Public corporations in New Zealand state intervention in the economy and political myth

Abstract

The primary objective of this study was to make intelligible the use of public corporations in New Zealand. Preliminary investigations revealed that a major problem in carrying out this objective would be to define a public corporation. A large number of government agencies existed in New Zealand with varying relations with other public sector agencies and institutions and with the private sector. Few of these conformed to any definition of a public corporation offered by overseas studies, but most had sufficient similarity to a definition to make exclusion of them from the study highly questionable. The most important characteristic of a public corporation, as overseas studies confirmed, was its relationships with the institutions of the public sector on the one hand, and those with the private sector on the other. Accordingly, an extrinsic definition of the public corporation was developed, rather than the intrinsic ones most commonly used in studies of this kind. Defining the public corporation as a relational entity solved the problem of definition, and also provided the means to resolve the paradox that even though the name public corporation was not associated with any political or administrative identity, government agencies continued to be called public corporations. The methodology for this study was adopted from the structural analysis of myths developed by the French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss. Each public corporation was treated as a variant of the myth of the public corporation. This meant that different examples could be analysed as transformations of each other, using the statutes which incorporated them (or subsequently amended their incorporating legislation) as texts of the myth. The major advantages of this method, apart from resolving the definition problem, were that it facilitated comparison of apparently unlike agencies, and provided a means of resolving the contradictions and paradoxes associated with the use of public corporations in New Zealand. The study contains a statistical profile of New Zealand public corporations drawn from the detailed analysis of the statutes affecting each public corporation. This analysis is then continued with an examination of a selected few examples according to the relationships outlined in the model to show how different corporations are transformations of each other. Finally a comparison is made of the various forms of a few public corporations as they have existed at different points in time. This is also based on the relationships in the model and is used to develop an explanation of changes that have occurred in the forms given to government agencies. From this analysis a paradigm is developed to relate organisational form to the role of the state in society. In conclusion the study indicates specific areas in which further research could test the model used, and suggests ways in which structural analysis might be used in analysing other political phenomena.