The SSC report (undertaken by Peter Hughes’s deputy) on Gabs Makhlouf’s conduct in the “Budget leak” affair late last month was finally released this morning, along with a statement from the State Services Commissioner himself, and a press conference (for which we appear to have to rely on media reports).  It was a very mixed bag but (remarkably) manages to show Gabs Makhlouf’s conduct and judgement in an even worse –  materially worse –  light than most would have expected, even having followed the media stories at the time and since.  Had it not been his last day in office anyway, his position would surely have been utterly untenable.

As it is, Peter Hughes appears to find himself betwixt and between.  He is clearly keen to distance himself from Makhlouf.  (As one small example, I was bemused that he had his comms person contact me last night to correct a mistake in my post yesterday, expressed thus: “in the current political climate, Peter feels it important to make clear that he did not reappoint Makhlouf” (previous Commissioner Iain Rennie had): not exactly standing behind your employee.)   And many of the words in his official statement, and (particularly) those reported from the press conference sound good, and pretty hardhitting.  From the official statement

“I have concluded that Mr Makhlouf failed to take personal responsibility for the Treasury security failure and his subsequent handling of the situation fell well short of my expectations.  Mr Makhlouf is accountable for that and I’m calling it out.”

and

At a press conference on the report, Hughes said his expectation of what chief executives should do when things go wrong was “very clear” and the chief executives knew it.

“They need to own it, fix it and learn from it. And I expect people to stand up and be accountable, and I am disappointed that Mr Makhlouf did not do that on this occasion,” Hughes said.

“The right thing to do here was to take personal responsibility for the failure, irrespective of the actions of others and to do so publicly. He did not do that.”

There were no hugs for Makhlouf (see Iain Rennie/Roger Sutton).  And yet that was it.  Hughes is reported as saying that were Makhlouf not leaving anyway he’d have looked at some formal reprimand (easy to say now, all hypothetical), and yet to do so now would be “cynical and meaningless”.  I don’t see anything cynical about it at all, and the meaning would be to show citizens and voters that there is at least some degree of formal accountability for people at the top.    Hughes went on to say that in these ‘big jobs” reputation is everything, and Gabs’s will have taken a big hit.  That is no doubt true, and as report makes clear it was entirely self-inflicted.  But what employers and governments can do is to make formally clear –  endorse the reputational hit – that conduct of this sort is utterly unacceptable, and judgement this poor would not be tolerated in very senior public servants.

And it got worse

“We can’t run the public service on the basis that you’re only as good as your last mistake. We can’t do that – that’s The Apprentice, it’s not Fair Go New Zealand. I have to look at this in the round, I have to look at this in terms of his eight years of service, and that’s what I’ve done…

What message does that send?  That really severe misjudgement by one of the most senior public servants in the end doesn’t matter that much, cos’ he’s a good bloke?  It is fine to talk in terms of learning from mistakes –  and just possibly, if this were a new Secretary to the Treasury one week into the job it might be applicable here –  but this was someone who had held top office for eight years and yet, when the heat really came on, performed very badly.  And, worse, as the report makes clear still today does not accept that he did anything wrong.  No “learnings” in that case.

And, of course, this was the same Peter Hughes who just two weeks ago at the gala farewell for Makhlouf, hosted by the Minister of Finance at the Beehive said

“Thank you from the people of New Zealand. Our country is a better place for your work.”

He said Makhlouf had brought “strong leadership and a great deal of personal integrity” to Treasury.

He had been “authentic and straight up” and had been calm and unflappable.

“I will certainly miss your calm authority,” Hughes said.

As I noted in a post at the time

In no conceivable universe (except perhaps some parallel one inhabited by SSC) could Makhlouf during that Budget episode be said to have displayed “calm and unflappable” leadership.  Had he done so, there’d have been no inquiry.

And the inquiry report demonstrates just how far from calm and unflappable Makhlouf’s conduct appears to have been, and how little “strong leadership” and “personal integrity” has been on display.    That gush, when Hughes must already have known much of what would be in the report –  a lot of it was in the media, some involved meetings he himself had attended –  seems both borderline dishonest, and if not then casting some doubt on the judgement of the State Services Commissioner himself.

It is perhaps worth noting too that the Minister of Finance has been playing the whole thing down even more than the Commissioner.  His statement makes no reference at all to the adverse findings in the Deputy Commissioner’s report (even though in my reading of the report, the Minister emerges not too badly –  recognising that the report dealt only with his, and his staff’s, interaction with officials).

But what of the Deputy State Service Commissioner’s report itself.   There was a great deal of interesting material, which puts Makhlouf in a very poor light, even though the standard Mr Ombler was asked to use was a fairly weak one, interpreted in ways that made it weaker still.   The standards he was asked to use were whether Makhlouf acted in “good faith”, “reasonably”, and “maintaining political neutrality”.   I didn’t have too much difficulty with how he interpreted good faith and the political neutrality (and as I’ve said before I thought most likely Gabs acted in good faith, and was not knowingly partisan), but here “reasonable” is defined as an action/decision that was “one that was open to be reached and is within the limits of reason”.   Either in how his mandate was written or how he interpreted it, there is no sense of a standard being whether actions/decisions were of a standard that might be reasonably expected from the most senior public servant in the land, who had held that high office for eight years.

And yet even on that rather generous standard, Mr Ombler still found that Makhlouf failed to act reasonably in three important respects.

Mr Makhlouf did not act reasonably in relation to:

• his use of the phrase “deliberate and systematically hacked” in his media statement issued at 8:02pm on Tuesday 28 May
• his use of the bolt analogy in media interviews on the morning of Wednesday, 29 May
• in his media statement on the morning of Thursday, 30 May, continuing to focus on the conduct of those searching the Treasury website rather than the Treasury failure to keep Budget material confidential.

Very little of what Makhlouf did during this period, after the first few hours, seems to meet a standard a fair-minded observer should expect from such a senior public servant.

