Year: 2018

Real interest rates

Michael Reddell Immigration, Interest rates

It is a while since I’ve done a real interest rate post, so here goes.

You’ll see stories from time to time about how low the New Zealand government’s borrowing costs are.

But it is still worth reminding ourselves of New Zealand’s long track record of having among the very highest average real interest rates in the advanced world.   Here, for example, are New Zealand, Australia, and the G7 countries for the last five years (the period chosen a bit arbitrarily, but a different set of dates wouldn’t substantially alter the relative picture).  I’ve just used average bond yields and average CPI inflation, from the OECD databases, but using (say) core inflation also wouldn’t materially alter the picture.

bond yields

Among these countries, we have one crisis-ridden hugely indebted euro-area country (Italy), one country with new substantial political and economic uncertainty –  and quite a lot of debt (the UK), one with extremely high levels of public debt (Japan), and one with recklessly large fiscal deficits and rising debt (the US).  And our real long-term government bond rates have been higher than all of them.

If we look at the situation today, the picture isn’t a lot different.  Italy has gone shooting past us, which should be no consolation to anyone (crisis pressures re-emerging there).  The gap between New Zealand and US real interest rates has narrowed quite a bit, as one might expect from the sequence of Fed interest rate increases in turn driven partly by unsustainable late-cycle fiscal expansion, but a 10 year US government inflation indexed bond was trading this week at 1.04 per cent, and a 10 year NZ government inflation indexed bond is trading at about 1.25 per cent.   Even that gap is substantially larger for 20 year indexed bonds.

As a reminder, our interest rates don’t average higher than those abroad because of:

  • superior productivity growth rates (we’ve had almost none in recent years),
  • macroeconomic instability (we have low stable inflation and low stable public debt),
  • public sector credit risk (see above –  and of the countries in the chart only Australia has comparably strong public finances),
  • weak banking systems (the Australian banks and their NZ subs have some of better bank credit ratings in the world),
  • risk around high levels of external indebtedness (not only is much of the external indebtedness on bank balance sheets –  see above –  but the New Zealand exchange rate has been persistently strong, not a feature you expect to see when risk concerns are to the fore).

Oh, and of the small OECD countries with floating exchange rates, over the last five years only Iceland (recently emerged from serious systemic crisis) and Hungary (IMF bailout programme as recently as 2008) had higher real interest rates than New Zealand.

At the heart of any explanation for this persistent real interest rate gap –  which has been there, on average, for decades –  must relate to factors influencing pressure on resources in New Zealand.   At some hypothetical world interest rate, there is  some mix of more demand for investment (housing, business, government) and a small supply of savings (households, business, government) than in most other OECD countries.    That incipient excess demand on resources is absorbed by having a higher domestic interest rate than in most other countries, and a higher real exchange rate.    That mix of adjustment will then squeeze out some of the incipient excess demand.  Global evidence suggests that overall savings rates aren’t very sensitive to changes in expected real returns.  Governments tend not to be very responsive to price signals, and people have to live somewhere (so although residential investment is highly cyclical, in the end everyone gets a roof over their head).  Much of the adjustment pressure is felt around genuinely discretionary, and market sensitive, investment spending: business investment, and especially that in sectors exposed to international competition.   It is the stylised story of New Zealand: moderate savings rates (overall), quite high rates of government and residential investment, modest rates of business investment, and a tradables sector which has managed little per capita growth for decades, and where international trade shares of GDP are stagnant or falling even a period when world trade blossomed.

And that is where my immigration policy story fits in.   Savings and investment pressures are aggregates of all sorts of forces and preferences, and so one can never say that a single factor “explains” the whole picture.  But if one is looking for areas where government policy – a non-market or exogenous influence –  plays a part, then New Zealand immigration policy over decades seems likely to be a significant part of the story.  Lots more people means lots more demand for investment just to maintain existing capital/output ratios.   New people need houses, and schools and roads and so on.  If this were a country where domestic savings (flow rates) were abundant –  and domestic savings are different from foreign savings because the act of saving domestically takes some pressure off domestic resources (incomes generated here not spent here) – it wouldn’t be a particular issue.  But that isn’t so in New Zealand.  Government policy choices may have influenced those outcomes to some extent –  I certainly favour a different tax treatment of savings –  but my reading of the international evidence leaves me sceptical that reforms in that area would make very much difference to desired savings rates (if only because income and substitution efforts tend to offset).

Instead, conscious and deliberate government policy drives up ex ante investment demand (at the world interest rate), and in the process tends to drive out the sort of investment that might have enabled those of already here to achieve better material standards of living.

(In a very small sample, it is perhaps worth noting that there are four OECD countries where policy is set to favour high rates of immigration.  They are New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Israel.  It should at least prompt a moment’s reflection among the immigration champions, that not one of those countries has been a stellar OECD productivity performer –  Australia and Canada have done better than New Zealand and Israel, but are nowhere near the OECD frontier, despite the abundance of fixed natural resources those two countries have.)

Race and the Living Standards Framework

Michael Reddell Treasury

The Treasury has been at work on its Living Standards Framework for some years now (since at least 2011).  When it was first dreamed up I recall remarking to various people that it seemed like preparation for a Labour/Greens government.  And so it has come to be, with the new government embracing the framework –  a substitute for actually doing anything about New Zealand’s dismal productivity record –  and talking endlessly about their forthcoming “wellbeing Budget”, plans for which must now be well underway.

There have been numerous papers published.  Among them were several playing identity politics:

Strangely, the Pacific paper emphasises that there is a wide variety of different Pacific cultures, but the Asian one talks repeatedly of “the Asian culture”.   This was the paper Gabs Makhlouf was touting in China a couple of weeks ago, talking up the “value” of “recognition of the hierarchical orderings of relationship.”

Personally, these papers strike me as largely a waste of public money.   But then so is the whole project, and I am very uneasy about The Treasury trying to analyse policy by loose race-based “preferences” or sets of values.  It has been notable, for example, that they have made no effort (to date) to look at perspectives on “wellbeing” by religion, for example –  where any differences may well be starker than those across race-based lines. Nothing either by political affiliation or ideology.  Only race.

Treasury were the ones who set off on the race-based path.  So I was curious –  and, okay, being slightly mischievous –  about what they’d done to look at the perspectives on the issue of European New Zealanders?   I didn’t actually expect they’d have done anything –  maybe they just assumed that their British CEO could adequately represent a (or the likely wide range of) European perspective(s)?   But I lodged the OIA request, and had a response this afternoon.

This was my request

Dear Sir/Madam,
I have noticed that Treasury has recently released papers on Maori, Pacific and Asian New Zealanders” “wellbeing” and the Living Standards Framework.  This is to request any similar work on European New Zealanders’ wellbeing, and if no such work exists any explanations why, and copies of any papers/emails relevant to the decision not to prepare such a paper.
Thanks in anticipation.
and this was the response,  provided on the very last of the standard 20 working days, and certainly not (as the Act requires) as soon as reasonably practicable.
The request is being declined under section 18(e) because the document/s requested do not exist.

In other words, it seems it never even occurred to them to think about the distinctive perspectives of the largest ethnic group in New Zealand.

Telling really, about the tokenism and identity politics that seems to infest this project.

 

The IDI and government data linking

Michael Reddell Statistics, Treasury, Uncategorized

Browsing on The Treasury’s website the other day, it was the title that caught my eye: “Talkin’ about a revolution”.   I’m rather wary of revolutions.  Even when –  not always, or perhaps even often –  good and noble ideas help inspire them, the outcomes all too often leave a great deal to be desired.   There are various, quite different, reasons for that, but one is about the failure to think through, or care about, things –  themselves initially small or seemingly unimportant – that the revolution opens the way to.

This particular “revolution” – billed as “a quiet and sedate revolution, but a revolution nonetheless” – was sparked by Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI).   Here is the Treasury author

The creation of Stats NZ’s IDI (or Integrated Data Infrastructure), a treasure trove of linked data, sparked the revolution, and its ongoing development drives it along. The IDI doesn’t collect anything new. Instead it gathers together data that is already collected, links it together at a person level, anonymises it, and makes it available to researchers in government, academia, and beyond.

The author goes on

Since 2013, its growth has been far more rapid. From a handful of users in its early years, there are now hundreds of people using IDI data to help answer thorny questions across the full range of social and economic research domains. The IDI is incredibly powerful for research, and has a number of important strengths.

  • Longitudinal – Providing a picture of people’s lives over time, crucial for understanding the effect of policies and services.
  • A full enumeration – Incorporating administrative data for almost all New Zealanders, enabling a focus on minority groups and small geographic areas.
  • Accessible – By making data available to researchers at relatively low cost, agencies are no longer gatekeepers of the data they collect, and a culture of sharing in the research community is encouraged.
  • Cross-sectoral – Allowing researchers to explore the relationships between different aspects of people’s lives that may be invisible to individual agencies.

There is a breathless enthusiasm about it all.

Stats NZ’s new online research database highlights the huge breadth of research underway for the benefit of all.

It is never made clear quite how the Treasury author gets to his conclusion that all this research benefits us all.

And here is the SNZ graphic illustrating the range of data they have put together (and linked)

IDI

I’m a bit torn about the IDI (and its business companion, the LBD).   As an economist and policy geek, I’m fascinated by some of results researchers have been able to come up with using this new database.  A few months ago I wrote (positively) here about how Treasury staff had been able to derive new estimates on internal migration.   Here is a chart I showed then on the various databases linked together that enabled those estimates.

tsy popn
And here is a more-detailed SNZ graphic on what data are in the IDI at present (and more series are still being added).

IDI 2

More details are here.

Note that it is not even all government data –  for example, the Auckland City Mission is providing data on people it assists.  Specifically

Auckland City Mission data

Source: Auckland City Mission
Time: From 1996
What the data is about:  Income, expenses, housing status, and household composition of Auckland City Mission clients, and the services these clients use. Auckland City Mission is a social service provider in Auckland CBD, that helps Aucklanders in need by providing effective integrated services and advocacy. Note: data dictionary available on the IDI Wiki in the Data Lab.
Application code: ACM

Even if in 1996 those individuals gave their consent for their (anonymised) data to be used, few people in 1996 would have had any idea of the practical linking possibilities in 2018.   (And at a point of vulnerability how much ability did they have to decline consent anyway?)

It is researcher heaven.  But it is also planner’s heaven.

Statistics New Zealand sings the praises of the IDI (as does Treasury –  and any other agency that uses the database).  I gather it is regarded as world-leading, offering more linked data than is available in most (or all) other advanced democracies –  and that that is regarded as a plus.   SNZ (and Treasury) make much of the anonymised nature of the data, and here I take them at their word.  A Treasury researcher (say) cannot use the database to piece together the life of some named individual (and nor would I imagine Treasury would want to).   The system protections seem to be quite robust –  some argue too much so – and if I don’t have much confidence in Statistics New Zealand generally (people who can’t even conduct the latest Census competently), this isn’t one of the areas I have concerns about at present.

