‘Mr Efficiency’ for Justice

Press, 21 February 1986, Page 18

‘Mr Efficiency’ for Justice

From

MARTIN FREETH

[ in Wellington

Mr David Oughton is a public servant for our times. The new Secretary for Justice’s reputation as an excellent administrator has been won through his efforts to bring greater efficiency and management accountability to his comer of the public service. The approach is much in tune with the new era of State sector efficiency being pursued by the Labour Government.

As deputy Secretary (administration), Mr Oughton has spent the last eight years running the courts administration head office finance and personnel, and the department’s births, deaths and marriages registry. He has been largely responsible for decentralisation of court and probation service management, and more recently, for an ambitious efficiency study of how some departmental staff do their jobs. David Oughton is a good bureaucrat, but he is also something of an enthusiast for liberalising the justice system in a changing and multi-cultural society. His friendly, down-to-earth style would seem in keeping with the penal policy reforms which the Justice Department is now implementing under the Criminal Justice Act, 1985. His appointment, at the age of 50, as permanent head is the latest step in a career which started when he left St Bede’s College, Christchurch, to join the Ministry of Works as a clerical cadet in 1953. In 1962, he transferred to the State Services Commission as an inspector. It is a common public service perception that employment in the commission is a great asset for career advancement in any other department. After 10 years, Mr Oughton moved to the D.S.I.R. as its Director of Administration.

In 1976, Mr Oughton briefly took his. administrative experience back to the Ministry of Works. Eighteen months later he moved to Justice. Mr John Robertson, who was Secretary from 1979 to 1982, has much praise for his former deputy, to whom he says he was able to leave much of the day-to-

day running of the department, while he concentrated on policy reform. “David came up the hard way of knocking around in the general administrative field,” he says. Mr Oughton is very practical, good with people and a great ‘trouble shooter,’ he says. Like Mr Robertson, and Mr Jim Callahan, the present Secretary, who will retire in May, Mr Oughton is not a lawyer. In the past, the Secretary for Justice was invariably a man with legal training, something reckoned to be essential in view of the department’s stewardship of the judiciary and legal system, and its role in much of the

Government’s general legislative programme. The appointment of administrators is a recognition of the disparate range of other functions that Justice performs, and may reflect the establishment of an independent Law Reform Commission. Mr Oughton has a professional accountancy qualification. In a recent interview, he pointed to the new Criminal Justice Act as the biggest challenge facing the department. The legislation is intended to make imprisonment the last resort of the criminal justice system and it introduced victim reparation and community supervision as alternative sentences for other than violent offending. Mr Ough-

ton’s articulation of the need and potential for such reform was put forcefully in simple language, conveying a sense of personal commitment. “We have got to do something. The number of people going to prison is much too high and a large proportion of them are getting jail sentences for property offences,” he said. David Oughton is particularly concerned about "system bias” against Maoris and other ethnic minorities. In recent months, he and other officials have been speaking at huis around New Zealand to explain and promote Maori community involvement in supervisory sentencing under the new policy. A concern that institutions reflect the characteristics of all ethnic groups is evident also in Mr Oughton’s long parttime involvement in education, first oh the board of Mana College and more recently on the council for the new Parumoana Community College. One of Mr Oughton’s first jobs as permanent head will be to 1 review the findings of a study of the management of the courts in one centre. The project is his brain-child, launched after the 1983 commission of inquiry into the Wellington courts administration. Melbourne business consultants were brought in to measure the work habits of staff processing paper and dealing with the public.

The approach follows the quality control concepts of an American business guru, Edward Deeming. David Oughton is a keen Deeming student. The courts project, a pilot for other branches of the department, is intended to produce greater efficiency in the work plan of each public servant and a lower final cost to the taxpayer. The Minister of Finance, Mr Douglas, has every reason to find such public servants heart-warming. David Oughton would like to see efficiency, in the final analysis, take the form of greater public access to justice, through quicker counter service and lower court fees.