Among the puzzles is just who Makhlouf was taking counsel from, if anyone, during this period.  Paragraph 10 of the report list the people Ombler talked to in the course of his investigation, but although various Treasury officials are listed, only one of Makhlouf’s second tier is mentioned (a new acting Chief Operating Officer on secondment from elsewhere in the public sector).  But none of the rest of his second tier –  the people he’d been working with for years, and who had a better sense of The Treasury, the Budget –  is mentioned. It is most unlikely –  in Budget week –  they were all away.  Did he really not talk at all to Struan Little, the Deputy Secretary responsible for the Budget, who takes over as Acting Secretary tomorrow.   Did people like him not take Gabs aside and suggest he was losing perspective?  If not –  based on all else in the report – that reflects poorly too.  We know that when Makhlouf decided –  late on the Tuesday night –  to do a round of media interviews the next morning, he explicitly rejected his Communications Manager’s offer to help him prepare lines/answers  (he went on to do those interviews with no outside prep, and not that much sleep apparently either).

What also becomes clear is that, although Treasury staff initially thought there had been a leak, by pretty early on (1pm on the Tuesday) they were converging towards recognising that the material may well have been taken from searches of their own website (all that clone site indexing stuff), and by 3pm that day they had turned off the function that was creating the snippets (of the sort that had been released earlier that morning).     They told Makhlouf this by 5pm, before Police, GCSB or anyone else was much involved (although one gap in the report is there is no discussion of contact between Treasury staff and the Minister’s office during the afternoon  – it is just impossible to believe there was none).

What is more, the report records that Makhlouf told the Minister of Finance (7;15pm on the Tuesday) that it was ‘very likely” that the information released had been accessed through deliberate searches on the website (all that clone indexing stuff again was explicitly mentioned).  Sure, they don’t seem to known that with certainty, but a calm chief executive would surely have taken it as the most likely explanation and tailored his actions and comments accordingly (while not closing down other lines of inquiry).

The timeline in the report has a lot of detail on the back and forth among Treasury, GCSB, and Police over this period.   GCSB seem to have made clear that it wasn’t a matter for them, and  –  since Treasury already knew the likely nature of the way the information had got out  –  to the extent there was anything for Police, it was already clear that it probably wasn’t about what had gone on, but on the narrower question of whether that activity had been illegal.

But none of that stopped Makhlouf.    At 8.02pm he had gone out with his, now infamous, “deliberate and systematic hacking” statement, and (by implication) associating GCSB with his statements/actions.  He had sufficiently little understanding himself that he told the Minister he didn’t know why GCSB weren’t investigating, and yet went on to tell the Minister he thought he (Makhouf) had to make a statement.  He read out the draft statement to the Minister –  hadn’t even given him a draft in advance to reflect on –  and at the same time said he wasn’t going to do media interviews. The report notes that the Minister’s staff who were in the meeting gained the impression that what had gone on was a far more serious computer system intrusion than what (Treasury staff already knew was most likely) the case.  It looks a lot like a chief executive, stung by the breaches on his watch, probably rather emotional, not turning to wise counsellors, and not ensuring that he had himself fully understood what staff were telling him.   Any statement should have been toning down the issue, accepting (probable) responsibility, not amping it up and (a key point in the SSC report) attempting to shift responsibility.

It got worse.  Treasury hadn’t shown GCSB their draft statement (with the word “hack”) and when Andrew Hampton saw it he texted Makhlouf and said Treasury needed to correct the statement (Hampton’s comms adviser then lodged a complaint with Treasury at not being shown the draft statement –  as would be conventional when one government department refers to another in a statement).  Makhlouf and Hampton talked and Makhlouf simply rejected the advice (even though GCSB is a key adviser on cybersecurity threats etc).

Earlier in the evening, Makhlouf hadn’t intended to do media interviews.  That was about his last good call in the whole affair.  But late in the evening, the Minister’s press secretary rang to ask him to do so, and Makhlouf agreed.  He seems to have taken no advice, including on possible responses, and instead got up at 4:30 on the Wednesday morning to prepare himself, where he came up with the infamous and highly misleading bolt analogy.

According to the report, by about 1:40pm on the Wednesday Treasury not only had a high degree of confidence that the “leaks” had simply involved systematic searches, but they had been told Police weren’t taking the matter any further.   Makhlouf told the Minister this at about 5:30 on the Wednesday.  He said he would make a media statement (and a parallel one from SSC) but thought it could wait until Friday, after the Budget was out of the way.  It was just another in a series of extraordinary lapses of judgement.    Wisely, the Minister’s office got back to Makhlouf shortly thereafter to indicate the statement should go out before the Budget.  (Presumably it was about this time the National Party had indicated they would hold a briefing in the morning to reveal how they got the information.   The report is endlessly cute on this point –  despite the fact that Treasury had a near-certain view of how the information had been found, we are expected to believe that they had no strong sense, even quite late in the piece, that National staffers had done the searching).

A reasonable person might have supposed that, having amped the issue up in his press release on Tuesday night, raised the stakes further in the media interviews on Wednesday, and (as background noise) having had senior ministers alleging all sort of impropriety, that a statement would be rushed out just as soon as it could possibly be got together (perhaps even a press conference with Makhlouf and his head of IT).  But no.  And Ombler concludes that this was all quite reasonable because “it takes time to draft an appropriate media statment and to appropriately consult other agencies”.    Except that the decision to do a press statement had been done by 6pm, the draft was sent off to various agencies –  including SSC (who thus saw the draft of the statement they now rightly criticise Makhlouf for) –  at about 8pm, the Minister’s office had it by 8.53pm, and the whole thing was finalised and sent out to various officials under embargo just after 9:30,    There was no reason why it could not have gone public then, not released into the dead of dawn, at 5am the following day.

Except, of course, that the statement was not well done.   As the report concludes, Makhlouf ended up focusing more on the people who had found the information than on the failures of The Treasury itself, and played up an extraordinary interpretation of Budget confidentiality conventions that surely no one else would have regarded as reasonable –  and which Ombler decisively picks apart.  Such conventions bind ministers and public servants, not people who find information through weaknesses in your website.  According to the report, Makhlouf even now rejects this interpretation.

The report suggests that Treasury staff themselves seem to have got caught up in a similar defensive mindset. In a way that is understandable: the “leak” would have been deeply embarrassing, but it was Makhlouf’s job to lead the organisation above the embarrassment and to do the right thing.  He simply didn’t do that, and no one else –  in his department or elsewhere in the public sector (the very top tier of public servants) – was willing or able to stop him.  Where, for example, was his employer –  Peter Hughes – after the first statement, after the interviews, or when he got the draft of Thursday’s statement (and the timeline records he was in two meetings with Makhlouf on the Wednesday afternoon, but the report tells us nothing about what he said or did with those opportunities).

