Historians, as explorers in and recreators of the past, have by their very vocation placed a high value on the evidential record of the past. Historians have a professional interest in … no, it is far stronger than that, theirs is a professional commitment to the preservation of archives and records, and to their integrity as evidence. Historians are acutely aware, compared with the majority of us who are only dimly aware, that, to quote David Lowenthal's The Past is a Different Country, "to be is to have been", that the now is an extrusion from the then.

I know it is currently fashionable in government circles to believe that if you throw enough money at consultants, PR whiz kids, and the change agents who now infest the senior ranks of the public sector bureaucracies, you can obliterate the past and create a playing field so steam-rollered, so pulverised, with its topsoil so sterilised that no seeds from the past can ever take root there. But this is a passing aberration, a fashion. Historians have documented similar aberrations in the past.

Like a plague of locusts the new managerialists may seem to have devoured everything in their path, but the rich earth nourishes new growth, nature, like common sense, reasserts itself, and we are in the long run a little wiser, perhaps.

But historians, and even if we add to that roll the family historians, are in a numerical minority, no matter how influential they may be in creating the stories that give meaning to our experience.

Dr Michael Cullen, M.P.

So for two reasons I do not propose to pursue the perfectly valid arguments for the public resourcing of the preservation of archives and records because of their historical and cultural value. The first reason is the presence on the platform of a fully certified professional historian, Dr Michael Cullen (1) (even though he is currently more involved in the creation of history than its retelling, and many of us would like him to get on with the next instalment as soon as possible) someone who can put far more eloquently than I the arguments of those who need the records of the past for understanding and interpretation and cultural stability. The second reason I have already touched on, the fact that the users of archives and records for cultural and historical purposes are a minority voice. They are as customers, for so they are conceived these days, buying in a niche market with minimal economic power, boutique shoppers who are small change in the big economic picture.

I propose to look instead at the interest that the majority has in the integrity of the records of governance. Governance: that is the exercise of the delegated power of governing or managing corporate bodies, whether they be central government, local government, non-profit organisations or commercial organisations operating under company law or the law of partnerships. That majority has an interest, not as consumers or customers in a marketplace, but as citizens in a society under the rule of law. The Greeks, as always, had a word for it. The polis, the society created by its members for the benefit of its members and operated within a firm structure of laws and regulations agreed to by the majority to balance individual liberty with social justice.

But before I develop the theme of the interests of the majority of citizens in good record keeping, a few lessons and insights from the past, a little history.

Insights from the Past

The record keeping activities of the state through most of recorded history have been seen by the majority as detrimental to their interests, the records seen as instruments of the powerful to maintain their control over the weak. In the oriental despotisms of Europe's Near East the rulers carefully documented the land and the people, but for their benefit, as the basis for the levying of taxes, forced labour for public works and military levies for conquest. In Pharaonic Egypt, the most systematically organised of the despotic bureaucracies to milk the majority for the benefit of the few, government administration and the preparation of records were the same thing. Scribe stands for government official, the term for record repository and government agency are identical. The state required that all law suits, all business dealings, all matrimonial agreements, had to be in writing to be valid, and the value of written records penetrated so far into the thinking of Egyptians that the dead, on the final day of judgement, had to vindicate themselves by written statements.

In ancient Athens the archives were central to the administration of the polis, to document citizenship or other status, to regulate business transactions, to document publicly all aspects of family life that were of concern for the stability of the polis. Aristotle, in the Politics, identifies the archives office as one of the indispensable institutions of his model state.

The emphasis, you will note, is on current records and their value in administering complex societies with specialised divisions of labour. As writing was created to serve administration, so archives were created to serve administrators, not scholars.

During the early years of the French revolution many of the hated records of the past, the monuments of feudal oppression, were destroyed. Minister Garat gave to the archivist at Lille this advice:

"All the old documents with gothic script are presumably there as elsewhere only legal titles of feudalism, of the subjection of the feeble to the strong"

Les Archives Nationales de France

The more radical revolutionaries in France argued for the total destruction of the records of the Ancien Regime because they embodied the rights and privilege of an old order (they also wanted a new level playing field), but the conservatives argued that these records were now the property of the people, should be preserved for cultural uses, and henceforth should be fully accessible to the people. The argument that probably carried the day was that because of the liquidation of feudal rights and property relationships the public needed access to the old records to protect their newly acquired interests.