But who really wants government agencies to have all this data about them, and for them to be able link it all up?   Perhaps privacy doesn’t count as a value in the Treasury/government Living Standards Framework, but while I don’t mind providing a limited amount of data to the local school when I enrol my child (although even they seem to collect more than they need) but I don’t see why anyone should be free to connect that up to my use of the Auckland City Mission (nil), my parking ticket from the Dunedin City Council (one), or (say) my tiny handful of lifetime claims on ACC.  And I have those objections even if no individual bureaucrat can get to the full details of the Michael Reddell story.

The IDI would not be feasible, at least on anything like its current scale, if the role of central government in our lives were smaller.   Thus, the database doesn’t have life insurance data (private), but it does have ACC data.  It has data on schooling, and medical conditions, but not on (say) food purchases, since supermarkets aren’t a government agency.   I’m not opposed to ACC, or even to state schools (although I would favour full effective choice), but just because in some sense there is a common ultimate “owner”, the state, is no reason to allow this sort of extensive data-sharing and data-linking (even when, for research purposes, the resulting data are anonymised).   There is a mentality being created in which our lives (and the information about our lives) is not our own, and can’t even be stored in carefully segregated silos, but is the joined-up property of the state (and enthusiastic, often idealistic, researchers working for it).   We see it even in things like the Census where we are now required by law to tell the state if we have trouble “washing all over or dressing” or, in the General Social Survey, whether we take reusable bags with us when we go shopping.    And the whole point of the IDI is that it allows all this information to be joined up and used by governments –  they would argue “for us”, but governments view of what is in our good and our own are not necessarily or inevitably well-aligned.

In truth my unease is less about where the project has got to so far, but as to the future possibilities it opens up.  What can be done is likely, eventually, to be done.   As I noted, Auckland City Mission is providing detailed data for the IDI.  We had a controversy a couple of years ago in which the then government was putting pressure on NGOs (receiving government funding) to provide detailed personal data on those they were helping –  data which, in time, would presumably have found its way into the IDI.   There was a strong pushback then, but it is not hard to imagine the bureaucrats getting their way in a few years’ time.  After all, evaluation is (in many respects rightly) an important element in what governments are looking for when public money is being spent.

Precisely because the data are anonymised at present, to the extent that policy is based on IDI research results it reflects analysis of population groups (rather than specific individuals).  But that analysis can get quite fine-grained, in ways that represent a double-edged sword: opening the way to more effective targeting, and yet opening the way to more effective targeting.  The repetition is deliberate: governments won’t (and don’t) always target for the good.  It can be a tool for facilitation, and a tool for control, and there doesn’t seem to be much serious discussion about the risks, amid the breathless enunciation of the opportunities.

Where, after all, will it end?   If NGO data can be acquired, semi-voluntarily or by standover tactics (your data orno contract), perhaps it is only a matter of time before the pressure mounts to use statutory powers to compel the inclusion of private sector data? Surely the public health zealots would love to be able to get individualised data on supermarket purchases (eg New World Club Card data), others might want Kiwisaver data, Netflix (or similar) viewing data, library borrowing (and overdue) data, or domestic air travel data, (or road travel data, if and when automated tolling systems are implemented), CCTV camera footage, or even banking data.  All with (initial) promises of anonymisation –  and public benefit – of course.  And all, no doubt, with individually plausible cases about the real “public” benefits that might flow from having such data.  And supported by a “those who’ve done nothing wrong, have nothing to fear” mantra.

After all, here the Treasury author’s concluding vision

Innovative use of a combination of survey and administrative data in the IDI will be a critical contributor to realising the current Government’s wellbeing vision, and to successfully applying the Treasury’s Living Standards Framework to practical investment decisions. Vive la révolution!

Count me rather more nervous and sceptical.  Our lives aren’t, or shouldn’t be, data for government researchers, instruments on which officials –  often with the best of intentions –  can play.

And all this is before one starts to worry about the potential for convergence with the sort of “social credit” monitoring and control system being rolled out in the People’s Republic of China.    Defenders of the PRC system sometimes argue –  probably sometimes even with a straight face –  that the broad direction of their system isn’t so different from where the West is heading (credit scores, travel watchlists and so).   That is still, mostly, rubbish, but the bigger question is whether our societies will be able to (or will even choose to) resist the same trends.  The technological challenge was about collecting and linking all this data,  and in principle that isn’t a great deal different whether at SNZ or party-central in Beijing.   The difference –  and it is a really important difference –  is what is done with the data, but there is a relentless logic that will push erstwhile free societies in a similar direction  –  if perhaps less overtly – to China.  When something can be done, it will be hard to resist eventually being done.    And how will people compellingly object when it is shown –  by robust research –  that those households who feed their kids Cocopops and let them watch two hours of daytime TV, while never ever recycling do all sort of (government defined –  perhaps even real – hard), and thus specialist targeted compulsory state interventions are made, for their sake, for the sake of the kids, and the sake of the nation?

Not everything that can be done ends up being done.  But it is hard to maintain those boundaries, and doing so requires hard conversation, solid shared values etc, not just breathless enthusiasm for the merits of more and more linked data.

As I said earlier in the post, I’m torn.  There is some genuinely useful research emerging, which probably poses no threat to anyone individually, or freedom more generally.   And those of you who are Facebook users might tell me you have already given away all this data (for joining up) anyway –  which, even if true, should be little comfort if we think about the potential uses and abuses down the track.   Others might reasonably note that in old traditional societies (peasant villages) there was little effective privacy anyway –  which might be true, but at least those to whom your life was pretty much an open book were those who shared your experience and destiny (those who lived in the same village).   But when powerful and distant governments get hold of so much data, and can link it up so readily, I’m more uneasy than many researchers (government or private, whose interests are well-aligned with citizens) about the possibilities and risks it opens up.

So while Treasury is cheering the “revolution” on, I hope somewhere people are thinking harder about where all this risks taking us and our societies.

Should Grant Robertson be able to bankrupt New Zealand?

Michael Reddell Fiscal policy, Uncategorized

Of course not.  And nor should have Michael Cullen, Bill English or Steven Joyce, the other people who have held the office of Minister of Finance this century.

And yet, by law, he can.  Anyone who holds the office of Minister of Finance can.   Without any further involvement in the matter by Parliament.

A basic principle of our form of government has long been that public spending can only occur if there is an appropriation voted by Parliament to authorise such spending.  Without that basic protection, Parliament loses much of its protection over the executive –  and protecting citizens against the executive was a significant part of the rise of democratic systems over government over hundreds of years.

There are some exceptions to that rule (eg  –  and at the sensible end – permanent legislative authorities for judicial salaries), some of which should be a little worrying, but the one I want to focus on here is section 65ZD of the Public Finance Act.

65ZD Minister may give guarantee or indemnity if in public interest

(1) The Minister, on behalf of the Crown, may give, in writing, a guarantee or indemnity to a person, organisation, or government if it appears to the Minister to be necessary or expedient in the public interest to do so.

(2)  The Minister may—

(a) give the guarantee or indemnity on any terms and conditions that the Minister thinks fit; and

(b) in the case of a guarantee, give the guarantee in respect of the performance or non-performance of any duties or obligations by a person, organisation, or government.

(3) If the contingent liability of the Crown under a guarantee or an indemnity given by the Minister under subsection (1) exceeds $10 million, the Minister must, as soon as practicable after giving the guarantee or indemnity, present a statement to the House of Representatives that the guarantee or indemnity has been given.

(4) The statement may contain any details about the guarantee or indemnity that the Minister considers appropriate.

Under this provision, a Minister of Finance can guarantee anything.   He doesn’t need the approval of Cabinet to do so, he doesn’t need the approval of Parliament, there are no specific criteria he is required to take account of (only his own assessment of “the public interest”), there are no limits on how large the guarantee can be, and even the reporting requirements –  added in recent years –  are weak in the extreme (the Minister must tell Parliament, after the event, that a guarantee has been given, but there is no mandated disclosure of the terms of any guarantee, the case for the guarantee, or documents related to the giving of the guarantee).

It is a shockingly broad power.  It isn’t clear that –  to take a deliberately overstated extreme example –  there is anything to stop a New Zealand Minister of Finance guaranteeing, say, the entire public debt of the United States –  or all the liabilities of Lehmans – provided the Minister concluded that, in his sole view, doing so was in the public interest of New Zealand (“I was worried the world financial system might fail, and New Zealanders would have suffered in the backwash”).   There are no effective ex ante checks and balances.  The Prime Minister might be able to sack the Minister of Finance, or the public might toss the governing party out at the next election, but that would small comfort if trillions of dollars of guarantees had been given out in respect of shonky activities.   A corrupt minister – and fortunately we haven’t had much of a problem with them so far –  could vastly enrich favoured people and entities in the process.  We supposedly build institutions around the realities of human fallibility, not an assumption that humans are angels.

As for settling the obligations taken on under a ministerial guarantee –  committing the full faith and credit of the New Zealand government –  there is an explicit statutory provision governing that too

65ZG Payments in respect of guarantees or indemnities
Any money paid by the Crown under a guarantee or indemnity given under section 65ZD and any expenses incurred by the Crown in relation to the guarantee or indemnity may be incurred without further appropriation, and must be paid without further authority, than this section.

Parliament gets no say at this point either (which makes sense –  a guarantee is worthless, and non-credible, if the person giving it doesn’t have the ability to ensure the obligation is honoured.

Perhaps a government could choose to default on its guarantee obligations, and so long as the guarantees were not given as part of any contract under some foreign jurisdiction there might be nothing anyone could do about it.  Defaults do happen, even in advanced countries, and perhaps markets would excuse default on the guarantee given by a corrupt minister for a huge and shonky deal, but it isn’t a situation we should ever risk finding our country in.

I’m not sure how other countries handle this issue, or constrain the ability of the executive to issue guarantees (I looked and couldn’t readily find a suitable reference source or comparative study).  But whatever they do –  and I’d be astonished if, for example, there was such flexibility in US legislation (where they have statutory debt ceilings, and all the perceived constraints around TARP or bailing out Lehmans) –  these provisions of New Zealand legislation seem far too broad, and should be reined in.

I don’t have a particular problem with some guarantee powers, but if they exist they should be tightly constrained.  The amounts the Minister can authorise himself should be capped (perhaps $100 million –  anything more requiring the approval of Cabinet (up to perhaps $10 billion) or of Parliament itself.  And the terms of such guarantees should be disclosed, as should the supporting documentation.

The counter-argument is probably about the ability to act swiftly.  And yet we know from bitter experience that governments can, when necessary (or when it simply suits them) ram legislation through Parliament in a day.   That doesn’t provide much scrutiny, but it is much more than we have at present, and Parliament is ultimately protection, and source of legitimisation of executive actions and commitments.

I’m pretty sure the guarantee sections  of the Public Finance Act aren’t the only way in which unconstrained individuals –  sometimes even unelected ones –  could gut the public finances, with little effective comeback, and no protections for citizens.  The hypothetical one that used to bother me –  and not because of any distrust of particular individuals, but because I had run the financial markets side of the Bank and was conscious of our powers –  was the Reserve Bank, which has almost totally unconstrained powers to enter into financial contracts, and which will be regarded by counterparties as highly creditworthy precisely because it is the central bank (too central to fail).  It trades on the underlying fiscal position of the Crown, and yet the Crown and Parliament have very little effective control over transactions initiated by the Bank.  In principle, a corrupt or seriously incompetent Reserve Bank Governor –  one unelected individual –  could enter highly leveraged large scale derivatives contracts and, if things went wrong leave the New Zealand taxpayer on the hook of tens of billions of dollars of losses.