Bottom line seems to be that Makhlouf does not regard himself as having done anything wrong.  Even with the benefit of hindsight, the report contains no sense of Makhlouf looking back with regret or wishing some things had been done differently (and he had a draft of the report, so had the opportunity to inject such perspectives if Ombler had missed them).  Consistent with that there was no contrition or apology at the time, and not a word from Makhlouf since.  He deliberately avoided parliamentary scrutiny at FEC the other day, and there has been not a word from him today.   And at the close of business today he is off, no longer accountable to anyone in New Zealand at all.  It is a shockingly poor standard of conduct on display.  He could not have survived in office –  with these findings and no contrition –  had it not been his final day.  It must be a tough day for Treasury staff, many of whom will probably be going out of their way to stay clear of Makhlouf (even those who otherwise have good impressions of him).

We –  citizens –  deserve much better.  We deserve more answers from SSC themselves.  And, one would have to say, the people of Ireland –  and of Europe –  deserve much better: if this is how their new Governor (and ECB Governing Board member) reacts under pressure when something goes wrong on his watch, it is a real worry as economic and financial pressures and tensions build.    And it is a reminder of how utterly crucial it is for anyone near the top to have at least one person they trust who is willing to tell them to their face when the top person has stuffed up, lost perspective, got it wrong.  If Gabs had such a person, they were missing in action in Budget week.

Gabs Makhlouf finishes as Secretary to the Treasury tomorrow, and there is still no sign of the SSC report on his conduct in the “Budget leak” affair. (Although the State Services Commission doesn’t really seem to live in the 21st century –  when it publishes press releases it seems not to put them on its website simultaneously with sending them out to the favoured list of journalists –  so it is always possible it is in fact out.)   Even if the report finally emerges in the next day or so, they’ve basically run out the clock. And that would, surely, be convenient for everyone –  government, SSC, Makhlouf, and the public sector CEs club –  except those actually seriously concerned about accountability in public life.

But yesterday we did finally get an announcement of an appointment of a new Secretary to the Treasury.   The job was advertised more than six months ago  (the fact that there would be a vacancy on Friday was known three years ago), suggesting that SSC had some difficulty finding a good person for the job.  In a well-functioning organisation/system, there would have been at least two or three really impressive, and pretty obvious, internal contenders (not necessarily internal to The Treasury, but to the New Zealand public service) and it wouldn’t have taken that long for a decision to have been made in favour of one of them.  A decision would have been announced several months ago, and the chosen person would have taken office on Friday.    Serious questions should be asked –  but no doubt won’t be answered –  about the process, and (more fundamentally) about the state of the upper levels of the public service (supposedly developed and nurtured by first Iain Rennie and now Peter Hughes) when twice in succession, SSC has chosen to turn to outsiders, with no knowledge or experience of New Zealand, to fill the premier position in the New Zealand public service.  Successful organisations mostly appoint from within.

Of course, The Treasury isn’t a high-performing organisation these days –  use any standard you like, but including stakeholder surveys, reviews of the technical quality of policy, the perspectives of capable staff who have now left, or even just the telling anecdotes (someone told me the other day about their dealings with Treasury social policy analysts, who reportedly struggled with the difference between average and marginal).  There are some good stories too, and some very able people, but few now view it with the mix of fear and awe that once characterised official Wellington. But the degradation of the public sector institutions’ isn’t unique to The Treasury –  after all, if it were just a Treasury problem, it shouldn’t have been hard to find a new Secretary to the Treasury from elsewhere in the high-performing policy parts of the public sector.

But what to make of the new appointee, Dr McLiesh?   The only honest answer is that it is very hard to know, and only time will tell.   That isn’t really good enough, in someone stepping the role –  in Peter Hughes’s own words –  in which they will be (not the organisation, but the individual)

“is the principal economic advisor to the Minister of Finance and the Government.”

It appears that very few people in New Zealand –  at least those in a position to comment – know her, and so we are left having to take Peter Hughes on trust. But then he was the person who reappointed Gabs Makhlouf, and that choice doesn’t inspire much confidence (even less now than at the time it happened).[UPDATE:SSC has got in touch and pointed out that the reappointment decision was made by Iain Rennie.]

I may be in a small minority here –  although I suspect not –  in that, however able someone is, I just don’t think it is appropriate to be recruiting foreigners –  especially not ones with no background in or experience of New Zealand – for such critical and sensitive roles.  Few other countries –  at least ones that had got beyond either colonial status or complete dysfunction –  would, and we shouldn’t.    Countries have interests that are, at times, in conflict with those of other countries, and that is true even for someone coming from the UK (Makhlouf) or Australia (McLiesh) –  and, in fact, those potential conflicts are much greater as regards Australia than the UK (just think of the banking sector for example).   One needn’t criticise the individuals concerned to think that we really should be capable of running our own country, and if the Secretary to the Treasury is not an elected policymaker, the person who holds that office should be a highly influential counsellor to elected governments, and hugely influential on what should be the premier department of state.  Someone rushed in from another country –  even a very friendly one –  just does not have primary loyalties to New Zealand, or a sense that their own future, and that of their children and grandchildren, depends on a job done excellently.   And they have no historical, social or political context for their advice.    We don’t have foreigners with no background in New Zealand as MPs or ministers, no matter how able.  And we went through a big debate 15+ years ago in which we decided that we didn’t want foreign judges either –  even though, at least in principle, judges simply apply Parliament’s law, and should be much less influential than the Secretary to the Treasury.

One might also add some comment about selection bias. Really top-notch foreigners –  really well suited to be premier economic adviser to the government of a sovereign state –  might normally expect to be recognised and rewarded best at home.  The New Zealand public sector isn’t spectacularly well-paid (unlike, say, Singapore or Hong Kong) and New Zealand is a poorer and smaller country than either the UK or Australia.   And it isn’t as if, these days, New Zealand is at the leading edge of reform, economic thinking, or public adminstration.  As far as we are aware, neither Makhlouf nor McLiesh had compelling family connections to New Zealand that made them want to give up the glittering prizes of home, make the sacrifice and just happened to be available to serve New Zealand.     Neither, at the time of appointment to the New Zealand Treasury secretary rule, seem likely to have been serious contenders for the comparable appointment in their home country.  Perhaps they were the best we could get……but that then is an indictment on the SSC handling of the New Zealand public service.