The French revolution established three principles: the responsibility of the state for the preservation of the documentary heritage of the past, as well as the current records of government activity; the right of the citizen of access to the archives; and the need for an independent national administration of all public archives.

Historians move into Archives

Most European countries followed the French model of a national archives in the first part of the nineteenth century, but at the same time, and partly as a reaction against French cultural hegemony, these countries began to use national history as a means of creating new national identities, especially in the German-speaking states. The new nationalistic, and essentially romantic, historiography emphasised the publishing of documentary sources and the writing of national history out of the treasures of the new national archives, and historians quickly replaced the former registry officials, trained in the management of government office records, in the management of the archival repositories.

The attitudes of the historians to the archives were entirely different. Archives developed more and more along the lines of the manuscript collections in libraries, with the major emphasis on the arrangement and cataloguing of mediaeval documents, the raw materials of the new history, with a neglect of the regular transfer of government records to the archives. It seemed so obvious that records should be arranged and catalogued for scholarly use and the arrangement was designed to bring out points of view rather than reflect the special character of their creation. It was not until the 1840s that the reaction set in and the doctrine of the respect pour les fonds was enunciated and widely adopted, with a move away from the attitudes and techniques of librarianship back to the work of registry officials and the supervision of the total public record.

In Britain, in search of improved access for the historian, the Public Record Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission, aided by private enterprise, indulged in an orgy of printed calendars and complete texts of archives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Hilary Jenkinson's (2) judgement on this prodigious output was that while it stocked library shelves it only touched the fringe of the problem and made accessible a tiny fraction of one per cent of the archival stock. In the same essay Jenkinson warned that the archivist must not turn student (read researcher-historians), for every student has an axe to grind, a theory to establish, a statement to prove, and that form of interest is incompatible with dispassionate conduct in sorting, in arrangement, in presentation. He recounts, as part of the warning, the action of the British Cabinet Minister who wanted all existing records in the Public Record Office between certain dates re-arranged (he was prepared to bring in army of mail sorters from the Post Office to do the job) in order to further his research: his research for the name of Shakespeare. It wasn't done, but Jenkinson claims that researchers with axes to grind have had plans hardly less revolutionary adopted with devastating results.

As impressive, and oppressive, as were the record-keeping bureaucracies of ancient Egypt and pre-revolutionary France, they pale before the record-keeping capacities and power of modem bureaucracies, state, local or commercial. Decisions made by those to whom we delegate authority for governance impact on practically every action we take. Every time we pick up a telephone, open a newspaper or a book, turn on a computer or a television screen or radio, what we buy or can't afford to buy, and the price, is affected by decisions made by our governors on our behalf.

But there is a significant difference between ancient Egypt, France under the ancien regime, and us. We live in consensual societies sustained by majorities for the benefit of majorities, and we, the governed, consent to rule by professional minorities composed of elected politicians and bureaucrats.

They are accountable to us, the majority, for their activities on our behalf, and we have established a number of mechanisms for ensuring that accountability - the ballot box, parliament, law, the courts, ombudsmen and parliamentary commissioners, auditors-general, and sustaining them all is Aristotle's fifth office, the archives and records of governance.

Without a record-keeping system which can guarantee the integrity of the public record our accountability procedures are highly vulnerable. Without a written record which can be trusted we are dependent on memory (the Winebox Inquiry (3) investigations have revealed just how fragile the memory of senior managers facing criminal prosecutions can be), or we are dependent on who's integrity is to be given the greater credence.

This has been increasingly recognised internationally, and has recently been strongly reinforced by politicians and constitutional lawyers across the Tasman.

The Australian Law Reform Commission, in its December 1997 review of the Australian Archives Act 1983, is very forthright on the constitutional role of record-keeping systems in government. It sees the primary job of the National Archives of Australia as being to guarantee the integrity of the Commonwealth records system, from the cradle to the grave, to ensure that full and accurate records are created and systems put in place to ensure their integrity and functionality. They are very clear that the neglect of the 'front end' of record keeping in favour of archival preservation is potentially dangerous. The first functional responsibility, of the ten listed by the Commission is:

1. To ensure that Commonwealth departments and agencies create and maintain such records in relation to the discharge of their functions as are necessary

• For the efficient and accountable management of those functions;

• To record relevant rights, entitlements, and obligations of persons under Commonwealth law,

• To document the history of the Commonwealth.