Why am I writing about this issue now?  Because it is 10 years this week since I first really became conscious of section 65ZD of the Public Finance Act –  10 years since we were working on preparations for the Deposit Guarantee Scheme, in which  –  with Parliament dissolved for the election –  the Minister of Finance, on his sole authority, offered to guarantee hundreds of billions of dollar of financial institution liabilities.    I’ll write more about that specific intervention later in the week, but for now I wanted to shine a light on these statutory powers –  and their frightening extent in the wrong hands.    We need better protections, with less discretion for a single minister.  We can’t simply rely on the integrity and good judgement of those who hold office, in this or any other area.

Makhlouf on China

Michael Reddell China, NZ politics, Treasury

In a blog post the other day, which briefly touched on the activities of the People’s Republic of China in New Zealand, former ACT MP and senior lawyer Stephen Franks observed that

Our colonial forebears gained their colonial power and wealth by suborning the elites of the peoples subjugated more often than with military violence.

I hadn’t particularly thought of it that way before, but of course once one thinks about it for even a moment he is correct about the history, and (I suspect) about the relevance of the parallel to the current situation.

In fact, the parallel came to mind in pondering the latest public speech by Gabs Makhlouf the British ring-in Secretary to the Treasury, who not only qualifies as one of the “elite” but isn’t even someone with a strong ongoing personal interest in the future of ordinary New Zealanders, or even of New Zealand institutions.  Of course, even public servants holding as high an office as Secretary to the Treasury don’t make policy –  we hold politicians to account for that –  but Makhlouf seems to be actively engaged with, and supportive of, the longrunning deference to one of the most evil regimes on the planet, and apparent indifference to the tentacles of that regime in our system and country.

It mightn’t even be quite so annoying if his pandering was supported by decent economic analysis or a compelling understanding of the economic challenges facing New Zealand.  But it isn’t.    The speech, given at the university in Beijing, is under the title “The role of the China-New Zealand relationship in raising living standards”.

He burbles on about his beloved Living Standards framework, reaching the astonishing conclusion in his final paragraph that

Green mountains and blue rivers are as good as mountains of gold and silver.

Perhaps when you have a secure government income of many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year they are, but not to most New Zealanders – the people who struggle to get by, who’d appreciate the opportunities for better housing, better medical treatment, or even a better holiday.     Of course, the environment matters (rather a lot), and greater wealth and productivity has given us cost-effective options to reduce pollution (contrast the pollution levels in London or Beijing).  Perhaps we could extend the parallel: uninhabited New Zealand 1000 years ago –  beautiful and untouched as it may have been –  as good as a reasonably prosperous country today that makes extensive use of natural resources, and which has changed the landscape?   Few will think so, but perhaps the Secretary does?     If this is the sort of economic analysis governments have been getting, no wonder there is no progress in reversing our relative productivity decline.

Makhlouf goes on at length about the value of international trade and investment, and I can go a reasonable way along that line with him.  But it is as if he is talking for a totally different country when he observes enthusiastically that

And back in 1990 the ratio of global trade to world GDP was 30 percent; by 2015 that ratio had doubled to around 60 percent.

Which is good, but in New Zealand –  the country he supposedly represents –  the total exports and imports were 52 per cent of GDP in 1990 and 54 per cent last year.    We simply haven’t shared at all in the dramatic increases in world trade.   And because he seems not to understand that, the Secretary presumably has no credible analysis for what might make a helpful difference in future.   As it is, the New Zealand story is even worse than those snapshots suggests: exports as a share of GDP peaked as long ago as 2000, and even exports of services –  where the Secretary likes to talk up tourism and export education –  peaked as share of GDP in 2002.    The services exports share of GDP is now 30 per cent smaller (three percentage points) than it was then.

Then there is one of his tired old lines, claiming that “we” (New Zealand) are “part of the fastest growing region in the world” when, as he delivered his speech in Beijing, he was closer to home in London than to his office in Wellington.

I could go on, but the weaknesses of the Secretary’s economic analysis have been documented in many earlier posts.   What appalled in this particular speech was the craven grovelling to the PRC, the total relativisation of our two countries in ways which suggest that he thinks their system, their government, is just as good as ours.  (I don’t suppose he really does, but when you are a senior official, backing your government, what you say counts  –  including no doubt to the PRC authorities. He does the kow-tow)

He begins his speech with the rather empty claim that

Yet there is so much that we have in common.

We are all human beings I guess, but it wasn’t clear what else he had in mind.   He tries, not very convincingly, to elaborate.

All of us here want open trade, thriving business, and economic growth. Those things matter for our material wellbeing. But they are only a subset of what contributes to the quality of our lives. I’m sure we share a belief in the importance of good health and education, decent housing, the support of family and friends, a clean natural environment, a safe and peaceful society. We seek that for ourselves and for future generations.

As the Secretary surely knows, the People’s Republic of China has no commitment to open trade, having a highly regulated economy, and tight restrictions on international services trade in particular, and on investment.    But what of that broader list of things he thinks we have in common?  Perhaps it is fine as far it goes, but he is talking to people in a country whose government has a million people from Xinjiang in concentration and re-indoctrination camps.  And for all the Secretary’s talk about wellbeing –  and even “social capital” –  it is notable that things like free speech, free expression, the ability to change your government, freedom of religion, and even the rule of law – explicitly disavowed not long ago by the PRC Chief Justice –  are totally absent from his list.  The things that divide free and democratic countries from the PRC regime are huge and important.  Perhaps even the sorts of things that might appear in a typical New Zealand assessment of wellbeing?  But they, apparently, don’t matter much to the Secretary to the Treasury.  He goes on the praise the Belt and Road Initiative –  under the aegis of which the previous New Zealand government committed to the (rather frightening) aspiration of “the fusion of civilisations” with the PRC.

In all that he was just warming up.  There is later a substantial section of the “NZ-China relationship”, which is almost nauseating in places.  Thus

It is a relationship that goes beyond diplomacy and trade. It’s also about the links between people, about investing in our mutual success, and about recognising our shared interests in the world.

Liberty, democracy, the rule of law for example?  I guess not.  Respect for established international borders?  I guess not.    Then again, there is this in common, that both China and New Zealand have dramatically (economically) underperformed their near neighbours over the last century of so: in China’s case, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and in New Zealand’s case Australia.

Then we get this

It hasn’t all been one-way traffic. New Zealander Rewi Alley helped establish the Gung Ho movement in the 1930s and dedicated 60 years of his life to improving the living standards of Chinese workers.

You mean the active member of the Chinese Communist Party and unashamed apologist for its evils  (I have one of his books sitting on my desk, co-authored with the dreadful Communist fellow-traveller Wilfred Burchett, written towards the end of the Cultural Revolution celebrating the quality of life in the PRC).    Then again, when we have a Chinese Communist Party member in our Parliament what might one expect from our elites?

The Secretary moves on to celebrate PRC foreign investment in New Zealand.  He notes, without further comment, that

Over half of the 25 largest Chinese investors in New Zealand are state owned enterprises including Huawei, Yili and Haier.

as if this is a good thing (Treasury not being known for its enthusiasm for SOEs in New Zealand), as if he cares not about the national security threat various allied governments have determined Huawei represents –  and note that Huawei likes to represent itself as a private company –  and as if he is unaware (or cares not a bit) about the PRC law under which companies (private and public) are required to operate in the interests of the partt-State, at home or abroad.  In the best of circumstances, state ownership (and murky ownership) is a recipe for weakened capital allocation disciplines etc, and the Secretary to the Treasury really should know that.

The Secretary goes on

I believe one of the main reasons the China-New Zealand relationship is so close and constructive is because we both recognise the importance of diplomacy.

A line so vacuous it can only mean that New Zealand knows when (almost always) to rollover, never upset Beijing, and so on.   And who would want a “close and constructive” relationship with such a tyrannical regime anyway –  unless money is now all that matters (surely not so, especially in the Secretary’s wellbeing world.   Do these people have no shame?

Channelling the government, the Secretary touches on the Pacific, where the PRC is increasingly active, and in ways that look quite damaging not just to our interests, but to those of the ordinary citizens (although, again, not necessarily the “elites) in those countries.  Here is his final line.

We believe it is in everyone’s interest in the region – including New Zealand and China – to encourage sustainable economic development, good governance, respect for sovereignty and the rule of law.

I guess that is really a timid suggestion to the PRC, but they are quite open that they have no time for the rule of law (unless, of course, in their own interests), good governance (surely you’d practice what you preach), let alone “respect for sovereignty” –  ask the neighbours in the South China Sea, or Taiwan, the peaceful independent productive democracy.

We believe it is in everyone’s interest in the region – including New Zealand and China – to encourage sustainable economic development, good governance, respect for sovereignty and the rule of law.

Sounding like his countryman, Neville Chamberlain –  who did finally come to his senses –  we apparently don’t believe in right and wrong, or standing by those who are threatened.  The Secretary –  and his government –  just want to be “honest brokers”.  It is a shameful stance.

Perhaps you think I’m being a little unfair to Mr Makhlouf.  He is after all just a (very senior) public servant, channelling government policy.  But no one forces him to parrot these sorts of lines, and to make public speeches re-emphasising New Zealand’s deference and subservience, all under the mask of “mutual benefits”.  Sure, he can’t run an alternative, more challenging, perspective in public, but it is entirely his choice to attach his name to these lines.    He is one of the guilty, sacrificing our values, our institutions, while giving cover to the evils of the PRC regime, all for what?   A few more dollars for a few more big institutions.  In the Secretary’s case there isn’t even the shameful, feeble excuse about political parties “needing” to fund themselves.

Sacrificing our values?  Well, in his speech Makhlouf also talked about his living standards framework and how Treasury had gone out to do some weird race-based consultations about what mattered to people. I haven’t read these papers yet but he reported that of their consultation with Asian New Zealanders (emphasis added)

There is a strong belief in the value of collectivism, diligence, responsibility, frugality and recognition of hierarchy in relationships.

Surely, if there is any traditional New Zealand value –  and as I noted earlier in the week, I’m not fan of values-test – it is the polar opposite of “recognition of hierarchy in relationships”.  But probably Makhlouf, MFAT, and the political elites of all parties would prefer we all knew our place and left all this to them; another deal, more donations, and a refusal to ever stand for the values the Prime Minister sometimes talks about if it might even create even a little awkwardness in Beijing.

Sometimes, moments of hope arise in the strangest places.  I’m no fan of Donald Trump, and could only agree with the right-wing US columnist who the other day declared Trump the single most unsuited person to be President in all of US history.  And yet the other day, his Vice-President Mike Pence gave a speech on the Administration’s policy towards the PRC that came as distinctly refreshing after reading the Makhlouf effort.  I’m not going to excerpt it at length, but for anyone interested I suggest you read it.  I was pleasantly surprised by much of it, and have seen fairly positive commentary on it from various Democrtic-leaning China commentators.

But I come before you today because the American people deserve to know that, as we speak, Beijing is employing a whole-of-government approach, using political, economic, and military tools, as well as propaganda, to advance its influence and benefit its interests in the United States.