At the time Makhlouf was appointed, it was made known that the government had rushed through an emergency grant of New Zealand citizenship to enable Makhlouf to have the job (as if, somehow, a label transformed loyalties).   The question should be asked now as to whether Dr McLiesh is also being given a rushed grant of citizenship.  And if not, what is going to happen when really sensitive issues arise?  When I worked at The Treasury for a couple of years, there were a couple of second and third-tier people who were Australian citizens, and care was taken around NZEO (New Zealand eyes-only) documents to ensure that those people did not see them.  Perhaps that works down the line, but how appropriate is it as an option for the Secretary to the Treasury?    If, for example, an Australian banking group, and/or their New Zealand subsidiary, is in crisis?

(The point here is not that any such appointments would be likely to consciously seek to serve another country’s interests, but that (a) the rules are designed to protect against extreme eventualities, and (b) appearances matter greatly.  I have worked as a mid-senior level official in two foreign countries’ national bureaucracies, and so know something of which I speak –  fortunately perhaps there were few/no Zambia/NZ issues.)

And what of the individual?  Eric Crampton has been the most vocal (public) critic of The Treasury under Makhlouf.  He is quite positive, if guardedly so, on the new appointee, who has a PhD in finance, and during a term on the staff of the World Bank was the co-author of several journal articles with highly-regarded academic authors.   I put less weight on that, partly because I’m not convinced of the cult of the PhD (in non-academic contexts, where I’ve seen people with top degrees from even better universities and with pretty strong publication records who simply weren’t suited to senior public sector roles).

I guess I put more weight on (a) what she has, and hasn’t, been doing and saying in the last decade or so (since moving into the New South Wales public sector), and (b) on who appointed her, and so the likely criteria being used to make the choice.

The new Secretary to the Treasury joined the New South Wales Treasury in 2008.  New South Wales, you will have noted, is not a country but a state.  Quite a few people live there, but in the end it is still more than a city council but less than a country.  So much power and functionality has been centralised in Australia, that technocrats regularly ask what the point of state bureaucracies really is.    Where this matters, in thinking about the New Zealand Treasury role, is not around managing a budget, or even dealing with individual (perhaps very complex) infrastructure projects, but around most everything else.   Tax policy for example.  Or monetary policy (The Treasury has just been handed a seat on the new MPC), financial system regulation, or even much of the big picture around health, education or welfare policy.  McLiesh has precisely no experience –  according to the SSC’s statement, which will have been putting the best foot forward –  in advising national governments on critical areas of national policy.    And there is a pretty good chance that, until the last couple of months, she has never given New Zealand economic policy, and its major failures (productivity) and challenges, a moment’s thought –  unless perhaps on a skiing trip she happened to pick up a local newspaper.    Frankly, this new appointee appears about as substantively well-equipped to be the key economic adviser to a sovereign national government, in a country with its own currency etc, as Makhlouf does to sit on the ECB Governing Council.

Perhaps one doesn’t really expect fairly senior state public servants to be making speeches, writing articles etc.  Mostly, it isn’t the day job.  I went looking and couldn’t find any evidence of anything.  But people who nurture a longstanding commitment to excellence in economics and policy advice often find avenues – and avenues are found for them –  to tap that expertise, in papers, commentaries, discussant comments or whatever.  But I couldn’t find anything with her name on done since she left the World Bank.  Perhaps I missed something –  I’d be keen to know if so –  but she looks like someone who has successfully transformed herself into a fairly well-regarded public sector operator.    There is a place (an important one) for those skills.

In eleven years in the New South Wales public sector, McLiesh has had five jobs.    From the look of the documents, they weren’t a succession of stellar promotions, but of frequent rotations, and then a move last year to run what seem to be the NSW equivalent of polytechs (in the wake of a sudden departure of the previous incumbent).    One of the questions that should interest anyone in thinking about the New Zealand Treasury is the management record: especially so for anyone uneasy about the current state of The Treasury.  Perhaps the new appointee really is a stellar change-manager and someone with a demonstrated track record of lifting performance in troubled organisations.   But when you are on your fifth job in eleven years, there have to at least be questions about whether you’d stayed around long enough for anyone to really tell the good that might have been done.

Which brings me to the final relevant set of considerations: who made the appointment, and what is the evidence on their predispositions?    I wrote about the appointment process, and the advertising for the job, in a post back in January (skip the first few paras).  From that post

The procedure for the appointment of public service chief executives is set out in the State Sector Act.  Section 35 provides that when there is a vacancy the State Services Commissioner must

invite the Minister to inform the Commissioner of any matters that the Minister wishes the Commissioner to take into account in making an appointment to the position.

That is the Minister’s opportunity to scope the job, and identify his or her priorities.  And although there is now a perception that appointments are made by the State Services Commissioner, in fact the law is clear that the Cabinet can not only reject a nomination, but can appoint their own preferred nominee.   In other words, while Peter Hughes (the State Services Commissioner) has considerable influence, appointments ultimately reflect to a substantial degree the choices and priorities of ministers.

And, writing about the capabilities SSC said it would be assessing people on

All probably fine and reasonable in their own way –  if what you want is some generic public service manager –  but again what is notable is the absences.   Neither here, nor anywhere in any of the documents, is there any sense of wanting someone who might model excellence as a policy adviser, or lift the performance of the organisation in a way that might deliver credible and compelling answers to the appalling productivity underperformance of the New Zealand economy.

And why not?  Presumably because neither Grant Robertson, nor his boss, nor his party, nor the parties they govern in league with, care.  Nothing –  in these documents, in speeches, interviews or anywhere –  suggests otherwise.

Perhaps Grant Robertson really was made uncomfortable by Makhlouf’s extraordinary behaviour in the “Budget leak” affair, but that aside we’ve not heard or seen a word suggesting that he wants something materially better or different in The Treasury.  Only yesterday he was out promising more wellbeing and Living Standards Framework stuff.

