The only stick at the end of the day is the power of disclosure. We have no powers other than the powers to recommend. My predecessor said to me when I came into this job 10 years ago, “Morgan, you haven't got any teeth, but you've got powerful gums.”
The reality is that it's the power to actually tell the story to the whole of New Zealand. All our reports get tabled in Parliament. They're not part of an annual report; we do that as a statutory requirement. We table our reports through the Speaker as public documents, and then we have a marketing program that we wrap around them. So we take it out to society, and then that empowers many others to move.
I think one of the important things is that with a role like this, which at the end of the day is only ever recommendatory—and I think that's exactly how it should stay—you have to look at its influence away beyond the actual recommendations. Counting up action on recommendations is absolutely no measure of the performance of an office like this, anywhere in the world. What you need to be looking at always is what is the wider conversation, dialogue, that you generate, and what subsequently flows from that. We've worried a lot about our influence. We do outcome assessments of all our reports two, three, or four years later, and we look away beyond just the response to the recommendations, and that's an important point.