China is also applying this power in more proactive ways than ever before, to exert influence and interfere in the domestic policy and politics of this country.

Pretty much what Anne-Marie Brady (I’m pretty sure no right-wing Republican) has been saying here, although you will never hear such honesty from our politicians.

Previous administrations made this choice in the hope that freedom in China would expand in all of its forms -– not just economically, but politically, with a newfound respect for classical liberal principles, private property, personal liberty, religious freedom — the entire family of human rights. But that hope has gone unfulfilled.

Gabs Makhlouf claims to believe we have so much in common with the PRC.

Beijing is also using its power like never before. Chinese ships routinely patrol around the Senkaku Islands, which are administered by Japan. And while China’s leader stood in the Rose Garden at the White House in 2015 and said that his country had, and I quote, “no intention to militarize” the South China Sea, today, Beijing has deployed advanced anti-ship and anti-air missiles atop an archipelago of military bases constructed on artificial islands.

Blunt, but unquestionable.  And thus utterly unacceptable in New Zealand.

At the University of Maryland, a Chinese student recently spoke at her graduation of what she called, and I quote, the “fresh air of free speech” in America. The Communist Party’s official newspaper swiftly chastised her. She became the victim of a firestorm of criticism on China’s tightly-controlled social media, and her family back home was harassed. As for the university itself, its exchange program with China — one of the nation’s most extensive — suddenly turned from a flood to a trickle.

While in our universities, Confucius Institute advance PRC interests, and our multi-university Contemporary China Research Centre is chaired by someone who chairs a Confucius Institute, advises the PRC on Confucius Institute, and has a range of other interests that could be severely disadvantaged if the PRC were ever upset.

I don’t have any confidence in the Adminstration’s willingness to stick to anything, or in Trump’s temperament in handling a crisis.  But at least the US government is willing to call a spade a spade in this area.  Ours are determined to see never ill, say nothing ill, while their party leaders (sickeningly) praise the regime, and the party donations keep flowing in.

Sadly, there is a yawning vacuum where courageous and honest political leadership, standing for our system, our values, and (to the extent we can) for the rights and freedoms of people in China, might be.   As Stephen Franks put it, it is the elites we have to worry about.

And, in closing, I noticed this link this morning on Anne-Marie Brady’s Twitter account

The article it links is (or at least I found it so) a little difficult to make your way through, but it represents the efforts of some ethnic Chinese New Zealanders not content with successive New Zealand governments’ supine approach to the PRC.

The PRC and the Prime Minister

Michael Reddell China, NZ politics

National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States is a bit like Radio New Zealand National, and about as left-wing in the assumptions and orientations (sometimes probably unconscious) of most of its presenters and interviewers.  I listen regularly to their politics podcast, and it struck me recently that the people involved are probably almost as left-wing as our Prime Minister (who, while an MP, served as president of the International Union of Socialist Youth, complete with the speech in which she used the word “comrade” 15 times in eight minutes).

Which is by way of saying that when NPR reports on a story, it isn’t exactly Breitbart, or the fevered imagination of some vast right-wing conspiracy.    These are people with whom you’d think our Labour and Greens parties would normally be in sympathy with.

But earlier this week, NPR published a lengthy story about the influence activities of the People’s Republic of China in Australia and New Zealand.  It is missing a few nuances, but is an interesting treatment for an international audience.  In the Australian section there is a nice quote from a serious senior academic.

“China’s different in scale and it’s different also in that it can integrate the private sector, education, civil society — all arms, if you like — of the state and the community with the objectives of the Chinese Communist Party,” says Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at Australian National University. “We’re not really dealing with a normal country here. We’re dealing with an authoritarian party state, where in fact Chinese citizens owe a higher loyalty to the party than to the state itself. So what we’re dealing with here is the largest secret organization in human history.”

and

Medcalf says the problem is not China’s people, but its Communist Party. Some of the most vulnerable victims of the party, he says, are Chinese people who left their country to live in democracies like Australia and New Zealand.

Very similar themes to those in the work, on this side of the Tasman, of Anne-Marie Brady –  vilified in last year’s election campaign by the then Attorney-General and Minister of National Intelligence as some sort of nasty xenophobe.

NPR interviewed Chen Weijian who

….moved from China in 1991, escaping imprisonment for working on a pro-democracy newspaper. He restarted the newspaper in New Zealand, but even there, Beijing caught up with him, he says: A pro-Chinese Communist Party newspaper in Auckland sued him for defamation after he criticized it for being too pro-Beijing. Ongoing legal fees forced his paper into bankruptcy in 2012.

“Their paper was funded by businesses supported by China’s government,” Chen says. “So an overseas Communist Party’s propaganda wing crushed our democratic newspaper here in New Zealand.”

A reader who is closer to these things tells me

The Chinese newspaper which crushed Chen Weijian’s pro-democracy paper is the Chinese Herald, now NZME’s joint venture partner of the Chineseherald website.
The international news on this website are primarily sourced from the three major CCP’s state media and they apparently uphold the CCP’s stance.
And more US readers/listeners got to hear of the curious, not to say alarming, case of Jian Yang.

Last year, local media reported that a prominent, Chinese-born member of New Zealand’s Parliament, Jian Yang, had lied to authorities about his education background on his citizenship application for New Zealand.

Yang, a member of the National Party, which led the government from 2008 to 2017, had worked for 15 years in China’s military intelligence sector. He studied English at the People’s Liberation Army Air Force Engineering University, taught at the college for five years after graduating and then obtained a master’s degree at the People’s Liberation Army University of Foreign Languages in Luoyang, one of China’s best-known military intelligence schools.

Later, at the same institute, Yang taught English to students who were studying to intercept and decipher English-language communications on behalf of Chinese military intelligence.

Yang declined an interview request from NPR. He admitted to journalists last year that he was a member of China’s Communist Party, though he insisted he has not been an active member since he left China in 1994. He has steered clear of the media spotlight since the scandal hit.

NPR joining the honourable company of all English language media that Jian Yang –  an elected member of the New Zealand Parliament, elected (to their shame) by all National Party voters  – simply refuses to talk to.

Chen Weijian goes on, rather more speculatively in some places

“Jian Yang is not just connected to China’s Communist Party,” says Chen Weijian. “He was sent here by them to spy on New Zealand. But people in Yang’s party — the National Party — all think he’s good for New Zealand-China relations. A lot of his party’s donations come through him, and he often leads government trips to China to make lucrative deals there.”

Yang, who has served in Parliament since 2011 and remains in office, played a prominent role during official visits to China in 2013 and 2016, sitting alongside then-Prime Minister John Key opposite Chinese leader Xi Jinping and serving at times as interpreter during bilateral meetings.

As Yang’s political influence grew, so did New Zealand’s economic dependence on China. In 2008, New Zealand became the first developed country to sign a free trade agreement with China. As a result, trade between the two economies has tripled in the past decade, largely because of China’s thirst for imported New Zealand milk: A quarter of all imported milk in China comes from the tiny island nation.

The (so-called) FTA was signed three years before Jian Yang turned up in national politics, and as a the world’s largest exporter of milk powder it seems probable that exports to China would have increased considerably over the last decade whether or not an FTA had been signed, whether or not Jian Yang was in Parliament.

NPR talked to Charles Finny, former diplomat, trade negotiator, and now lobbyist who declared last year that he knew Jian Yang (and Raymond Huo) and was always very careful what he said in front of either of them.

Finny [talking of FTAs] believes the same to be true in politics. He says China has most likely been using New Zealand as a testing ground for diplomatic relations with other developed nations.

“We’re small, nonthreatening,” he explains. “We’re not as close to the United States. China, I think, wants to learn from us about how to deal with other, larger players. It’s very common for Chinese leaders when they’re just about to be appointed to a big position to come to New Zealand to learn about democracy, to learn about how to deal with the media, to learn there are going to be some protests — all these things that are going to be a much bigger factor in bigger relationships, they get to learn how to deal with it here.”

Perhaps, but you get a pretty easy ride here.  Universities lined up to have photos taken with Xi Jinping.  Our former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley went out of her way to ensure that the visiting Chinese leader in the 1990s didn’t have to see protestors.

NPR did talk to one senior New Zealand politician who made some interesting remarks (if typically cryptic and defensive) that seem to have had surprisingly little local media attention.

After New Zealand’s intelligence agency began looking into Yang’s background in 2016, he was removed from parliamentary select committees on foreign affairs, defense and trade. But he hung on to his seat in Parliament, leaving some wondering why.

“The answer to that is not something that can be given today, but it is an answer that will soon have to come from our country and our system as to what our response is,” Winston Peters, New Zealand’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister, tells NPR. “At that level of growing public interest — and I would think intelligence interest as well — plus the shared intelligence from our closer allies, one would be naive in thinking that our response would not be forthcoming.”

Does that mean anything at all?  And if so, what?    Surely it is pretty clear why Jian Yang hangs onto his seat, despite his past, and his misrepresentations to New Zealand authorities, being exposed and acknowledged?   And despite his ongoing close associations with the PRC and his refusal to ever utter a negative word about that totalitarian state.  On the one hand, the National Party wants the donor money and doesn’t want to risk the relationships with donors by acknowledging that there is something very wrong.  And, on the other hand, because all other parties –  including that of the Deputy Prime Minister, once in office – make it easy for National to do so.  Not a negative word is heard from any of them –  the Prime Minister, the minister responsible for the intelligence services and the electoral system, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Defence, the leaders of the Green Party (or their foreign affairs or intelligence spokespeople).

The interview with Winston Peters obviously got a little tetchy.

Analysts in the U.S. and Australia have suggested the Yang case is evidence that China is exploiting New Zealand as a weak link in what’s known as the “Five Eyes,” the intelligence alliance including the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This angers Peters. He is the longest-serving parliamentarian in New Zealand’s history [which he isn’t] and has long been vocal about his country’s dependence on China, but he draws the line when his country is criticized for being used as a political tool for the Chinese.

“This country turned up to two world wars, two years before the United States on both occasions,” he points out. “So we don’t like that sort of talk down here.”

The journalist obviously missed the important context that Peters only ever says anything critical when he is in Opposition and unable to actually do anything.

One might point out in response to the Deputy Prime Minister that 80 years ago our then government was at the forefront of calls to pushback against aggression by Germany and Italy, recognising the nature of the evil.  So different today…..

The NPR journalist then turned to Stephen Jacobi

“To suggest that New Zealand may be naive, well, OK, fine,” says Stephen Jacobi, executive director of the New Zealand China Council, a group in Auckland promoting business ties. “We don’t have to see the world the same way Americans do, or even Australians do. We’re very proud of that.”

Jacobi says the evidence against Yang — who serves on the board of his organization — is largely hearsay and is not enough to prove that he is working for China’s government.

The NPR people obviously missed the rather important point that the China Council isn’t just a bunch of businesses wanting to sell out their own country for another deal, but a taxpayer funded organisation designed to play distraction and influence public opinion in favour of the (successive) government’s strategy of doing much the same.

