The life and times of Mr Fixit, Sir Brian Roche
Saturday, 27 June 2026
When Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announced Sir Brian Roche’s appointment as tsar of the public service, he celebrated the fact he’s been endorsed by the leaders of every political party. Nikki Macdonald looks at the highs and lows of Roche’s career - the latest investigating integrity concerns at MBIE - and asks how you become everyone’s favourite Mr Fixit.
Nice guy. Good guy. Tough guy. All descriptions that come up multiple times when discussing government go-to fix-it guy, Sir Brian Roche.
Talk to those who’ve worked with the former PwC accountant over his long private and public sector career and you’ll get assessments ranging from “outstanding” to “terrible”.
But two things stand out. In the politically neutral tradition of the public service, he’s happy to serve any master. He doesn’t need to change his spots to match the prevailing politics because he never bares them.
“I am completely mystified by his ability to persuade both political sides that he’s really on their side,” says a former board colleague.
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And he’s very good at settling the horses.
“He's incredibly calm and calm people make politicians feel good,” says someone who has dealt with him across different roles.
“If you're a politician and you're losing your mind and you've got someone who's calm, and they sound as if they're on top of it, then that's a wonder. Everything's collapsing and someone’s saying ‘This is fine, don't worry about it, we can fix this’. People naturally gravitate towards that.”
A fellowship of Fixits
Roche’s CV is as long as it is diverse.
Born in Hawke’s Bay, he trained as an accountant and spent the first two decades of his working life at PwC. That included contracting to the public sector, across education, housing and transport.
In the 1990s, he was chief crown negotiator on Treaty of Waitangi settlements and his 2017 knighthood citation credits him with being “a major contributor” to the ground-breaking Ngai Tahu settlement.
More recently, before being appointed Public Service Commissioner in 2024, he was chief negotiator for Ngāpuhi, whose settlement dreams still languish unresolved.
In 2004, Helen Clark’s government appointed him chairperson of the new Auckland Regional Transport Authority, paving a potholed path to one of the most problematic episodes of his career - the “disastrous” PPP to build Wellington mega-road Transmission Gully. More about that later.
And in 2008, he became deputy commissioner of Hawke’s Bay district health board, after its elected members were controversially sacked. Roche - then still a partner at PwC - was shoulder-tapped for the job by the government-appointed commissioner, Sir John Anderson.
It was more than a meeting of minds; it was a fellowship of fixers. Another accountant by training, Anderson also bridged public and private, business and politics. And his ability to placate politicians on both sides had already earned him the label that would be passed on to Roche - Mr Fixit.
What Anderson saw in Roche we’ll never know, as he’s no longer around to ask. But he also shared the view that his job was to serve the government of the day. And he never sought public profile. (While Roche has appeared regularly in the media discussing the latest public service scandal, he declined to be interviewed for this story, as he didn’t want to talk about himself.)
In 2010, Roche was handed arguably his first major fixit job, as chief executive of an ailing NZ Post. Faced with shrinking piles of letters, he showed the mettle behind the nice, cutting costs, reducing delivery to alternate days and pivoting to parcels.
A colleague from that time says he did an “outstanding” job.
“It was the longest corner ever to be turned, but it was a five-year strategy and that was basically the only way it could happen.
“He is extremely accomplished and very very good at what he does… He’s very much a value-for-money guy, so he’s a tough unit, but if he’s given a job, he knows what the job is and he will do it.”
But he was always an agent of the government. A yes man, if you like.
“If the government has said we want to do something, his version of duty and service would be getting it done, and cracking a few eggs along the way, if he had to.”
Like Anderson, who was a long-time cricket administrator, Roche also earned his sporting stripes, for which he gets glowing reviews. He chaired the Hurricanes rugby franchise through its most successful period, including winning its first Super Rugby title in 2016.
And he headed the bid project team that landed New Zealand the 2011 Rugby World Cup and later chaired the company that ran the tournament. Aside from some transport woes, the event was a commercial and public success.
