge differ from those of science and the broader, universalist knowledge that underpins our current system.

Secular, universalist knowledge has as its foundational norm the principle that all knowledge is contestable on the basis of reason and evidence. Secular knowledge cannot have sacred status. Systems for advancing such knowledge cannot seek to protect particular knowledge or truth-claims from critical scrutiny.

Secular, scientific knowledge is universalist in the sense that it is open to all – regardless of ethnic or cultural background – to acquire the expertise necessary for engagement. Questions of moral value or the researcher’s personal characteristics are separate from questions about the truth or probability. This kind of scientific knowledge is advanced by what Jonathan Rauch has described as a ‘constitution of knowledge’: institutions, principles and commitments that allow for the pursuit of secular knowledge.

Te Pūtahitanga: A Tiriti–led Science-Policy Approach for Aotearoa New Zealand, which informs the Green Paper, notes that universalist claims of scientific knowledge contain cultural and normative content. This is true. The constitution of knowledge can be thought of as a culture of science. To regard secular or scientific knowledge as valuable does indeed reflect the belief that this knowledge is useful. Like any tool, it may also serve malign purposes, but the value judgement is that knowledge about the material world is preferable to ignorance. It is useful to have aircraft that don’t crash, medicines that work, and public policies that actually serve their declared goals.

And how do we distinguish knowledge from falsehood about such issues? (Strictly speaking, ‘more likely to be true’ from ‘less likely to be true’?) Again, the standards of universalist knowledge reflect a value judgment. In this case, it is the judgment that evidential tests and open debate are preferable to alternative methods of settling disputes about what is more likely to be true.

And let’s be clear about what the alternatives are: deference to a person’s social status or credentials, emotional manipulation, deduction from religious texts, intimidation and coercion. These alternatives gave us the Inquisition, theological rule and ‘Xi Jinping thought’ elevated to constitutional status. Of course, religious knowledge and faith can take much more benign forms. But to elevate them to positions of institutional authority is to create a system that puts faith and personal status above reason and evidence. Is this what New Zealanders want?

Some proponents say we can have both. I disagree. Certainly, different systems of knowledge may come to the same conclusions on some questions. But conflicts are obvious, especially when it comes to the underlying explanation as to why we should believe (or not) something to be true. On the one hand, we have the principle that all knowledge is contestable, a commitment to evidential tests, and universalist standards of knowledge. On the other side, there is  commitment to honouring knowledge on the basis of ethnicity, faith or cultural tradition. Either a claim is contestable, or it is not. An individual scientist can choose to hold both God and science in high regard; a system for advancing science cannot.

What are the trade-offs?

The practical implications of putting God – in the form of mātauranga Māori and Te Tiriti – into our science funding system are unexplored in the Green Paper. But we can anticipate some. If all research is to pass a Te Tiriti-consistency test, some subjects and some research findings will be off limits.

How could a researcher hope to gain funding to investigate the potential downsides of honouring obligations arising from the Treaty,

Could international research on carbon deposits in Antarctic ice, indicative of large-scale burning of vegetation by Māori in pre-colonial times, have been conducted by researchers operating under a Te Tiriti framework? Criticism of the research by some New Zealanders is telling. Local critics took aim at the ethnic makeup of the research team, alleged failures of cultural understanding, and the failure to cultivate relationships with Māori. Could any scientist hoping for funding and a career in New Zealand have led this research project to the same findings?

Good research often will upset stakeholders and may well be offensive. The history of philosophical and scientific discovery is full of heretics pushing against the cultural or religious orthodoxy of their times. Copernicus, Spinoza and Darwin all challenged sacred knowledge and those guarding it.

More prosaically, elements in our fishing industry would no doubt have preferred research not to have uncovered systematic labour exploitation on vessels fishing in New Zealand waters. I don’t suppose the tobacco industry was ever that keen on rigorous research on the health effects of smoking. We know a lot about the efforts of oil and gas to suppress climate change research.

The need for public research funding, academic freedom and research independence arises precisely because the narrow interests of stakeholders do not always coincide with public interests. Sometimes they do, but we cannot make it a bedrock assumption of our research system. Yet this is what embedding the Treaty does, by making all research subject to a partnership veto.

One of the authors of Te Pūtahitanga: A Tiriti–led Science-Policy Approach for Aotearoa New Zealand recognizes the extent of change involved, writing that a Te Tiriti-led public sector implies fundamental change to our system of law and governance. For example, the claim that, ‘The Waitangi Tribunal has described much of New Zealand’s law as still in breach of te Tiriti principles’ implies a need to rewrite much of our current law. According to the same source, honouring the Treaty also means we need to limit our central constitutional principle: that parliament is sovereign.

Whether or not the Treaty (or its principles) should be given constitutional status is obviously a critical question. The current MBIE ‘conversation’ appears to assume only one answer. Yet for the time being, parliament is still sovereign. In a parliamentary democracy, a resilient research funding system must have broad-based societal legitimacy if it is to pursue objectives that outlive the election cycle. Foundational change requires democratic scrutiny and consent.

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