New Zealanders might be proudly independent, but only foolish people are proud of having a different view from other countries simply for the sake of it.  Most New Zealanders aren’t that foolish.   Jacobi –  whose background was trade with the Americas –  seems to simply ignore issues around the integrity of our political system, the evils of the PRC regime, and its external aggression.    But who cares about those things when there are deals to be done by your members, visits to host etc.

But his comment about Jian Yang is interesting.  On the one hand, he now seems to concede that there is something to the concerns (it is only “largely” hearsay).  Perhaps things like the:

  • service in the PLA military intelligence system,
  • membership of the CCP,
  • expert assessments that (a) no one voluntarily leaves the Party, and (b) a person with his background would not have been allowed out of the PRC unless he was regarded as totally politically safe and reliable,
  • the acknowledged misrepresentations of his past on immigration/citizenship forms,
  • the photographic evidence of his close ongoing associations with the PRC Embassy,
  • the absence of any sign, in his time in Parliament, of ever being willing to criticise the PRC regime, for anything.

Does he actively “work for” the Chinese government?  One hopes not, but even if not –  and Charles Finny appeared to think otherwise, on national TV – the list of things we know, with a high degree of certainty should be enough to have any leaders of decency and integrity dissociate themselves from Jian Yang.   Perhaps it is a bit like the Kavanaugh case: the relevant standard, in putting people in influential leadership positions, shouldn’t be whether one could avoid a criminal conviction.  In Jian Yang’s case, it isn’t even clear that he could get over that hurdle in respect of the immigration/citizenship non-disclosures.

The willed reluctance of the New Zealand establishment to confront the issue was captured again in this week’s Newsroom column by Peter Dunne. Writing about who might leave Parliament at the next election, our longserving former minister writes

Likewise, Dr Jiang Yang may decide to stand aside if the vague but persistent whispers about his links to Chinese intelligence agencies persist and intensify

 

You mean pretty basic, now acknowledged, “links” like the fact that the man worked for them for a decade?   A bit more than a “whisper”.

The NPR story ends with some coverage of Anne-Marie Brady, both her papers (and associated testimonies) and the break-ins to her home and office, which are widely assumed to be the ultimate responsibility of the PRC authorities.  There isn’t anything new in that section of the story, although it is good for a wider range of overseas readers/listeners to be exposed to the material.

The Peters quote aside, in many ways there isn’t anything new in the NPR story; the news is as much that another major overseas media organisation, one whose people are probably not generally unsympathetic to the leftish slant of most New Zealand politics, ran it.

But I was struck by it partly for the contrast with the speeches the Prime Minister was giving last week on her progress through New York, making the most of her baby for publicity purposes (I checked, and Tony Blair and his wife had a child while he was Prime Minister, who wasn’t –  as far as I could tell –  paraded at the UN General Assembly).  I read all six of them, looking for substance and mostly coming up short.   It was the speech to the United Nations General Assembly that I focused on most.  After all, there might have been hardly anyone there is hear it, and only a few Guardian types to praise it, but it was an official statement of New Zealand Prime Minister to an international agency which New Zealand is a founding member of.

There were plenty of sly digs at the United States –  some even warranted –  but not a word, directly or indirectly, about the People’s Republic of China.  It might be the most populous country on the planet, with the largest (total) GDP, on an aggressively repressive path domestically (as just one particularly egregious example, those million or more people of Xinjiang in concentration camps, having done nothing but be) and a pretty aggressively expansionist path abroad, including the direct interference in the commercial and political affairs of other countries, including our own.  There was a whole section on “universal values”, which of course bears no relationship to how the People’s Republic operates.  There was a great deal on climate change, most just cheap rhetoric –  and perhaps not that different from what Xi Jinping might have said.  And then the speech ended this way

Perhaps then it is time to step back from the chaos and ask what we want. It is in that space that we’ll find simplicity. The simplicity of peace, of prosperity, of fairness. If I could distil it down into one concept that we are pursuing in New Zealand it is simple and it is this.  Kindness.

In the face of isolationism, protectionism, racism – the simple concept of looking outwardly and beyond ourselves, of kindness and collectivism, might just be as good a starting point as any. So let’s start here with the institutions that have served us well in times of need, and will do so again.

Kindness and collectivism.  There’s the answer, at least according to our Prime Minister.  Frankly I found it unnerving that we get this level of vapidity of someone charged with running the government.   “Kindness” is an admirable, perhaps under-rated, characteristic in interpersonal affairs, but it is hardly any sort of useful benchmark for making public policy.  In fact, it is incredibly naive and dangerous, and simply pays no heed to the realities of human nature.    As for “collectivism”, perhaps it is something the members of the Interational Union of Socialist Youth think fondly of, but many of the rest of us are inclined to think of manifest evils of the Soviet Union and Communist China (I could recommend a couple of good books I’ve read recently –  here and here).  I’m pretty sure neither the term nor the idea of “freedom” or “liberty” appeared in the Prime Minister’s speech at all.    Much of the active government talk was rather reminiscent of the sorts of speeches the Chinese Ambassador gives here every few weeks, with her talk of

“building of a community with a shared future for mankind”

Or rather like Simon Bridges signing the government up last year to an aspiration of a “fusion of civilisations” with a regime so evil.

Not, of course, that the PRC would be so vapid as to suggest that “kindness” is some sort of watchword for policy, whether domestic or international.

But then why would we be surprised.  The President of the Labour Party sings the praises of the regime, and of Xi Jinping.  And, so we learn from the Chinese Embassy website (although not from the Prime Minister), on the recent visit of a Politburo member there was talk of strengthened ties between (presumably) the Labour Party and Communist Party of China (emphasis added).

Li, secretary of the CPC Guangdong Provincial Committee and a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, met with New Zealand Prime Minister and Leader of the Labor Party Jacinda Ardern on Monday.

Li said China is ready to work with New Zealand to enhance political mutual trust, expand economic cooperation, keep closer party-to-party exchanges, and strengthen coordination and communication in international and regional affairs.

People say (I see it even in the ACT newsletters) that the Prime Minister is a nice kind person at an individual level, but she seems wilfully indifferent –  if not worse –  to the nature of the regime with which she and her party deal,  and about whose evils  –  and whose interferences here –  she will never once openly speak of, whether at home or in New York.

It was interesting to see the government joining yesterday in a multi-national effort to denounce various incidents of Russian government hacking.  I welcome them doing so, even if I couldn’t help wondering what marked out our own government’s signals intelligence efforts, Waihopai and all.  Isn’t such interception what governments do?  And isn’t complicity in actual and attempted murder on foreign soil –  about which the government was so slow to speak out, whether over the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine or the Skripal case – rather more substantively important.

But those were rather cheap words –  about episodes not actually involving New Zealand directly – signifying not much more than our ongoing relationship with the UK and Australia.   But China is a much bigger issue globally, and particularly in New Zealand, than Russia is.

And where is the Prime Minister on things like Xinjiang (or do “universal values” not apply there)?  Where is the Prime Minister on things like the episode in the South China Sea earlier in the week –  a Chinese warship within 45 metres of a US ship on innocent passage through international waters –  let alone the now fait accompli of the illegal militarisation of reefs etc in that sea?  Where will the Prime Minister be on the new in-depth Bloomberg story about the PRC using their place in supply chains for espionage purposes?

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.

Or on the PRC attempts to use research cooperation agreements, including with NZ universities, to steal sensitive technology?

And, of course, where is the Prime Minister on situations like Jian Yang, or Raymond Huo –  apparently associated with various United Front bodies –  who sits in her own caucus.

Perhaps she and her colleagues think kindness is the answer?

“Kindness” is no substitute for a serious hardheaded analysis or for engaging with the New Zealand public on the nature of the PRC threat, here and abroad.   It seems more like an excuse for covering your ears and eyes and reciting repeatedly “hear no evil, see evil”.     But then there are none so blind as those who wilfully choose not to see.

(And critical as I am of the Prime Minister here, there is no sign that any party in New Zealand is any better, even if not all of them would use quite her particular vapid rhetoric to simply avoiding facing reality, or standing up for New Zealand and the values of her people, and her friends in other free and democratic countries.)

But what did Winston Peters mean in those quotes above? Perhaps some New Zealand journalist could ask him?

Tomorrow, I might tackle the latest public effort of a senior public servant to dine with the devil.

In (reluctant) support of teachers

Michael Reddell Education, Immigration, Uncategorized

I’m no great fan of school teachers (at least as found in contemporary New Zealand –  a re-read last week of Goodbye Mr Chips was another matter altogether).  Over ten years now we’ve encountered a handful of very good teachers, quite a few duds, and lots who seemed no better than mediocre.  There was the Principal who, when my oldest child started school, told a gathering of parents of new entrants that it was really quite inappropriate to teach content as almost all of it would be out of date before long.   And when this particular Principal (together with the NZEI) was using the pages of the Dominion-Post to promote my daughter’s teacher –  apparently genuinely excellent –  as an illustration of the case for more pay, I made myself unpopular by noting that in the same school there were less than outstanding teachers, and that most people knew who they were.   Then there was the science teacher at the local intermediate school teaching conspiracy theories around 9/11.      Teachers who want to tell students off for discussing the previous day’s playground incident in which a deeply troubled student was on the loose with a knife and the school was in lockdown.   And then there is the endless “indoctrination”, mostly probably by teachers not quite smart enough to realise there really is an alternative view to their particular right-on views on colonialism, capitalism, homosexuality or whatever, and not apparently trained to the view (common in my youth) that a teacher’s personal political views (let alone sexual preferences) weren’t something to obtrude into the classroom.   If there are any teachers in Wellington sympathetic to a market economy, they must keep rather quiet about it.

So I’m not normally overly sympathetic to teachers.  And mostly we are stuck with them –  the teachers’ unions being among those most strongly opposed to effective school choice.   That said, as a stay-at-home parent, their stopwork meetings and strikes don’t inconvenience, or greatly bother, me.  It can be nice to have a bonus day at home together.

Of course, like any occupation there can at times be difficulty filling particular teaching positions.  When I was young we moved from Christchurch to Kawerau, and either on the day we arrived, or possibly the next day, the Principal of the local high school was on the door step.  He’d heard that the new Baptist minister’s wife had science qualifications and teaching experience (10 years previously) and he was desperate for staff.

Perhaps not all such specific vacancy stories tell anything meaningful about salaries and/or working conditions.  But when the stories multiply, and there is evidence of a material gap between demand and supply (demand exceeding supply) at the current price is usually a sign that the price should be rising, perhaps quite a bit.

How confident can we be that there is a shortage of teachers at current salaries?  Principals tell us so, but they –  members of same unions –  aren’t entirely disinterested observers (it was only a few weeks ago that a newsletter came home from one local school in which the Principal urged us parents to get along and support the teacher protest).    And almost every day, at least in the schools I have exposure to (three at present), there is a warm body in front of each class.

But then in this morning’s newspaper we read that the government itself –  the ultimate employer/funder of most school teachers –  recognises the problem.  The Minister of Education “is pledging to find at least 400 overseas teachers for the 2019 academic year”.

Which is rather convenient for the government surely?  As the near-monopsonist purchaser of school teaching services, it deals with shortages by using its power as  controller of the immigration and work visa regime to attempt to meet its staffing problems.

