Andrew Dickens: Our public service can do better

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge · Feb 18, 2025 · 1m · transcript

A mate and I have a little joke.

Whenever we screw up. Either big or small. We’ll look at each other and say, “it only took one goat”.

It acknowledges that it takes forever to build up a good reputation and all it takes is one misstep to immediately undo all that good work.

New Zealand was recently told it had slipped a place in the world reputational survey around fraud and corruption.

We’re now 4th in the world. Which is still very good but not as good as we were before.

The news that confidential data held by a government agency was inappropriately given to a third party is a very serious…