And Hughes?  His track record isn’t one of promoting people with real expertise, and leadership capability, in the subject area they are responsible for –  what does Andrew Kibblewhite know about Justice, or Andrew Bridgman about Defence, or Carolyn Tremain about economic development. to take just three high profile examples.   Real expertise might not be disqualifying –  people seem to speak highly of the new MFAT head –  but it scarcely seems to be a prerequisite.  Nothing in the Treasury advert really suggested he’d made an exception in that case.  The focus seems always to be on appointing general public service managers, who won’t rock the boat, won’t upset Peter Hughes, and will get along nicely with ministers.    If that is what you want in the job, quite probably the new Secretary to the Treasury may do quite well, while probably seeking to use the job as a stepping stone to something bigger, better, and better-paid (richer country and all that) back home.     But count me sceptical that the appointment presages a substantial improvement in The Treasury.   (And, as always with public service heads these days, the likelihood now of disrupting the Treasury second tier, so that the incumbent has their own people:  some might argue that change is warranted –  but the sun/moon feeling card senior manager has already gone  – but where are better candidates likely to be found in the diminished New Zealand public sector?).

Near the end of my earlier post I wrote

I guess there is nothing to stop the person who is eventually appointed choosing to make productivity a priority and foster work developing compelling analysis and recommendations.  But it doesn’t seem very likely.  Even if Treasury isn’t as resource-constrained as some government agencies, there won’t be lots of capable staff resources readily able to be diverted to something that just isn’t a government priority.  But more importantly, what sort of person do we suppose is likely to get the job?   And why would such a person, who got through the selection process (acceptable to both SSC and the Minister) be likely to change their spots once in office.  What would be their incentive?  And how likely is it that they’d be the sort of person who would even care much, or understand the issues well enough to know where to start.

That still feels about right now.

I’d love to be wrong about this, and truth is that at present we have only very very partial data.  If the new Secretary to the Treasury really is the agent of transformation, dramatically lifting the performance and standing of the organisation, I’ll be delighted –  and, I hope, ready to highlight my pleasant surprise.  But it isn’t clear, on the information to hand now, why we should expect anything more than a competent generic public service manager, with little expertise in national economic management, no background in New Zealand, and –  perhaps most importantly –  no mandate or imperative for anything much better or different.

Our institutions have been in decline for some time, and there is little reason to suppose that Peter Hughes –  or the ministers he works for –  will be the agents of reversal, or that this latest appointment is a sign that change (for the better) is really in the wind.

When I wrote last week about Gabs Makhlouf, outgoing Secretary to the Treasury (whose serious misjudgements around the “Budget leak” mean he really should already have gone), a former Treasury official got in touch to say that while what I said seemed reasonable, if anything I was probably a bit too generous to Makhlouf.  Perhaps, but it is probably better to err on that side.

Perhaps what my former colleague had in mind was something like the perspectives –  raw and brutal – in a truly remarkable column published at The Spinoff by Tony Burton, formerly (until just last month) the deputy chief economist at The Treasury.  The title tells you most of what you need to know: “How bosses’ obsession with vapid slogans borked the public sector”.  One can only assume Tony doesn’t intend to look for work in the New Zealand public sector ever again…or at least for not as long as Peter Hughes, and the CEs appointed in his image and likeness, are in place  (Tony’s background was as a UK academic, so I guess he can always head back there).    Anyone with the slightest interest in the degraded state of policy advice and the New Zealand public service should read it.

The first paragraph will give you a taster

Sometimes on a Tuesday morning you may hear a low, vaguely rhythmic rumble coming from a Treasury meeting room. A handful of its middle-aged Pakeha bureaucrats will have descended from the department’s working floors where budgets and economic predictions are done to assemble around the table. Stalin humiliated his politburo by forcing them to sing along to a recording of wolves howling. The Treasury leaders are probably attempting a waiata, but the sound they produce is a drone of submission eerily similar to its Soviet precursor. Welcome to the New Zealand public service in 2019.

and this, of The Treasury

The collapse in the organisation’s expertise has been so profound that Treasury even appointed an HR professional to the minister of finance’s office. Think about that for moment. The Treasury are government’s main economic and fiscal experts. An important way for Treasury to help the minister of finance is to provide some of those experts for his office. Yet Treasury appointed someone whose area of knowledge is running Treasury as an organisation. Imagine you went to see a GP and were told the office manager was the most qualified person in the practise to provide medical advice. That is the position Grant Robertson is in.

If anything, he seems to have it in for Peter Hughes even more than for Makhlouf (I guess the latter will be gone next week, while the former rules the roost of the New Zealand public service).  Of Hughes as head of MSD (Burton worked in MSD when he first came to New Zealand)

One of his first acts was to command all staff to heed ‘Peter’s Principles’, of which there were 10. (Yes, he really did issue 10 commandments from on high, though I understand it didn’t take 40 days.) The status given to expertise in the organisation’s culture is best exemplified by the last principle: “’Just do it!’ means … just do it”.

Astonishing.

There are a few bits where I’d disagree with his emphasis or interpretation (about history before his time) but it is really important reading –  entertaining, passionate, disdainful even, but raising profoundly serious concerns.  He doesn’t really offer solutions, but the first step to a solution has to be a broader awareness and acceptance of the problem.   There is no sign yet of that, and thus it remains difficult to be optimistic that anything will be much better when Peter Hughes finally gets round to appointing a new Secretary to the Treasury.

Nor is it clear that even the government, let alone the Opposition, really cares.

But New Zealanders pay the price for this decline and fall.

UPDATE:     A reader with knowledge of the secondees to Robertson’s office got in touch and suggested that the claim (see above) that “an HR professional” was appointed as one of Treasury’s secondees did not seem right.  I have lodged an OIA request with The Treasury to confirm one way or the other (which they could answer quickly but probably won’t), but further inquiries resulted in an email suggesting that one of the current Treasury secondees may be the person Burton had in mind.   Here is his LinkedIn page.     The person concerned is a relatively recent Treasury recruit, having joined in 2016, with degrees in Architecture and Public Policy.  Of his time before his secondment last year to the Minister’s office he writes

Analyst
Company Name:  The Treasury – New Zealand
Dates Employed:  Apr 2016 – Present
Employment Duration: 3 yrs 3 mos
Location: Wellington
I worked on fiscal and policy issues spanning state services to transport, and worked with Treasury leaders on its organisational strategy.

He appears to have worked on a range of policy issues, but also “worked with Treasury leaders on its organisational strategy”.  It has been suggested to me, from people who should know, that this role would have been based in Human Resources.