As I’ve written previously, there can be a place for work visas where, for example, there is a sudden and unexpected increase in a demand for a particular skill, or even where a particular skill is very rare (the market for some speciality skills can be very thin indeed).   But there are no real surprises as to how many teachers are needed nationwide –  at bare minimum for people born here there is a five year lead time, and that for new entrant teachers.  And decent teaching skills aren’t, or shouldn’t be, that hard to come by –  the PPTA apparently claims 17000 members.    These should be jobs that can be perfectly adequately filled by local residents –  who will have the added bonus of understanding the local culture –  at least if the labour market was allowed to work.

A few months ago I wrote here (and here) about how the work visa system appeared to be enabling local authorities to keep down bus driver wages and (thus) fares and ratepayer funding by substituting foreign workers in place of locals.    The bus driver case looked particularly egregious –  it being a quite modestly-skilled role into which someone could be trained in 6-8 weeks.   But it isn’t clear to me that the school teacher case is really so different, even granting that the skill levels are higher, and thus the inevitable local training and recruitment lags would be a bit longer.

Of course, like all work visa applications the case for importing teachers will be supported by evidence that locals couldn’t be recruited. But if you keep the wage level down it isn’t overly surprising that New Zealanders with other options will pursue them, and you will be left with an apparent shortage.

And the market in teachers is a pretty dysfunctional one.  We have national pay scales even though it must be a great deal harder to get teachers in Auckland than in Timaru (and that private sector jobs typically pay a bit more, for the same job, in Auckland than in Timaru), the pay scales for secondary teachers don’t differentiate by subject (even though the alternative options for a good science teacher and a good history teacher may be quite different, and we still have something like pay parity between kindergarten teachers and secondary school teachers.   For that we can blame both the teacher unions and successive governments (National-led and Labour-led).

Nonetheless,  there does seem to be a shortage of (good) teachers, and it isn’t obvious that the government should be able to use the immigration system to avoid meeting the market (while no doubt claiming in other fora that heavy use of work visas in particular sectors doesn’t hold down wages in those sectors).

When writing about bus drivers, I suggested adopting this sort of policy

To that end, I’ve argued previously for a system in which Essential Skills visas are granted on these terms:

a. Capped in length of time (a single maximum term of three years, with at least a year overseas before any return on a subsequent work visa, with this provision to apply regardless of skill level).

b. Subject to a fee, of perhaps $20000 per annum.

If an employer really can’t find a local hire for a modestly-skilled (or unskilled) position, they’d be able to get someone from overseas, but only by paying (to the Crown) a minimum annual fee of $20000.  It is pretty powerful incentive then to train someone local, or increase the salary on offer to attract someone local who can already do the job. If you can’t get a local to do a job for $40000 per annum, there might well be plenty of people to do it for $50000 (and still cheaper than paying the ongoing annual fee for a work visa employee).

Even in the context of teacher salaries –  where starting salaries are well above $40000 –  per annum – this looks like the starting basis for a workable model.

More generally, I have argued that

If we are going to have government officials administering something like a mass market Essential Skills visa scheme, and deciding who does and doesn’t get approval, surely a key aspect of any labour market test should be something along these lines?

“has the effective wage or salary rate for this occupation risen materially faster than wages and salaries more generally in New Zealand over the past couple of years?”

If not, how can you seriously use the term “skill shortage”?    Even if wages in a particular occupation have risen faster than the norm, it takes time for locals to respond and shift occupations, so one wouldn’t necessarily want to jump at the first sign of a bit of real wage inflation in a particular occupation, but if after a couple of years the pressures were persistent then some sort of Approval in Principle for temporary migrant labour –  at wages at or above those now prevailing in the domestic market – might make some sense as a shock absorber.  But MBIE seems perennially averse to markets adjusting in ways the generate higher real wages, even though that outcome is one core part of what we look for from a successful economy.

I’m not a fan of the teachers’ union propaganda arguing that some decades ago senior teachers earned as much as MPs, and that they should be again –  MPs seem to have been quite badly underpaid in that earlier period.  But I’d be surprised if the government could show that teacher salaries (and overall working condition-adjusted remuneration) have increased more rapidly than the market generally in recent years.  If not, surely higher salaries –  perhaps regionally differentiated – should be the first part of any adjustment, and if there is any resort permitted to offshore labour markets it should be explicitly temporary, backed by financial incentives/penalties of the sort I outlined above.

It sticks in the craw to stick up for teachers and their unions, but the market indications would appear to be on their side in this particular dispute.   Of course, the fact that there is a shortage doesn’t –  in an administered market like this –  tell one how much salaries should be adjusted (or the onerous paperwork burden eased), or the appropriate balance (starting salaries vs later progresssion) but the direction looks pretty clear.  And the proposal to resort to substantial offshore recruitment looks as if the government has indirectly conceded the case –  even as, again, it continues to preference the interests of offshore people over those of New Zealand workers.  Teachers might be less sympathetic than bus drivers, rest home workers, or shop assistants, but they are New Zealanders too.  Even, as it happens, substantial funders of the Labour Party.

A bare pass mark for the Board

Michael Reddell Reserve Bank Act reforms, Reserve Bank Board

The Reserve Bank’s Annual Report was published yesterday.  I’m not overly interested in the Bank’s own Annual Report, although a couple of things (one an omission) caught my eye.

The first was the sharp increase in staff turnover last year

RB turnover

Staff turnover of almost 20 per cent is very high.  The Bank explains it this way

Staff turnover increased during the year to an unusually high level for the Bank, in part due to an increase in the number of retirements and staff going on external secondments for development.

But it (even the “in part” bit) isn’t a very compelling explanation –  although I suppose both the Governor and Deputy Governor retired –  and the Bank hasn’t had any material changes in responsibilities, reduced budgets etc in the last year.  It would be interesting to know what the results of their most recent staff engagement survey looked like –  probably not that good when turnover is that high.

And it was a touch surprising that the Bank’s (self-adopted) Maori name doesn’t appear in the text at all, and even more surprising that the Governor’s new enthusiasm for talking of the Bank as some mythological pagan tree god doesn’t appear at all.   The report was signed off only three weeks ago, and we know this nonsense was well underway by then.   Perhaps the Governor didn’t think it would play well with Parliament –  although I’d have thought it might be one of the few places where it might be well-received.

But my main interest was in the Annual Report of the Bank’s Board –  a separate statutory requirement.   I’ve written about these reports each year (2015, 2016, and 2017), mostly repeating the points that:

(a) the Board isn’t like a real board of a business, a Crown entity, or even a charity or sports club having few/no decisionmaking responsibilities, instead

(b) the main role of the “Board” is to monitor and hold to account (on behalf of the Minister and the public) the Governor, and yet

(c) the Board has consistently acted, and communicated, as if their primary role was to have the back of the Governor, serving his interests not those of the  public.

And so no discouraging or critical word was ever heard from the Board, even in (say) egregious instances of the Governor attacking individuals.   From reading Board annual reports over the years you’d have to suppose that the Bank was perfect –  the sort of entity unknown to humankind – or that the Board was supine, and useless to taxpayers.

Consistent with all this, the Board’s Annual Report has been buried inside the Bank’s report –  you can’t even find it separately on the Bank’s website.  There is no press release from the chair about the Board’s report, and no mention of the Board’s annual report in the Governor’s own press release.   It still has the feel of a tame appendage of the Bank, working mostly in the Governor’s interests  (even if this year, for some reason, the Board’s report this year features first in the combined document itself).

But there has been some improvement over recent years.  A few years ago, the Board’s report was a mere two pages, and now it is five pages (with some other relevant descriptive material –  eg around conflicts of interest and remuneration of directors –  included in the Bank’s report).     There is also still a (relatively minor perhaps) factual error.   But there are some signs in this year’s report suggesting that just occasionally the Board thinks for itself.  Perhaps this isn’t unrelated to the fact that the second stage of the review of the Reserve Bank Act is looking at, among other things, the role of the Board and whether it adds any real value in its current form.

What in this year’s report makes me just slightly encouraged?

It certainly isn’t the treatment of monetary policy.  Reading the report you wouldn’t know that core inflation had been below the midpoint of the inflation target for eight years, even after the midpoint was made the explicit focus of monetary policy (by agreement between the Governor and the Minister) in 2012.  Instead, there is simply heartwarming praise of the policy processes, and if there are any issues at all about inflation they are, apparently, all the fault of the “global environment”.  Then again, none of the Board has any particular expertise in monetary policy.

But there were several positives.

First, while backing the inquiry into banking conduct and culture in New Zealand being undertaken by the FMA and the Reserve Bank, they explicitly note that

“conduct concerns are formally within the remit of the FMA”

which is a point I’ve been making for months, but which the Governor has never been willing to acknowledge, preferring to be the most visible face of an issue that really isn’t his responsibility.    It is a small acknowledgement, but they didn’t need to say it, and yet they chose to do so.  That deserves credit.

Second, the Board’s report explicitly refers to the damning survey results on the Reserve Bank published earlier this year in the New Zealand Initiative’s report on regulatory governance.  This was the report which summarised the results thus

In the ratings, the RBNZ’s overall performance across the 23 KPIs was poor. On average, just 28.6% of respondents ‘agreed’ or ‘strongly agreed’ that the RBNZ met the KPIs and 36% ‘disagreed’ or ‘strongly disagreed’. These figures compare very unfavourably with the FMA’s average scores of 60.8% and 10.3%, respectively.  They also compare unfavourably (though less so) with the Commerce Commission’s averages of 39.9% and 25.8%, respectively.

The Board writes

The Bank’s own relationships with regulated entities came under scrutiny with the publication of an independent review of regulatory governance in New Zealand. The Board met with the Chairs of the Boards of the four large trading banks as a means of gauging whether the opinions expressed in the review are widely held. Both the Board and the Governors are looking for continuous improvement in how the Bank interfaces with the regulated entities, specifically how it assesses the soundness and efficiency of its own regulatory actions (including the risks of unintended and inefficient consequences); how it assesses any tradeoffs between these two objectives; and how it reports on efficiency as well as soundness.

Pretty tame stuff, but better than nothing, and at least a recognition that there has been a problem.    The Governor’s own statement, by contrast, explicitly mentions the IMF FSAP and questions about the handling of CBL, but doesn’t mention at all this heavy criticism from well-informed locals, and the body of the report appears to brush off the NZI report results as largely resulting from one particular disputed policy (which frankly seems unlikely –  well-regarded and trusted institutions don’t score that badly when there is simply one specific thing that happens to upset people).

On CBL, however, the Board seem mostly in the mode of covering for management.

Given the public comment that was associated with the Bank securing interim liquidation of CBL Insurance Limited,  the Board requested information on the legal advice obtained and the reasons why the Bank’s investigation was not disclosed prior to court action being sought. The obligation to make disclosures to the share market rests with company directors, and a statutory requirement for confidentiality applied to the Bank’s investigation.

It is good that the Board asked the questions, but the answers don’t seem very satisfactory.  It was, after all, as I understand it, the Reserve Bank that compelled CBL not to tell shareholders (or, indirectly, creditors) what was going on.

My third small positive related to how the Board tells the story of what it does.

