I dropped out from public sector...
...and now i don't know what to do lol
The original article can be found at Johnny’s Substack and is syndicated here with the author’s permission
A month ago I emailed my manager and his manager and told them that I was resigning. I didn’t give a reason, just the minimum amount of notice required. Now my notice period is up and I need to start writing.
My decision to quit may have been reckless but it wasn’t completely spontaneous. Things had gotten pretty unpleasant in the office and, although I found pleasure in organising alongside my colleagues, I wasn’t necessarily going to be able to continue sending impish all-staff emails forever. Like nearly everyone in my organisation (which boasted some of the highest turnover rates in the sector) I was furiously applying for jobs elsewhere but the market isn’t exactly conducive to grand gestures so I left without an exit plan.
The NZ public service is a dog’s breakfast at the moment
For several political terms prior to my entry into the workforce, New Zealand’s public service has been a domain where several high-profile positions have been held by cardigan-wearing dweebs who couldn’t care less about people outside Wellington. These senior leaders subscribe to the doctrine ‘political neutrality’, a type of politics-free-from-politics. Although the Public Service Commission lays out pretty straightforward guidelines, in practice it simply means you can’t say who you’re going to vote for but you can whole-heartedly preach austerity because the market has about as much to do with politics as gravity.
Into this environment comes a newly-elected government as hostile to Māori, to workers, to the environment as any in recent memory and senior leaders have no conception of how to respond other than credulously nodding along to its agenda. To push back would be political, to agree to everything they suggest is just doing your job. For some of these guys, facilitating the implentation of a hard-right agenda is proof of their political neutrality “it may not be consistent with my own beliefs but that’s what being a public servant is all about.” The more odious the things they do (with or without a martyr’s internal struggle), the better they must be at their job. Others were a little too eager to jump when the new Government told them to, even pre-empting the racism of their new masters. Others still are useful buffoons who haven’t really thought about the implications of what they do but are content bumbling along like Mr Beans on six-figure salaries.
Rob Campbell is one of a handful of people who held senior roles in the public sector to understand the perverse contradictions of ‘political neutrality’
The further you go down an organisational chart though, the more likely you’re going to encounter genuinely good people. People who joined the public service for the right reasons. People who think long and hard and stress and agonise about the impact of work on ordinary people. Most people who work for government are like this. Being a bloodless technocrat is an aberration, something you have to force yourself into becoming.
But…
…all the good people are leaving (and I did too)
Within this environment, I was striving to balance my substantive role (in a mercifully depoliticised corner of the sector) with work as a union delegate. But as time went on and the issues my members were having to deal with got gnarlier and gnarlier, it became increasingly untenable to stay.
I started suffering from insomnia, spending the night writing righteous emails to the senior leadership team and HR in my head. Most stayed somewhere between my sleep-deprived brain and my drafts without regard for their intended recipients. My own role was never threatened but I was seeing more and more people leaving the organisation, often with health issues they didn’t have when they started. As the worsening environment chipped away at me I was no longer able to ignore the feeling in my gut of absolute disgust and embarrassment on behalf of myself and the people around me.
That’s not to say that there aren’t people doing amazing things from within the public sector. I have so much admiration for those who continue to organise, find ways to push back and ensure they get everything in email. But for me, I just can’t continue to physically stomach the contradictions.
So I’m going to give writing a go
For any writing endeavour to succeed, I will need to come to terms with the fact that not all readers share my unconditional love of rodents.
I’ve written a bit in the past. Under my own name, under pseudonyms, not to mention countless briefings and Cabinet papers and emails. Although my instinct is a default state of fluffy or frivolous, even when I’m writing about things that are neither fluffy nor frivolous, I take the art of email-writing very seriously.
Now, I’m hoping to continue that writing until my savings are depleted and I have to go back to fulltime work (not for Central Government). There are a few things I’m keen to share on here, even if they end up being so niche that I’m the only one who cares. The Spinoff hasn’t published me since my piece on the history of rodents in Aotearoa that only I cared about.
For October 2024, I'm arranging my viewing around a few themes: Voodoo, Corman/Price Poe adaptations, Jiang Shi, 50s sci fi and general films I've been meaning to see.
The first thing I’m going to write will be a series based on my October viewing—31 days of horror films with a focus on a few themes of interest to me. I expect this bias towards the movies to always be at the forefront of my writing. However, I hope I will still be able to branch out more broadly into arts, politics and rodents. I also intend to use this platform to share information about my upcoming book. I promise my output will not always be as naval-gazing as this particular entry.
When I put more space between me and the public sector, I may start opining on the state of government work in greater detail. Until then, it will likely be ghouls, goblins and maybe the occasional gopher.
Johnny Crawford is a writer and recovering public servant based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.