The Shut-Up Policy: The New Zealand Police Case

The Public Service Commission has the Speak-Up Policy, which should be called the Shut-Up Policy. What happened at Police should not be a shock.

The Speak Up Framework is the policy the Public Service uses to promote an environment of safety and accountability. It is the policy under which staff members can raise issues in a “safe” setting and “support effective reporting and managing of wrongdoing concerns”. However, it should be called The Shut-Up Framework.

This was one of my biggest findings during my Master’s Thesis at Victoria University when I tried to understand how and why the Public Service discriminates against non-white workers for senior leadership roles. The barriers are informal and invisible due to many factors. Still, the most surprising finding of my Master’s was the use of the Speak Up Framework and the Code of Conduct by agencies as their primary methods for preventing and measuring discrimination. On average, 13 people per year raise internal complaints among over 28,000 employees in 2022. This is not a sign of there being no complaints; it’s a sign of the policy's ineffectiveness in actually encouraging staff to speak up, or as I like to say, its actual goal is to encourage staff to Shut Up.

I’m technically on a writing sabbatical from Less Certain, trying to recover my brain after a demanding year. But now and then, something hits me so directly that I get an urge to write about it. The Police scandal is one of those moments. What happened with McSkimming’s is too close to my heart, too connected to my research, and far too familiar to ignore.

I was reading an article from the Weekend Herald this morning by Michael Morrah about the case, and it had a line that reminded me of this:

The IPCA report raised “questions about the thoroughness of the Public Service Commission’s integrity checks that allowed McSminning to be appointed to the role of deputy commissioner in the first place”.

Which is exactly what my Master’s thesis found: how do innocent, and in this case, criminal white men, not only get away with this, but get promoted?

People keep asking, “How could something like this happen?” As if this is some extraordinary crisis unique to the Police. It’s not. I'll say this again for the folk in the back, It Is Not. What happened to this woman happens all the time across the public service, just out of sight, under the banner of “process,” “policy,” and “professional standards.” The only real difference here is that it got out. Finally!

I spent two years researching the internal complaint systems of the New Zealand public service. What I found is that the so-called Speak Up Framework doesn’t help people speak up; it allows institutions to shut things down in a magically effective way. In 2022, when I was researching my master’s thesis, I found that on average across a workforce of more than 28,000 public servants, only 13 people a year raised an internal complaint (that is 0.2%). Agencies report this number proudly as evidence that everything is working. In reality, it’s evidence that the system is functionally unusable. That their policy is highly ineffective or effective, but for some nefarious purpose to suffocate the oxygen out of the complaints.

This isn’t a failure of process. This is the process. And the Police case is simply that same reality, but on steroids.

In my research, I saw that the internal complaint pathways mirror the Police report: confusing, inconsistent, intimidating, punitive, and designed to protect the institution rather than the complainant. Policies that look robust on paper are “long, detailed, and intimidating,” giving the illusion of safety while actively discouraging use. When complaints are raised, information is shaped behind the complainant’s back, through “informal, invisible backchannels” where the person raising the concern has no control over what happens next. What starts as a formal process becomes institutional word salad, institutional gaslighting, and in many cases, institutional betrayal, all terms the scholarship already warns about.

In the Police’s case, we see the same pattern, but with even higher stakes. Senior officers circulated a narrative that the complainant was a “woman scorned” trying to “discredit” a Deputy Commissioner. This narrative was accepted at face value, repeated, legitimised, and solidified into organisational truth. No one checked.

Instead of investigating the allegations, the Police protected him. They directed support towards him. They framed him as the victim. And they arrested her. Holy Shit, God Give Me Strength!

If you’ve ever worked in the public service, you’ll recognise the underlying mechanics instantly: the institutional wall. In my thesis, I argued that the so-called “formal enablers” the policies, frameworks, codes of conduct, and leadership statements- are overshadowed and overridden by powerful “informal barriers,” the unwritten rules that say: complaints must be shut down quickly and preferably in favour of the agency. That is exactly what happened here and what happens most of the time.

The system incentivises silence through complexity, ambiguity, power asymmetry, and reputational risk management. Institutions, especially hierarchical ones like the Police, will almost always prioritise protecting their senior leaders over the safety of vulnerable complainants. And when the person accused is at the very top of the pyramid, the system contorts itself into unimaginable shapes to maintain the illusion of stability.

We talk about “speak up” culture as if it can be trained into existence. But a framework that only 13 people in a workforce of tens of thousands use each year is not a speak-up system; it’s a shit'sp system. A system with such low engagement is not working. It is being avoided.

So no, I’m not shocked by the Police scandal. I’m heartened, but I’m not satisfied.

Because if we stripped away the uniforms, badges, titles, and looked only at the structural incentives, the barriers, the power dynamics, and the documented behaviours, this case is simply the public service complaint system operating exactly as designed.

What would shock me is if anything actually changed.