I would have to say that, if this is the person who was meant, the paragraph in the original article is at least slightly misleading (personally, I feel misled as a reader).   Again, if it is this person, they do not appear to be what most would think of as an “HR professional”.   One might debate what sort of people Treasury should hire as analysts – as Eric Crampton has done vocally – and even how experienced secondees to the Minister’s office should be (bearing in mind that the role is usually more about managing relationships and paper flow, founded on a knowledge of the organisation and its people and the potential significance of the issues, than on providing substantive personal analysis or policy advice to ministers), but this specific claim in Burton’s article does feel like something of an overreach.  Initially I had found it the most compelling single thing in the article –  it was something new to me and quite specific, coming from someone who  –  in my limited dealings with him over the years –  seemed pretty careful about detail.  I should have been more sceptical.

Gabs Makhlouf has now had his gushy official farewell, even as we await for the SSC report on his conduct and judgement during the Budget leak affair.  His term expires next Thursday (27th) and so with each passing day it looks more likely that the SSC will simply run out the clock, so as to further minimise the risk of an undue embarrassment to them (party to Makhlouf’s choices), to Makhlouf, or to The Treasury.

But, clearly not content with a post-Budget lull and a quiet last few weeks at work, Makhlouf has released a (final?) on-the-record speech, addressing the question “What is prudent debt?” in turn reopening debates, at least on the left, about the government’s approach to fiscal policy.   It is a rather odd affair, as the speech appears to have been given to a bunch of Treasury staff (“the Treasury’s Economic Forum”).

As I’ve written here previously I’m generally not convinced that the Treasury Secretary should be making public speeches.  The primary role of such an official is the administer The Treasury and advise the Minister of Finance (unlike, for example, the Governor of the Reserve Bank who wields independent policymaking power).  And whatever the merit of their views –  and there have been very able Treasury secretaries in other times and other places – in speaking openly they are either constrained to not depart far from current government policy (themselves partisan choices), or they create trouble for the government and undermine the willingness of ministers to engage privately with the free and frank advice officials are paid for.

But on this occasion I don’t have too much problem with the speech being put on-the-record.  It seems to reflect analysis and advice already provided to ministers, in a core area of Treasury’s responsibility, and if that advice itself hasn’t already been published –  and it should have been, pro-actively – it would almost certainly be made available in response to an Official Information Act request.

Moreover, although I have been very critical of numerous of Makhlouf’s speeches over the years (Google “croaking cassandra, makhlouf speeches” if you want examples) this speech was one of the better (not great, not that deep, but not bad) ones I’ve seen.     That doesn’t mean I agree with it all –  that isn’t the relevant criterion –  but that much of it is thoughtful and considered, and doesn’t just parrot glib, but perhaps conventional, cliches.   There is too much reference to “wellbeing” in it for my liking, but that is probably true of every public sector document at present –  please the masters –  and since it is mostly vacuous it is mostly relatively harmless.

Why “prudent” debt.  Because the term is explicitly used in the Public Finance Act –  governments are required to conduct fiscal policy consistent with maintaining a “prudent” level of debt.  They don’t have to tell us what they consider is prudent, but they do have to tell us what debt levels they are aiming at.   Quite what criteria are relevant to determining the prudence or otherwise of a particular level of debt isn’t spelled out, and so although the choices are ultimately for politicians to make, it is appropriate and indeed desirable for The Treasury to offer advice, at least on how best to think about the issue  (I’m less sure it is the place for The Treasury to put a number on prudence, as Makhlouf does, because their values and priorities won’t necessarily be those of the elected politicians.  But so long as they, and we, recognise that, and take their advice for what it is, it is still likely to be a useful contribution to the debate.)

Personally, I found the more persuasive part of the speech to be where he addressed the issue of buffers.   One’s view on how much debt the government should carry in normal times needs to be informed by one’s view of how badly adverse events could throw one off course, in ways that would lead a government to want to carry more debt for a time.  One can think of severe recessions, severe natural disasters, or even things like banking crises. In a severe adverse event, the last thing one wants to find is that one doesn’t have the fiscal flexibility (market or political) to facilitate prudent adjustment and absorption policies.    In a New Zealand context, a buffer of perhaps 20 percentage points of GDP seems sensible and reasonable.   One shouldn’t expect to use it in every downturn, but every few decades something very severe will come along, and one needs to have the flexibility to cope. And, on the other hand, 20 per cent won’t always suffice –  wars happen.

But beyond that, it was less clear how much substance there was to the speech –  or to the, as yet unpublished, supporting analysis.   For example, the Secretary seems (perhaps understandably) hesitant about criticising other countries, but he seemed reduced to trying to argue that there were substantive structural reasons why public debt should (prudently) be lower in New Zealand than it might be in some other countries, rather than just openly saying that levels of public debt in, say, the UK, France, US, Japan, Greece are higher than looks sensible.   His arguments for why debt here should be lower than in other countries don’t amount to much: small size (not clear how this is relevant at all), and exposure to natural disasters.  The latter might have some merit (although Japan’s experience of natural disasters in the last 150 years is much worse than New Zealand’s), but it isn’t exactly integrated to a structured framework.     And one could, quite reasonably, counter that our much more rapid population growth rate would naturally, and all else equal, lead to a higher prudent ratio of debt to GDP than one might observe in most countries (population growth doesn’t really get a mention).  On the other hand, our dismal productivity record might also be relevant, but again it doesn’t rate a mention.  And nor does the distinction between countries with floating and fixed exchange rate (the latter typically need more fiscal flexibility).

It was also a little surprising that, in a speech that bills itself as taking the “long view” there was no mention of how we might best think of past peaks in public debt ratios.  Depending on which measure one uses, thirty years ago public debt as a share of GDP might have been around the peak level Treasury now thinks appropriate.  What should we take from that earlier episode?    And there was no mention at all of the earlier period when, for decades, New Zealand ran public debt to GDP well in excess of 100 per cent of GDP.  How should we think about the prudence, or otherwise, of that record (and wouldn’t, for example, prudent debt levels (share of GDP) for 1913 New Zealand have been considerably higher than those for, say, 1913 United Kingdom?

There were also places where the political strains were showing.    On the one hand, the Secretary to the Treasury is right with the “governments have to ‘invest’ more” line.