“He did an outstanding job,” says a person involved in the event. “The commercial side of the Rugby World Cup was run very, very well and he ran the partnership with the rugby union very well.'
Contacts, contracts and critics
Alongside his unflappable calm, former colleagues say Roche’s bulging contacts book bridging public and private is another factor making him a favoured fixer.
“He had relationships with everyone, he could just pick up the phone and talk, which is very rare in someone who has been working a lot in the public sector.”
But not everyone is a fan. Comments from critics range from “terrible” to a nice guy who “drifts along” but lacks direction and strategic vision, to “a real little fighter and biter”.
One smudge on Roche’s record is Wellington’s troubled highway project, Transmission Gully. Roche was chairperson of the Wellington Gateway Partnership, which developed the Public Private Partnership (PPP) to build the road. He then became chairperson of the New Zealand Transport Agency, where he had to apologise for the road’s repeatedly delayed opening.
As well as the delays, the highway build suffered budget blowouts and parts needed extensive resurfacing.
A person familiar with the project says the PPP was “disastrous”, although he attributes that mostly to a poorly set-up bid process. (An Infrastructure Commission review blamed the time and cost over-runs on external events, unrealistic initial cost estimates, governance and consenting issues, more than the PPP model).
From 2016 until 2023, Roche also chaired New Zealand’s largest ever transport infrastructure project, Auckland’s City Rail Link, which is finally limping towards opening, four years after its original go-live date.
As well as being tasked with cutting costs - and almost 9000 people - as public service commissioner, Roche leads the new Government Digital Delivery Agency, which is supposed to accelerate public servants’ adoption of digital tools, such as AI.
With some 60,000 people working in the core public service, that’s a mammoth project by any definition. The commission’s own papers say there are “unique challenges” for the public service in realising AI’s potential. Its risks include amplification of bias, lack of transparency in system design, and breaches in data privacy and security.
“There is an important balance between slowing down to ensure privacy and integrity are protected and meeting pressure to seize opportunities faster and reduce costs,” says a report on integrity risks.
Can Roche safely shepherd a job of that scale, in the year he has left as public service commissioner? His record at the Rugby World Cup suggests yes, but his record at Antarctica New Zealand raises serious questions.
Roche was chairperson of the polar organisation during the beleaguered project to rebuild Scott Base, which had to be scaled back after the cost estimate doubled for the “aspirational” plan to build large modules in New Zealand, ship them across the world’s stormiest sea and land them on Ross Island.
A review into the failed fix found the original plan had an “unreasonably high-risk profile”, building design elements were excessive and 'there has been insufficient tension between cost and design aspirations“ resulting in ”an option that is irretrievably beyond budget“.
Antarctica NZ’s responsible minister, Winston Peters, questioned the organisation’s management of the project, and decried its “terrible waste”. And in February 2024, when appointing new board chair Leon Grice and member Heather Simpson to replace the resigning Roche, Peters said the appointments were “one of a series of remedial steps that the Government is taking to bring the project under control”.
Someone familiar with the Scott Base rebuild says the plan’s risks were obvious from the outset to anyone who understood the environment. He fails to find anything printably diplomatic to say about Roche’s role.
Grant Avery is more charitable. A management consultant on high risk projects and adviser to the New Zealand Antarctic Society, he thinks Roche and the Antarctica NZ board were partly victims of widespread “optimism bias” and New Zealand’s broken review system for large-scale projects. Broken because private sector reviewers temper their criticism, to avoid being blackballed from future work, Avery says.
“It’s softening your advice to win the next job.”
While the responsibility for budget blowouts rests with the board, and a board chairperson should know what good looks like and where to get it, many don’t, Avery says.
“I’m very sympathetic to them, they are the victims of poor advice and conflicted advice.”
One former associate, however, says Roche does have a “healthy scepticism” for information provided to him. And a former board colleague says Roche demanded clear, concise board papers, and he hasn’t served on such a tight board since.
The board member admires Roche’s “boardsmanship” - the ability to work a meeting to get the outcome you want.