That is real front end stuff, real cradle watching!

It is recommended that the National Archives of Australia be given overall responsibility for implementing a single whole-of-government approach to Commonwealth records creation and maintenance, including the promulgation of standards and guidelines for appraisal, sentencing, destruction, custody, and preservation, and monitoring compliance, to the extent of entering premises to check that the standards and guidelines are being implemented.

To give the Archives the clout to enforce its extended role, the Commission recommends that it be established as in independent statutory body, separate from the executive government and responsible to a Council, with control of its own assets and managing its own finances, and organised on the sectoral model with vertical integration of advisory, regulatory and delivery service functions.

New Zealand model rejected

The New Zealand functional model, separation of policy-making from operational functions is considered and rejected because of its weaknesses in coordination and consultation between policy makers and implementers. In general, it recommends that the Australian archives be free from the constraints of ministerial direction, except that the Minister may direct the Archives only when formulating a standard or guideline relating to a particular matter to take into account any government policies in relation to that matter that the Minister may identify and direct be taken into account.

The Commission states that the current laissez-faire approach to record-keeping within the agencies of government is inadequate, and reliance cannot be placed on initial unregulated record-keeping with statutory management only when records reach archival status. Archives are not just a basis of minding the cemetery.

Most of these same ideas occur in the 1996 report of the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee to the State Parliament of Victoria, but it goes even further in recommending that the Victoria Public Record Office be given a role in auditing the adoption of record-keeping standards in government agencies on a similar basis to the Auditor-General.

There are very good reasons why the Australians are placing such emphasis on the integrity of the public record, as the evidence to recent Royal Commissions in Queensland (4) and Western Australia (5) testifies eloquently, but we are in no position to crow over the fallibility of our neighbours. You don't have to look very far to find the same slimy creatures that have galvanised the Australians lurking under our own doorsteps.

We have been fortunate in New Zealand that we could, as citizens, take a great deal of the mechanisms of governance on trust. We had the assurance that there were widely accepted conventions of governance, codes of socially approved or sanctioned behaviour, within which the professionals operated. We had enough confidence in party manifestos, the loyalty of politicians to the parties which placed them in parliament, the integrity of individual politicians, the neutrality and selflessness of public servants, not to worry too much about the detail. We were well aware that democratic government is not perfect, just better than its alternatives, and believed that all that was really necessary was a healthy skepticism, and keeping the big stick under the bed ready for the three-yearly elections.

I doubt whether many people are now prepared to take so much on trust. Our faith in politicians, in the political system, and in the public sector bureaucracy, has been badly bruised in recent years.

Truth v. the Bottom Line

The former ethos of the public service has substantially been replaced by the behavioural models of the marketplace, with questions of value, even of truth, being calculated against the new universal standard of the financial bottom line, and the senior members of the public sector bureaucracy (I can't bear to call them public servants any more, so public sector bureaucracy will have to do as a description) have quickly learned to respond to market signals, as witness the appearance of two judges, a departmental head, and a former auditor-general, accused of tickling the public purse to their financial advantage. And these are only the tip of the iceberg of self-serving behaviour. Government agencies are looking more and more like the tax-farmers of Biblical times as they back away from providing public services and move into revenue-generating user-pays modes, and are trusted less and less.

When there is an erosion of trust in the people who are delegated to exercise the powers of governance over the majority, there is a greater need for the maintenance of the integrity of the record of their governance and for increasing public access to that record. If you can't trust the bastards there are two possible solutions.

If I were a criminal, engaged in a criminal conspiracy, I wouldn't be arguing for a proper records system which would establish a paper trail of my criminal activity. In fact I would avoid all documentation and carry a gun to settle any dispute about where truth lay. It is no accident that governments which are criminal conspiracies against their people don't win awards for records management, but are world leaders in enforcement at the point of a gun. Even their secret police surveillance records are corrupt farragos of gossip, personal vendettas, slander and lies.

If I were an investor in a company, or a senior employee of a company, after what we have learned from the Winebox Inquiry about the millions of dollars changing hands without written documentation, and the fragile memories of those involved in making those decisions, I would be insisting on a first-rate records system to establish paper trails that could be trusted, for my own protection.