In the past, the Board has talked about cocktail functions it holds (for local elites) around various Board meetings this way

With most Board meetings…the Board hosts a larger evening function to engage with representatives of many local businesses and organisations, and to enhance our understanding of local economic developments and issues……. This outreach is a longstanding practice of the Board to ensure visibility of its role among the wider community, and to facilitate directors’ understanding of local economic developments, and the wider public’s understanding of the Bank’s policies.

But here they are this year

The Board met with business representatives and other important stakeholders over lunch at many of its meetings, and also hosted functions for local stakeholders following its regular meetings in Auckland and Wellington. These functions provide an opportunity for stakeholders to discuss issues with the Board and Governors following a presentation by Governors. The Board pays particular attention to any feedback on the messaging, transparency and accountability of the Bank, and is looking to the new Governor to ensure that there are improvements in some key stakeholder relationships in the next year.

If they still seem to tie themselves too closely to the Governor, there is a clear shift of emphasis – at least in how they sell themselves in public –  recognising a little more that their job is not to promote the Bank’s policies, but to ensure that the Governor is doing his job.  The explicit final sentence is the sort of thing one should expect, from time to time, from the Board, but which has been notably absent over the previous fifteen years of reports.  It is a welcome step forward and thus –  credit where it is due – I’d give them a (bare) pass mark this year.

Under the amending bill currently before Parliament the Board’s powers are to be beefed-up further, as regards the new Monetary Policy Committee.  I regard that as quite inappropriate: the Board members have no relevant expertise, and no legitimacy in their role determining who will set macroeconomic policy for New Zealand.  But the bigger questions are still to be addressed in the second stage review of the Reserve Bank Act, and so no doubt the Board needs to be seen on its best behaviour, at least looking as if it is adding some small amount of value.

But the institutional incentives, and resourcing (lack of it) mean that any improvements are unlikely to be durable or amount to much, even if individual board members were well-intentioned.

Thus, welcome as the small improvements in this year’s report are, I remain of the view that the Board in its current form should be dis-established,  If, as I would favour, the Bank is eventually split in two, there should be proper decisionmaking boards for each of the monetary policy and financial regulatory agencies.  That is how most Crown entities –  large and small, visible and not –  are governed.   Scrutiny and review mostly always will –  and probably should be –  done by those outside the Bank: the Treasury, MPs, financial markets participants, academics, and independent commentators, supported by pro-active practices and statutory provisions around the release of relevant documents .  In support of those efforts, I will continue to argue that the proposed independent fiscal monitoring agency should be broadened to include responsibility for providing independent monitoring and commentary on monetary policy and the Bank’s financial stability responsibilities.   Board members, sitting with management every month and with the Governor as a Board member, resourced by the Bank itself, simply can’t hope to be able to provide the level of detached scrutiny the public deserves of such a powerful public agency.

The government keeps film subsidies on

Michael Reddell Productivity

Subsidies and special deals for favoured firms/industries seem to have been becoming increasingly common in New Zealand.  There is Tiwai Point, the Sky City convention centre, the forestry industry, the export education industry and probably others I’ve forgotten.   There are the R&D tax credits the Prime Minister touts at every turn –  the only substantive item in her (very short) list of things the government is doing to reverse the atrocious productivity performance.

And then there is the film industry, into which many hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured over the last couple of decades.  There is an industry there, but one which official advice to the government makes clear has no prospect of viability without heavy subsidies.  That should be a good test as to whether there is any robust case for the subsidy.  Barring something like national defence considerations, any industry that has no credible prospect of ever standing on its own feet without subsidies or protection should be allowed to left to itself, probably to wither and die, but just possibly to transform itself.  And given the skewed incentives facing ministers, officials, and those in the industry – when such interventions are launched and when they are later evaluated – the standard of proof even for transitional assistance should be very high indeed.  It rarely is, of course.

This is another of those areas where there seems to be no discernible difference between National-led and Labour-led governments (and going by his comments in the last few days it isn’t even clear that the ACT Party is much different).

The current government showed some initial interest in looking to pull back on these taxpayer subsidies.  But, so we learned over the weekend, having had a look, they’ve backed away, and the party of workers, of the low income and disadvantaged, is going to keep right on with the big production subsidies.

The government has abandoned plans to rein in ballooning subsides for Hollywood, citing film industry opposition and the threat of lawsuits from the producers of James Cameron’s Avatar films.

But yesterday Parker, speaking from Australia, said following consultations with industry around the viability of their business – and thousands of accompanying jobs – without subsidies, and legal advice over a 2013 deal signed with Avatar producers, said cuts or changes to the subsidy scheme were now off the table.

“We’re not proposing to introduce a cap. We accept that the subsides are necessary, and we accept there’s a benefit to the country,” he said.

and

Parker said he wasn’t entirely dismissing the criticism by officials but said international rivals for film work were also offering subsidies.

“There’s something in that, but it’s also true that you have to balance that with whether you want to have a major industry. It’s a binary decision here – you either have this subsidy, or you don’t have an industry.”

“You’d be a foolish government to allow the film industry to fail, you might never get it back,” he said.

Now quite possibly they were on the hook over the Avatar deal, but that isn’t an argument for keeping the whole scheme in place (even if it might require a specific carve-out that respects the terms of a specific deal the previous government signed with the Avatar people).

Various official papers are linked to in those articles (notably these), which make it pretty clear that even MBIE’s hired-gun economic consultants were reluctant to attempt to put a number on the alleged economic benefit of the film subsidies, and other consultants hired to peer review the estimates the first ones eventually came up with were less than convinced by the results.  The Treasury estimated that net economic benefits were negative –  which is pretty much what one would expect when such large subsidies are required to keep the industry in business, and those funds have to coercively raised from other taxpayers.

But, notwithstanding all this, the Minister is convinced there is a benefit.  It would be nice to see his analysis.  Something for example about why, in a sector in which other countries’ taxpayers are wasting their money on subsidies, we should even be participating in such bidding wars.  And about why and how subsidising/protecting the film industry is so very different from all the other protected/subsidied industries we once had in New Zealand, that were in time forced to either stand on their own feet, or die.  And which, while they lasted, detracted from New Zealand’s overall economic performance, part of the decades-long story of declining relative productivity.

There are attempts at more sophisticated analysis in various reports MBIE and other agencies have commissioned (including this piece from last year by NZIER).  But I just had a quick look at a few summary indicators I could find.  Here, for example, is a line from a detailed table of New Zealand services exports (June years, $m)

2014 2015 2016 2017
Audiovisual and related services 504 490 397 280

Not exactly the trend enthusiasts would have been looking for.

The NZIER report has a chart of the estimated contribution of the screen industry to GDP over this decade.  In 2010 the estimate was 0.46% of GDP and in 2015 (the most recent year) 0.41 per cent of GDP.

In the annual SNZ release of screen industry data there is a table of earnings from screen industry jobs.  Here are those earnings shown relative to GDP.

screen industry jobs

On this measure, the relative share of the industry is a bit smaller than it was in 2005, despite all those subsidies.

There is also a similar length series of (a) the number of people employed, and (b) the number of jobs, which I’ve shown relative to the HLFS data on total employment.

screen E

And here is the same breakdown in respect of the number of jobs shown relative to the QES jobs filled data.

screen e 2

Employment isn’t everything –  there just might be stellar productivity growth going on.  But what NZIER could find on that front wasn’t particularly impressive –  and as they note, the numbers are shaky at best.  And in a sector of this sort, where New Zealand is a small part of a global industry, if there were really stellar productivity gains being achieved one might expect them to show up in a growing market shares, including (for example) rapidly rising exports and a rising share of total employment.  There is simply no sign of any of that.

Advocates seem reduced to some pretty feeble arguments not much different from “it feels good”.  In their taxpayer-funded report, NZIER devoted several pages to trying to make the claim that film subsidies are an effective part of “soft diplomacy”, exemplified apparently by cases like these

The German-aired Emilie Richards series (case study 6 over the page) is not well known in New Zealand, but in Germany it played a role in cross-cultural understanding. In the case of 800 Words (case study 7 overleaf), our Trans-Tasman relationship plays out in a drama series featuring New Zealanders and Australians together in daily life.

But as the discussion of these two cases unfolds it all seemed to reduce to not much more than “if you subsidise something, you will get –  and may even grow –  some firms and jobs that depend wholly on those subsidies”.  That is no sort of robust test.

Film subsidies look like a classic case in which, once established, it is extremely difficult to overcome the concentrated vested interests that want the subsidy to continue, even if there is no sign that New Zealanders as a whole are benefiting.  Perhaps there is a better class of cafe in Miramar as a result, perhaps ministers like hobnobbing with film industry people (although given the revelations of the MeToo movement it is hard to know why), and there are (of course) individual employees who would be adversely affected by the discontinuation of the subsidies –  as there is in any economic change, including the cyclical ups and downs in places like the construction industry.  But it isn’t a good basis for taking your money and mine to provide subsidies to the likes of Richard Taylor and Peter Jackson, talented as they (and their staff) may individually be.   Economic policy should be premised on considerations like economic efficiency, with any interventions benchmarked against credible performance data.  On that score, film subsidies were flawed from inception, and they clearly fail now.

Against values tests

Michael Reddell Immigration, NZ First, Uncategorized

New Zealand First’s conference over the weekend apparently supported some form of values test for immigrants.  It has been ACT Party policy too –  perhaps one of the few things the two parties (one strongly pro-immigration, one ostensibly a bit sceptical) actually agree on.

Such provisions aren’t unknown: Australia has its Australian Values Statement , a pretty watered-down thing that newcomers have to subscribe to. It isn’t clear that doing so makes any useful difference at all.    As I noted in an earlier post

My concerns are about two, perhaps opposing, risks.  The first is that any values statement becomes a lowest common denominator statement as to be totally meaningless.  The second is that the wording of any values statement –  if taken seriously –  would be hotly and continuously contested, as culture wars ebbed and flowed. 

Here, any serious suggestion of a values test just seems to offer another avenue for fighting the culture wars, in ways that would – among other things – end up delegitimising the deeply held views of many New Zealanders (native and non).   According to Newsroom’s account of the New Zealand First proposal

The bill would legally mandate new migrants and refugees to respect sexual equality, “all legal sexual preferences”, religious rights, and that alcohol was a legal substance that could not be campaigned against.

I certainly don’t respect “all legal sexual preferences”, let alone the acting out of those “preferences”.   And, on the other hand, the public health academics at Otago seem to lament that alcohol is legal.  More generally, for 100 years or so –  ending only 30 years ago –  we used to have a referendum every three years at which one of the options was Prohibition.   Kate Sheppard and the WCTU campaigned for women’s suffrage partly as a means to the desired end of Prohibition.     It is a long time ago now, but I suspect I probably voted for prohibition myself, and my (New Zealand born) father was a leading figure in the Temperance Alliance, which campaigned for it.    And what of “sexual equality”?  Who knows precisely what it is meant to mean here –  or in the Australian Values Statement –  but perhaps it means faithful Catholics would be banned from migrating to New Zealand because they don’t believe a woman can (from the nature of things) serve as a priest?    I don’t suppose that is what NZ First will mean, but some Green MPs might think that sort of restriction was rather appealing.