And there is certainly an in-principle case for higher investment in New Zealand. The risks I discussed earlier – particularly climate change – will likely need to be managed through major investments. And as we discussed in He Puna Hao Pātiki, many of our social assets – social housing, and the healthcare and education estates – are aged and reaching the end of their useful life. In some places there is a critical under-provision of these essential social assets. High-quality infrastructure investment is needed to support urban growth and the supply of housing. Further investments in this physical capital can support the wellbeing of New Zealanders, and aid the development of our human and social capital.

You might agree or disagree with him, but it certainly reads as if he believes that there are big potential returns (economic and social) to lots more public investment.  And yet he spends the next page walking back from what this seems to imply, arguing (more or less) that it would be better if we had more unemployment so that these projects he favours wouldn’t crowd out private spending.  It is a pretty incoherent stance: if the projects are really as high-yielding as the Secretary makes them sound, we should welcome and embrace them now, even if other spending is crowded out.  And if they aren’t really that attractive, one should be cautious about championing them at any time.  But there is little sign that Treasury has faced or addressed that tension.

There also wasn’t much sign of the Secretary engaging with the record of government failure (perhaps not so surprising in an official more generally, but Treasury are supposed to be the guardians of good spending discipline).    Personally, there are several reasons why I don’t favour higher levels of public debt (and don’t regard the limits of what the market might lend as particularly relevant), including the continued stream of low quality projects governments manage to do even at present.  Wouldn’t a persuasive case for more debt involve, among other things, repeated case studies of the excellent and efficient ways governments spend and invest, with actual economic and social returns coming in at or above estimates generated at the time the relevant project proposal was approved.  This isn’t a benchmark of perfection – any investor, public or private, will get things wrong at times –  but of excellence, including showing how poor projects are recognised early and either remedied or terminated.  Given how weak the governance and accountability are, we should be very wary of letting governments loose with the credit card.

It was also striking that there was no mention in Makhlouf’s lecture of the way in which government social provision is likely to affect private sector savings behaviour.  One can largely agree with the welfare system as it is, and still recognise that without it, it is likely that the private sector as a whole would save more, notably for retirement.  That biases me towards thinking that the appropriate ratio of public debt to GDP in normal circumstances in an advanced country is really quite low.   In fact, for a comprehensive net debt measure, a benchmark of around zero per cent of GDP might be a reasonable starting point, with a resonant round number appeal (a bit like middle-aged people used to look forward to the day they become debt-free –  before governments messed up the housing market).  (As it happens, on the OECD’s broad measure –  general government net financial liabilities –  zero is about where New Zealand is now.)

A few other quick points:

• it was good to see the Secretary specifically address MMT,
• and it was good to see him refer, late in his speech, to the government’s growing use of Crown entity debt, in ways that erode the significance of the actual core Crown debt targets. Better perhaps for Treasury to encourage as to think about net debt more broadly – to encompass such things, and the NZSF assets –  than to run with putting a number on the variable the current government chooses to target,
• it is a debate worth having, but I remain as unconvinced as ever – and I used to run the Reserve Bank’s financial markets function –  by the argument Makhlouf repeats that the government needs to have a significant level of gross debt to support (a) market functioning, and (b) optionality around future borrowing capacity.

Overall, not a bad speech, and better than many of Makhlouf’s.  One can’t help thinking that much of the material and many of the ideas might better have been released in a series of working papers or discussion documents –  to encourage expert debate more widely –  before the Secretary put his imprimatur on an official view.  But, in the end, next week  he’ll be gone, heading for Ireland, and we’ll be left to reflect and debate the best longer-term approaches for New Zealand.

Who knows, but by then we might even have a replacement for Makhlouf announced.  It is pretty shambolic that a week from his departure –  date known long ago –  the recruitment and appointment agency (SSC) hasn’t announced an appointment to what should be the most important public service job in New Zealand.

I saw three reports of last night’s Beehive function to farewell the outgoing Secretary to the Treasury.  There was Barry Soper’s piece on the Herald website, and Herald political editor Audrey Young’s account, as well as Richard Harman’s Politik column (the latter is subscriber-only, but with one free article a month for non-subscribers).

Soper’s is the more hard-edged take

The atmosphere in the cavernous Beehive Banquet Hall last night was about the same as it would have been if Donald Trump walked into a Democrat’s convention.

and

It’s surprising the inquiry wasn’t done and dusted in time for the farewell given all the statements so far point to the fact that the Secretary knew full well when he claimed there’d been a hack attack that it hadn’t taken place, the GCSB spies had made that clear the night before.

But

But if last night was uncomfortable they were doing their best not to show it.

Across the three accounts, we learn that – Grant Robertson aside, as host –  no Labour ministers were present, but that a phalanx of New Zealand First ministers  and MPs were, including Shane Jones, whose (lack of) regard for the proprieties of public office is well-known.

I suppose that when it was decided to push ahead with this nauseating function, people had to at least go through the motions, but it sounds as if it was worse than that.    Audrey Young talks of the “glowing tributes” Makhlouf received (Harman talks twice of “fulsome praise” –  when I was growing up that meant (eg OED) “offensive to good taste, from excess or want of measure”, so perhaps Harman was deliberately being a bit double-edged.)    Reports suggest that at least Robertson was somewhat honest, since his praise seemed to involve the things that had seen a dumbing-down of The Treasury, and a lowering of its standing and capability to offer rigorous economic analysis and advice.  I guess when your government has no economic ambition, you don’t need much analysis.

But what seemed wildly inappropriate was the account of the State Services Commissioner Peter Hughes’s address.  You will recall that the State Services Commission is investigating Makhlouf’s personal conduct in and around the Budget affair.

“Thank you from the people of New Zealand. Our country is a better place for your work.”

He said Makhlouf had brought “strong leadership and a great deal of personal integrity” to Treasury.

He had been “authentic and straight up” and had been calm and unflappable.

“I will certainly miss your calm authority,” Hughes said.

In no conceivable universe (except perhaps some parallel one inhabited by SSC) could Makhlouf during that Budget episode be said to have displayed “calm and unflappable” leadership.  Had he done so, there’d have been no inquiry.

But, more importantly, how are supposed to take seriously (supposing anyone was inclined to) an inquiry into very recent conduct, when the person responsible for the inquiry gushes like this, and apparently went on to praise the collegiality of the public service chief executive “club”.   Looking out for each other no doubt (even if, privately, they must all be thinking “Gabs, how could you have?”)