My argument, very simply, is that we, as citizens, have a vital interest in good record keeping to maintain our control over those to whom we entrust our governance. In the present unfortunate circumstances, when levels of public trust in the political system are so low, we should as citizens be pressing for more formal controls, higher standards, and more investment in record keeping, for our own protection, not only in the public sector but also in the private sector, as more former government activity is being eased out of the public sector into the private and large corporations control more of our society.

Records and archives, in a democracy, should be the instruments of the weak - weak as individuals, powerful as a collective - to control those entrusted with the power of governance,

What of course has been happening in recent years is the very reverse: a decline in the investment in and standards of record keeping, both in the public and private sectors, with the constitutional risks increasingly being transferred to individual citizens. In the private sector 'light' regulation, or self regulation, has become the norm, and in the public sector the role of National Archives in surveillance of overall government record keeping has been curtailed by financial restrictions, and the State Services Commission (6) has abdicated its responsibilities. The laissez-faire approach condemned by the Australian Law Reform Commission rules in New Zealand.

National Archives of N.Z.

At a time when National Archives of New Zealand, in the public interest, should be strengthened and directed towards a whole-of-government approach to records creation and maintenance, it is being diverted in another direction, down that same historical heritage blind alley that others have long since exited, or like Victoria, are exiting at high speed.

You will all be aware of the outline. A new Heritage Group has been formed in Internal Affairs, bringing together under a new General Manager, the existing Historical Branch, the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Historical Properties (war graves and monuments), and the National Archives. This is being done, and here I am quoting verbatim from departmental documents, otherwise you wouldn't believe me, to provide a stronger focus for government's role in heritage, to enable resources to be better utilised in order to gain the best return on investment, to realise opportunities in building heritage products and services, to focus and strengthen business development and to generate third-party revenue, and to enhance service delivery. The benefits are spelled out as a heightening of New Zealanders' sense of their own unique traditions and history, bringing the past alive and making the records of our people and our government accessible to all New Zealanders.

Now I am not saying that we do not need wisely-selected reliable evidence for historical assessment, for the longer-term auditing of governance that the Greeks bequeathed to the world, something we call history, we do. We also need, because of the smallness of our market, government investment in this historical auditing. I support strongly, as most of you would, government support of the Historical Branch, the Dictionary, the Historical Atlas, and a revised Encyclopedia. I doubt the wisdom of the Heritage Group in achieving these ends, However, we don't have the instruments of direct democracy that were available to the Greeks to control the performance of our governors (death, removal of citizenship, and exile) but we have developed alternatives appropriate to modem societies, and one of those is comprehensive and reliable record keeping for the short-term auditing of governance.

We need, quite simply, to make a greater public investment in National Archives to enable it to fulfil its proper constitutional role. Treasury would recommend against such a course of action on the grounds that it would increase the financial risk to government, and thus to us as taxpayers, but the alternative, of allowing the records of governance to be further weakened, poses a far greater risk to our rights and our powers as citizens.

Who care? We, as citizens, care!

Explanatory notes

1. The Hon. Dr Michael Cullen, M.A., PhD., M.P. for Dunedin South, New Zealand Treasurer, Minister of Finance, Deputy Leader of the New Zealand Labour Party and, at the time of speaking, Parliamentary Opposition. His own paper to the conference may be seen at http://www.caldeson.com/RIMOS/cullen.html. (Return to text)

2. Sir Hilary Jenkinson, a former Keeper of Public Records, Public Record Office, London.
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3. The Winebox Inquiry: A long-running (1996-1998) but inconclusive N.Z. judicial inquiry into allegations of off-shore tax dodging. So called because initial incriminating documents were passed to the authorities in a cardboard wine case.
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Sir Johannes Bjelke-Petersen

4. Royal Commission into the administration of State Premier, New Zealand-born Sir Johannes ("Joh") Bjelke-Petersen - "The Fitzgerald Inquiry", 1988.
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5. Royal Commission into the Commercial Activities of Government and Other Matters - "Royal Commission on W.A. Inc.", 1992.
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6. The State Services Commission: N.Z. Government department that advises Ministers on Public Service matters.
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7. The Archives and Records Association of New Zealand (ARANZ), P.O. Box 11-553, Manners Street, Wellington, N.Z.
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