And does anyone suppose that if such a values test was established in New Zealand it wouldn’t include something about the Treaty of Waitangi, and something rather heavily loaded towards an interpretation that would have been unrecognisable 50 years ago.  Perhaps migrants would be required to undertake to “respect” the Treaty, whatever that means, or something that went even beyond that.   Or that if a values test was imposed by the current government it wouldn’t be full of rhetoric about the environment, climate change, and other left-wing priorities.

I dealt with this in an earlier post when, a couple of years ago, ACT was championing its proposed values test.

And where would it stop?  I had a quick look this morning at statements I could find in which each of the three largest political parties describe their values.  There was some overlap (and the particular Labour Party document I found had three of four pages of text, while the Greens and National Party had quite short lists), but there were quite a few substantial differences.  Which is what one might expect: a significant part of political debate is the contest of ideas and values, particularly in an era of cultural transition (eg secularization, in which culture and religion are no longer intrinsically interwoven).

I might find the references to loyalty to the sovereign, and limited government, in the National Party’s list appealing.    Many other New Zealanders wouldn’t.   “Respect the planet” might be something central to a Green view on things, but to me the concept of respecting an inanimate object just seems weird.  And even though there was serious uncertainty about the consequences of doing so, I’m glad our ancestors took decisive action to confront Hitler, rather than “take the path of caution”.

As far as I can see, none of the values statement (yet) talk of the rights of the unborn, or transgender rights to bathrooms –  to take just a couple of issues that have convulsed American debate.

Perhaps we might get agreement on process issues –  parliamentary sovereignty, a universal franchise, the rule of law etc –  but even on process it might be thin pickings.  There are probably plenty of supporters here of moving to a written constitution, and others who still hanker for a return to FPP.  In the end, is there genuine common ground on very much at all, other perhaps than that change should occur non-violently?  We can all agree that individuals do and should have rights, and probably all agree that in some circumstances the needs/interests of the “community” override those individual rights.  But where that boundary is, and how it should shift, is the intrinsic stuff of politics.  We can’t agree among ourselves, so what is there for immigrants to sign up to, other than today’s (temporary) shifting majority.  I was amused, for example, to read the Prime Minister’s [John Key] rewriting of history, in answering the values question, noting that for him it included “understanding that New Zealand’s always been a tolerant society”.   Really?  To name just one low-key example, our treatment of conscientious objectors during the two World Wars meets no reasonable definition of “tolerant”.

And yet the people who call for migrants to sign values statements do capture a fair point.  When large numbers of people are allowed by our governments to come and live in New Zealand they have the potential to change our society.  People are not just bloodless economic units –  dessicated calculating machines.  They bring their own attitudes and values, and while the new arrivals are likely to be changed by living here so –  if the numbers are large enough – is our society.  One need only think of European migration to New Zealand over the last 200 years –  we their descendants may be changed by living here rather than in, say, the United Kingdom, but the similarities with modern Britain are probably greater than those with pre-1840 Maori society.  The point is not that modern New Zealand is better or worse for those migrants (and their values/attitudes/technologies), but that the fact of change is inescapable and largely irreversible.  Seeking that sort of change is itself a political act.

Which is one of a number of reasons why I’m skeptical that –  even if there were material economic benefits to residents of the recipient countries – large scale immigration programmes are normally a legitimate role of government at all.  We’ll always have some immigration.  New Zealanders travel, and some will meet and marry foreigners.  Often enough the new couple will want to settle here.  And our humanitarian impulses will, rightly, drive us to take some refugees.  But in neither case –  both on generally quite a small scale – do we grant permission to reside here with a goal of changing our society.

But once we get into large scale immigration programme, governments are in the culture change business, actively or passively, often without even realizing it. In terms of the domestic culture wars, and ongoing debates, the ability to attract more people like one side or another skews the playing field.  Instead of working out our differences, and debating change, within the existing community of New Zealanders, we tilt the playing field one way or the other. I might be comfortable with a large influx of mid-western evangelicals, while most Wellingtonians might prefer liberal Swedes.  I might be happy with strongly Anglican Ugandans or Kenyans, while many would prefer secular French.   In the specific New Zealand context, few migrants have any strong reason to feel a commitment to the Treaty of Waitangi, and for those New Zealanders for whom that is an important issue, any large scale immigration skews the game against (that representation) of Maori interests

It is far easier to resolve disputes, and find an ongoing place for each other, among communities with shared memories, experiences and commitments.  Families do it better than countries.  Countries do it better than the world.  Globalists might not like to acknowledge that, but it doesn’t change the reality.  Families don’t usually resolve their differences –  sometimes painful lasting differences –   by injecting new members into the family.

It is one of the reasons why I’m opposed to large scale immigration programmes at all.  They allow governments to attempt to skew the playing field one way or other, rather than letting the inevitable cultural/values conflict play out, and be sorted out,  by New Zealanders themselves, as New Zealanders.  Perhaps it is a little different when the immigration largely involves people with similar backgrounds (culture/religion) to those of people already in the recipient country.   One might argue that was the case in New Zealand for a long time, although even then one could only do so by ignoring the position of Maori in New Zealand.

I also dealt with some of this stuff in a post on the culture/identity aspects of last year’s New Zealand Initiative report on immigration.

So long as we vote our culture out of existence the Initiative apparently has no problem.  Process appears to trump substance.  For me, I wouldn’t have wanted a million Afrikaners in the 1980s, even if they were only going to vote for an apartheid system, not breaking the law to do so.  I wouldn’t have wanted a million white US Southerners in the 1960s, even if they were only going to vote for an apartheid system, and not break the law to do so.  And there are plenty of other obvious examples elsewhere –  not necessarily about people bringing an agenda, but bringing a culture and a set of cultural preferences that are different than those that have prevailed here (not even necessarily antithetical, but perhaps orthogonal, or just not that well-aligned).

When governments facilitate the inward migration of large numbers of people –  as ours is every year –  they are changing the local culture in the process.  Now, cultures and sense of national identity are not fixed and immutable things, but cultures also embed the things that the people of that country have come to value and which have produced value.  Those people (“natives”) typically aren’t seeking change for its own sake: the culture is in some sense the code “how we do things here”, that built what people value about the society in which they live.  Whether it is comfortable or not to say so, in the last few centuries, Anglo cultures have tended to be among the most stable, prosperous and free.  So it is far from obvious why should embrace change so enthusiastically, or why we would want to adopt the Initiative’s stance, and only want to exclude those whose views and actions are “antithetical” to our own, or who might want to topple our society illegally.

Perhaps if there were really substantial economic gains to New Zealanders from bringing the huge numbers of non-citizens to live in New Zealand it might be different. At very least, we might face the choice –  give up on some of our culture and sense of national identity in exchange for the economic gains.  In some respects, that was the choice Maori faced when the Europeans came –  a clearly more economically productive set of institutions etc, but on the other hand the progressive marginalisation of their own culture. ….

There is also a degree of naivete about the Initiative’s take on culture and/or religion (and the two overlap to a considerable extent).  Back in one of the earlier quotes, the Initiative argued that it was fine with people of whatever belief coming, and

Within New Zealand, people are free to pursue their beliefs, be they spiritual or corporeal, provided these do not impose on other people’s pursuit of the same.

They don’t seem to recognise that most people hold to beliefs that they think should influence how society is organised.  Even libertarians do. This is particularly obvious in Islam, which has never had a very strong distinction between ‘state’ and “church’, but it is no less true of Christianity.  Both are evangelistic religions, proclaiming what they believe to be true – and seeing truth as an absolute concept.  Both can, and have, survived at times and in places as minority faiths, but neither has ever been content to believe that its truths are just for its people, and not for export. I’m not so sure it is really much different either for today’s “social justice warriors”, or for libertarians –  whose proposed rule is, essentially, that we should all just leave each other alone (even though this has never been, and never seems likely to be, how human beings have chosen to organise themselves).

I’m not convinced that stable democratic societies can survive that long without a common culture and/or common religion (the two aren’t the same, but they overlap considerably, and necessarily).  It is hard to know.  We don’t have a long track record of democratic states –  a few hundred years at most (even if one doesn’t use universal suffrage as the standard), and then only for a handful of countries.

…..

Democracy involves agreeing to live by a set of common rules, agreed by some sort of majoritarian process.  In almost any state, those rules include procedures for handling those least able to support themselves (whether it was Old Testament gleaning rules, the Poor Law, or the modern welfare system).  In a democracy, the willingness to help and support others is likely to be limited, to a considerable extent, to those with whom one feels a sense of shared identity.  The boundaries aren’t absolute, but revealed preference –  and introspection –  suggests that almost all of us are willing to do much more for our own families, and then perhaps for friends or members of other close communities of interest (neighbourhoods, church groups etc), and then for others in one’s own country, and only then for citizens of the world.  Is it a desirable model? I’m not sure. But it is human one, one that seems fairly ineradicable at a practical level.   Speaking personally, I don’t feel a strong sense of obligation to support someone down on their luck just because they became a New Zealander yesterday.  And I don’t feel a strong sense of obligation to support someone who won’t work to support themselves.  But I’m much more willing to vote my taxes to support those people than I am to support those down on their luck in Birmingham or Bangalore.  It is partly in that sense that “being a New Zealander” matters.  Mostly, humans will sacrifice for those with whom they sense a shared identity –  and generally that isn’t just the Initiative’s line about a shared belief in equality before the law, free speech etc etc (important to me as those things are).

Of course, what unites and divides a “country” or community changes over time.  In the wake of the Reformation, divisions between Protestants and Catholics were sufficiently important to each to make it practically impossible for both groups to co-exist for long in any numbers in the same territory/polity.  And, sure, multi-national multi-faith empires have existed for prolonged periods –  the Ottomans and Habsburgs were two examples – but not as democracies. Prudent repression can maintain stability for a long time.  But it isn’t the sort of regime that Anglo countries (and many others) have wanted to live under.

But the New Zealand Initiative report doesn’t seem to take seriously any of these issues, not even to rebut them.  They take too lightly what it means to maintain a stable democratic society, or even to preserve the interests and values of those who had already formed a commuity here.    I don’t want stoning for adultery, even if it was adopted by democratic preference.  And I don’t want a political system as flawed as Italy’s, even if evolved by law and practice.   We have something very good in New Zealand, and we should nurture and cherish it.  It mightn’t be –  it isn’t –  perfect, but it is ours, and has evolved through our own choices and beliefs.  For me, as a Christian, I’m not even sure how hospitable the country/community any longer is to my sorts of beliefs – the prevalent “religion” here is now secularism, with all its beliefs and priorities and taboos – but we should deal with those challenges as New Zealanders – not having politicians and bureaucrats imposing their preferences on future population composition/structure.

Values tests simply aren’t any sort of sensible answer, and particularly not in western societies  whose “values” and “religion” are not remotely stable or settled.   Perhaps it would work in Saudi Arabia.  Perhaps it even could have worked in many places in the 19th century.   And if such tests were seriously adopted in a society like New Zealand they would probably end up being used most against the sorts of people who now call for them.  Our culture’s heritage once included Test Acts, and I hope we resist the growing pressure to establish some modern form of them.  We can’t avoid the cultural conflicts within our own society, but we can give ourselves space to work them through as New Zealanders, people with some sort of shared commitment to this place and its people, that few newcomers –  wherever they are from, whatever their values, whatever their religion – are likely to share.