Last week, Ombudsman Ron Paterson released a report into an inquiry Dame Paula Rebstock conducted in 2012-13 for the State Services Commission.
Her inquiry looked into a series of leaks to Labour's Phil Goff about various goings-on within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Reporting on her inquiry, Dame Paula made some very critical comments about two Mfat public servants.
Although not fingering them for the leaks - she thought a temp employed within the commission itself probably was responsible - she found that they had (in effect) conspired to try to sabotage proposed reforms to Mfat's structure and processes, because they thought such changes would undo their "personal legacies''.
For career public servants, receiving such a label is about as bad as it gets short of criminal charges.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, one of those criticised, Derek Leask, complained to the Ombudsman about Dame Paula's investigation and her conclusions.
The Ombudsman's subsequent report has now eviscerated almost every aspect of Dame Paula's original inquiry.
Not only did she exceed its terms of reference by investigating Mr Leask for anything other than leaking to Mr Goff, she also failed to tell him what he was being investigated for and treat him fairly when doing so, before reaching conclusions about his actions that were flat out wrong, in fact.
The Ombudsman consequently recommended that Mr Leask receive a formal apology, have his legal expenses paid, and receive a compensatory payment to cover the reputational harm done by Dame Paula's flawed findings.
However, rather than accept and implement the Ombudsman's recommendations, the Government (and the commission, which really appears to be joined at the hip with ministers on this matter) seems to have decided to resist these findings.
Its strategy has two aspects to it.
The first is to imply that there is no smoke without fire, in that Mfat public servants generally were in the wrong in opposing the proposed changes.
Murray McCully ran that line in his comments last week when he continued to refer darkly "to unprofessional and disreputable conduct'' by unnamed public servants.
The second aspect is to try to minimise the Ombudsman's findings, suggesting they amount to little more than nit-picking over process and suggestions for how to do things a bit better next time round.
That was the tenor of the commission's initial response, echoed last Tuesday by its Minister, Paula Bennett: "I think though that if you read [the Ombudsman's report] carefully, what it says is that there were certainly some procedural matters that we should be learning from and that shouldn't have happened in that way.
"But I actually think there's been a misinterpretation of the report itself, in that it's saying it made allegations against people that shouldn't have been made, and that's certainly not the way I read it.''
Well, either Ms Bennett is reading a completely different report from the one the Ombudsman has released publicly, or she's playing fast and loose with the truth.
Because here, repeated verbatim, is one of the Ombudsman's conclusions: "the evidence relied upon by the [Rebstock] inquiry did not reasonably support some of the criticisms made about Mr Leask in [her report] and some highly relevant evidence was not properly addressed'' and ‘‘the manner in which the evidence was portrayed in the [report] did not fairly represent Mr Leask's actions''.
That's not a "procedural matter that we should be learning from''.
It simply isn't.
It's a substantive finding that Dame Paula acted wrongly when levelling certain allegations against Mr Leask because there was no real evidence to support them, and Ms Bennett really cannot pretend it is anything else.
But why should anyone outside of Wellington's "Thorndon bubble'' then care about what appears to be a squabble among government agencies involving the treatment of public servants?
Here's why I think we should.
New Zealand's system centralises a lot of power in our governmental agencies, and very few mechanisms exist for calling misuse of that power to account.
The Ombudsman's role has long been considered one of the most important.
While not legally binding, the findings of and recommendations from its reports are accorded a considerable degree of mana.
That stems from the office's basic purpose: to be an independent watchdog over public power that isn't just interested in whether it is lawfully exercised (like the courts are), but whether it is fairly used.
If the Ombudsman's wholesale condemnation of the treatment of a senior public servant - someone with status, resources and a measure of clout - can be effectively ignored, then what hope can less powerful individuals have that the Ombudsman will be able to give them some form of redress against wrongful (by which I mean substantively wrong) actions of government?
And if not the Ombudsman, then who?
- Prof Geddis is a specialist in public law, rights jurisprudence and democratic theory at the University of Otago Law Faculty.
