The greater diversity now displayed in Parliament and Cabinet is a good thing in itself. Who would want to see a return to the 1950s and 60s, when these institutions were dominated by Pākehā middle-class and middle-aged men?
Then the only Māori in the House were those who held the four Māori seats, while the two or three women were widely regarded as novelties. One, Sydenham’s Labour MP, Mabel Howard, who had been the country’s first woman Cabinet minister, amused her male colleagues with her outspoken and often flamboyant approach, including holding up two pairs of bloomers in the debating chamber during her effective campaign for standardised clothing sizes.
While such theatrical gestures are seldom sufficient of themselves, and can even be counterproductive, it’s reasonable to expect that, just as Howard did, a much wider variety of perspectives, interests, backgrounds, values and behaviours will make a positive difference to both the processes of public policymaking and to the content of public policy. Real ‘merit’ embraces much more than technical competence.
However, we live in an organisational society, so there is good reason to believe such an expectation can be greatly overstated, because of the independent and powerful effect of institutions and organisations on the way people think and act. Institutions are invaluable in ensuring continuity and stability, and in promoting and sustaining key values and moral and ethical standards, socially and individually. The downside is they can instil too much conformity and too little willingness among people to push at the boundaries of institutional acceptability.
People who work within them may indeed come from a variety of different backgrounds, and may be women or men, LGBTQ+, or Pākehā, Māori, Pasifika, Asian and so on. But diversity is always in tension with conformity, and conformist standards are determined by privileged interests that control career paths and social and economic opportunity. It often turns out to matter less where people come from but more about where they hope and expect to go.
Parliamentarians who feel they ‘represent’ diverse communities inevitably learn they are party members and Parliamentarians as well, and as such are under enormous pressures to acquiesce in the ways and means of this institution. This remains the case, even though we’ve come a long way since prime minister Keith Holyoake advised new MPs to breathe through their noses.
The real test of greater diversity in institutions and organisations, therefore, is the extent to which it results in real challenges to a status quo that is built on and seeks to preserve privilege in all its forms. This is a test that confronts all our ‘diverse’ MPs and Cabinet members primarily as individuals rather than as members of a collective like, for example, the Labour Party’s Māori caucus, as important as that group is.
The same is true of governmental bureaucrats, who may be strongly motivated to pursue their careers in organisations that reflect their own values and perspectives, but find the independent effect of bureaucratic ways of doing things is a serious impediment. As far as racial perspectives go, a study in the 1970s in the United States found both black and white Americans who worked in a conservatively oriented federal bureaucracy like the Department of Agriculture and black and white Americans who worked in a liberal agency like Health, Education and Welfare tended strongly to share the same orientation of their agencies toward a range of political issues on a liberal-conservative spectrum. Organisational ‘acculturation’ was found to be the main explanation.
Given the renewed racial turmoil in the US in more recent times, it’s possible such a finding would not be replicated today. On the other hand, it might well be. Many African-American officers work, comfortably or otherwise, in US police departments that are imbued with racist attitudes.
A similar issue confronts the New Zealand Police in its efforts to overcome racist attitudes in its ranks, whether a function of recruitment or organisational socialisation, or both. And then there is Oranga Tamariki, which, according to its own chief executive, has displayed racist attitudes at all levels. Just as some Māori may become police officers first and foremost, so may social workers become primarily loyal organisation members. This strong tendency has been called ‘organisational capture’, but that term obscures the fact that whether or not one is ‘captured’ is in the end a matter of individual choice, rather than coercive institutional indoctrination.
In New Zealand’s currently diverse Parliament and Cabinet, some people will resist and seek to change the way these institutions work, while others will sooner or later be seduced by the institutional cultures that have been developed over decades, when the desirability of greater diversity was not an issue deemed to warrant serious or sustained consideration. It will be interesting to see those who more readily succumb to the collective institutional pressures they will continue to face, and those who—as the late Mabel Howard did—try to remain true to themselves.
Emeritus Professor Bob Gregory is in the Wellington School of Business and Government at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.
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