At the World Economic Forum last month, Mark Carney delivered a speech that should make every middle power pay attention.

The former central banker, now Canada’s Prime Minister, argued that the rules-based international order is fading. The institutions meant to help countries cooperate have become, in his view, a useful fiction.

For countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, places with influence but without superpower muscle, this matters. The world has become more dangerous. Getting our own houses in order is no longer optional.

But telling countries to reform is easier than doing it.

Often, the problem is not that we lack good policy ideas. The problem is that our systems for delivering reform have seized up. Left alone, the system does nothing.

New Zealand is a good case study, even though it should be easy to reform. There is no upper house to block laws and no written constitution that entrenches policy settings. A government that wants to act can move fast.

And yes, reforms do still happen. Education Minister Erica Stanford overturned decades of balanced literacy, which had pushed phonics to the margins, and required structured literacy instead. Early results from a new phonics check show gains in early reading, including for Māori students.

In housing, Minister Chris Bishop is moving to replace the Resource Management Act, the planning law that has governed land use for over three decades, with a framework designed to make building easier. He is building on years of bipartisan consensus.

So reform is not impossible. But both have one thing in common: they happened because ministers bypassed the system instead of working through it.

Take education. Stanford brought in outside expertise through a Ministerial Advisory Group, chaired by Michael Johnston of The New Zealand Initiative, the think tank I lead.

Ministers who want real change often find their departments cannot help them. The ministry’s senior leaders had been rotated through unrelated portfolios. Hired for management skills rather than educational knowledge, they could not challenge flawed thinking or push through real change.

Many officials are capable and committed. The problem is what the system rewards.

Housing tells a similar story. The Productivity Commission, think tanks and international experts spent 15 years educating politicians. By the time they were ready to act, the case had been made, outside government.

Reform, it seems, happens only when unusually capable ministers find ways around a system designed for inertia. That is not strength. That is fragility.

Australian readers may recognise elements of this pattern, even if the federal structure and Senate provide friction that New Zealand lacks.

Before we can reform policy, we must reform the machinery that produces policy. Call it ‘meta reform’: fixing the operating system of government so that reform can become normal rather than rare.

So why has the system become so resistant?

The loss of expertise is part of it. New Zealand’s public service has embraced the generic manager idea: management is a transferable skill, so senior officials need not understand the areas they run. They move across agencies and few stay long enough to master any field. Job advertisements ask for “comfort with ambiguity” rather than real knowledge.

In 2022, Treasury advertised for a senior analyst to lead its economic strategy. The advertisement said an economics background was “not essential.” When ministers try to carry out complex reforms, they too often find leaders who lack the expertise to help.

Accountability is another problem, or rather the lack of it. Ministers are responsible for their portfolios but cannot control them. They cannot directly appoint or remove the chief executives of their departments. Their offices sit in the Beehive, New Zealand’s executive wing, away from the organisations they supposedly direct.

The health minister does not physically work in the health ministry, and the education minister rarely visits hers except for formal meetings. How can you hold someone accountable for an organisation they barely see and cannot staff?

The answer is that you cannot. The way things work now is meant to protect political neutrality, and neutrality matters. But it also weakens accountability when things go wrong.

Then there is how broken up government has become. Portfolios have been salami-sliced so finely that no single minister can grip a problem. Funding stays locked in silos. Coordination eats up energy that should go to reform.

What would meta reform look like in practice?

Ministers should be able to appoint the chief executives of their departments. This is not about politicisation. It is about accountability. If a minister cannot choose who leads the organisation for which she answers to parliament, something fundamental is broken.

Ministerial offices should move into departments. Being close matters. Management by wandering around, as Tom Peters called it, is impossible when the minister works in a different building.

The expectation of frequent rotation should be wound back. Public servants should be able to build genuine mastery over a career. The old Mandarin model, where officials spent decades in one area giving frank advice, served governments better. Generalists have their place, but devaluing specialist knowledge produces shallow advice.

Scattered portfolios should be pulled together, and funding should follow outcomes rather than organisational charts.

None of this is easy. Bureaucracies resist change. But the alternative is a system where reform remains rare, exhausting and dependent on finding the right minister at the right moment. Every success requires bypassing the machinery rather than working through it.

Carney’s message was blunt: middle powers must name reality and build strength at home. New Zealand’s experience suggests that strength begins with the unsexy work of institutional reform.

The question is not whether good policy is possible. Clearly it is, when there are exceptional ministers.

The question is whether good policy can become a normal output of the system rather than a triumph over it.

To read the article on The Australian website, click here.