“He is an impressive and controlling figure…He’s a complex and interesting fish…I would say there’s no statement he makes that’s naive.”
But the former colleague also believes the Mr Fixit role is part of a governance “groupthink”.
“It’s the same people appointing each other to the same circle of boards. That’s the old joke about the All Blacks - it’s harder to get out than get in. Once you’re in, and then you don’t rock any boats, and then you appoint the board members of this other board you’re on, and it becomes a big sort-of love-in.”
Staff, silt and settlements
Everyone interviewed for this story said Roche was great with staff. No screaming matches, no table-thumping, no bullying, nothing but polite and calm. And resisting the lazy option of throwing the chief executive under the bus when the heat was on.
On whether he actually fixes stuff, or simply shrouds problems with that veil of reassuring calm, there’s less consensus.
After Cyclone Gabrielle devastated Hawke’s Bay and Gisborne in 2023, Roche was appointed chairperson of the cyclone recovery taskforce.
Gisborne mayor Rehette Stoltz says she found Roche to be warm and engaging.
“His confidence and decisiveness during one of the most devastating times in our region brought some calm and reassurance to us.” (There’s that power of calm again).
The taskforce helped establish the 'locally led, centrally supported' recovery model, sped up discussions between councils, insurers, banks and central government and helped develop the property buyout categorisation system, Stoltz says.
“His work gave us comfort while communities waited a long time for certainty and complex, slow funding arrangements.”
Someone else familiar with the taskforce, however, questions what it really achieved.
“It removed a lot of silt, but whether or not it actually fixed the problem or not, I don’t know. I think the taskforce went and saw a lot of people, and it talked to a lot of people, and it made people aware that the government was coming round and listening, which is great. But whether or not those regions are better prepared for future flood effects, I don’t know. I certainly don’t think so.”
One former colleague says Roche is “a good man doing a hard job”. But he questions whether he’s really providing free and frank advice.
“The government says I want you to do this, and he’ll go ‘OK, I’ll go and achieve that’. And that’s fine, you absolutely need people in that space, who are people who will deliver objectives.
“The difficulty is, that that’s different to ‘Is this is a good thing to do?’…The irony here is, one of the jobs of a good public service is to tell their minister when something is a bad idea.”
While Roche was lauded for his role in the pivotal Ngai Tahu treaty settlement, other treaty work has not been such a resounding success. Before becoming public service commissioner, Roche was chief crown negotiator for Ngāpuhi, which has yet to reach a settlement.
Former treaty negotiations minister, Chris Finlayson, has often sat across the table from Roche, while representing iwi in negotiations.
“He's a good man, always good to deal with…No one person is responsible for a settlement. He was more in the nature of a technician, but very competent, very reliable. And in more recent years, where he’s been a negotiator: it’s impossible to say about Ngāpuhi, because nothing has been achieved there yet; and some of the other ones he was involved in are more works in progress.”
Finlayson thinks the Mr Fixit label is more about genuine problem- solving, than simply keeping problems out of the public eye.
“It's always good for governments of both persuasions to know that there are people who can be relied on to do a good job. I don't know Brian's politics, but I know that Cullen trusted him, Key trusted him, so that's actually not a bad way to be. In hyper-partisan politics, it's good that there are people like that who just sort of, want to do a good job for the ministers they have.”
Another former colleague thinks Roche is the right pair of hands to get the public service into shape.
“If you look at his career, he’s gone and steadied ships and reduced risks and delivered.
“It’s experience, it’s public and private sector understanding. He understands Wellington, but he also understands business, and I think that’s crucial for any successful person with his task.
“I think settling the horses is always going to be part of that. But ultimately, you’re wanting long-term systemic improvements, and I think Brian’s career points to that a little. But you can never fix everything either. There will always be a problem for the next person to inherit.”
Having been dragged out of retirement at 69 to be public service commissioner, Roche’s time as Mr Fixit must be nearing an end. Will the next conjuror of calm please stand up.