And after all that attendees had to listen to Makhouf “at length” (is there anything worse at a farewell than long speeches?).  The sheer vacuity of it all was captured in this piece of (delusional) political pandering.

“I have to say, Grant, that one of my proudest moments was listening to the Budget speech and hearing the living Standards’ Framework come alive,’ he said.

While serious analysts struggle to identify any real difference the soft-centred feel-good rhetoric made.

The other thing that caught my eye in the Harman column was the photo at the top of it, showing Makhlouf and Grant Robertson chatting pleasantly with the PRC Ambassador, Madame Wu.  Pretty nauseating in the wake of the repression this very week of the Hong Kong protests –  but no doubt Madame Wu is delighted that our government, unlike Australia, the UK, the EU, and senior US figures, has said nothing at all.

But in particular the photo brought to mind Gabs’s shameless (and not even well-grounded) pandering to the PRC.   There is, for example, this

Secretary to the Treasury Gabriel Makhlouf has welcomed a new Memorandum of Arrangement formalising a financial dialogue between the New Zealand Treasury and the Ministry of Finance of the People’s Republic of China.

signed on the Prime Minister’s recent tributary visit to Beijing.  Of it, Makhlouf noted

There are fiscal, financial and economic issues of mutual importance to our two countries and there is much we can learn from each other

Quite what he thought the New Zealand Treasury could learn from economic policy etc in a middle income highly repressive state without the benefit of the rule of law or a genuine and open contest of ideas was never made clear.  You might excuse that bumpf on the grounds of “well, it is meaningless, and just the stuff officials sometimes have to do”. But the same can’t be said for the dreadful speech he gave in Beijing last year.  I wrote about it here.   An excerpt

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 party-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.

That is the sort of leadership our Treasury has had for the past eight years.  But I guess you can see why he probably mostly went over okay in the Beehive.   And why Madame Wu was so keen to chat.

My trains anecdote yesterday prompted a former Treasury official to get in touch with another farewell story.

I recall him also saying, in the context of the Christchurch earthquakes, that what was needed was a “Canary Wharf” kind of initiative in Christchurch. I recall his total absence of any reference to cost/benefit or evidence leaving us all looking at the floor – we were trying to imagine what a Canary Wharf in Christchurch might consist of, aside from being mystified about what it was about Canary Wharf that he was seeing as welfare-enhancing.

No doubt we all say dumb things at times, and perhaps especially people who think aloud.   But not all of us, having already risen to such giddy heights – albeit by leaving home and coming to a small and remote country – say things of quite such economic illiteracy in formal work contexts, and then get promoted further, to be chief economic adviser to successive governments for eight years.

It isn’t Makhlouf’s fault New Zealand has drifted further backwards, in economic terms, over the last eight years.  But over that time he led an institution that could have played a powerful role in shaping and influencing for the better debate about how best to respond to our longstanding continuing relative decline.  Instead he chose to shift the focus to feel-good distractions.  He –  and those who appointed and reappointed him –  bear responsibly for that, for what is in many respects a betrayal of our people, perhaps especially the poorest and most vulnerable, who can’t just flit in and when their term ends flit off to another high-paying job in yet another country.

Yesterday afternoon I attended a forum at Victoria University arranged to discuss ideas in a paper written by Gabs Makhlouf, the outgoing Secretary to the Treasury, and one of his staff, Udayan Mukherjee (currently doing masters study at Cambridge).  The paper is still described as “draft for discussion”, but that apparently includes wider discussion (I checked and the authors didn’t mind it being more widely quoted).

The paper is under the title “Economic Policy in the Public Square: A Perspective from New Zealand”, and is 30 pages of reflections on a variety of issues around economics, economic policy, and public policy more generally.  I’m not quite sure what motivated the paper, although The Treasury has faced some criticism –  mostly justified in my view – in recent years around such things as an apparent de-emphasis on economics skills, and various aspects of the Living Standards Frameworks (including caricatured representations suggesting that some previous generation of advisers or policymakers had once thought GDP was everything).   At very least, some of that criticism must have been context for the Secretary to the Treasury to have devoted his scarce time to such a project.

The paper itself didn’t end getting that much attention in yesterday’s forum: Mukherjee gave a fairly brief introduction, and then we had three panellists (one foreign PhD student, and two of the eminent figures of New Zealand economics, Arthur Grimes and Gary Hawke), each of whom had their own hobbyhorses to pursue, and the discussion constantly seemed to veer towards universities and what they should teach, or which courses a budding economist should pursue.

There were bits of the paper I quite enjoyed. I’m a history buff and any time someone addresses the history of economic policymaking in New Zealand I’m interested (Mukherjee is apparently doing work in this area for his masters).  I quite like playing devil’s advocate (mostly because I think it is actually a correct interpretation) around the contribution to economic policy of Sir Robert Muldoon (quite a lot of liberalisation happened on his watch, in very challenging times, even as some very costly choices – especially around Think Big – were made late in his term), and so it was good to see Jim McAloon’s book on post-war economic policymaking cited.   I’m less persuaded by their suggestion to de-emphasise debates about the post-1984 reforms (that suggestion seemed, consciously or not, more likely to reflect the fact that one author wasn’t here at the time, and the other hadn’t yet been born).   The biggest upheaval in New Zealand policy (economic or otherwise) for generations is inevitably a key point of reference, especially as policy subsequently has largely descended into somnolence.

But if there are interesting snippets, the paper overall seemed to be a bit of a muddle, especially for a piece carrying the imprimatur and co-authorship of one of our most senior public servants and policy advisers.  If the paper is ever revised and finalised (and Makhlouf will soon have time on his hands) I think it could do with quite a bit more work.

Thus, you’ll notice the title of the paper.  The suggestion is that the paper is about “economic policy”.  They don’t define that term, but I think it wouldn’t be unreasonable to take it as including macroeconomic policy (overall fiscal policy, monetary policy, perhaps financial system regulation) and things that are directly focused on overall economic performance (whether economywide or sectorally).   One could think of (most of) immigration policy, R&D policy, policy around trade agreements, tourism policy or whatever.  On such important issues, it seems pretty unquestionable that we should form our public service expert advice, primarily (although of course not exclusively) from an economics perspective.  On some of those sorts of issues, international perspectives and literature will provide most of what is needed. On others, there will be some distinctive New Zealand perspectives and angles.  We need advisers who are able to draw on (substantially economic) theory, evidence, and experience, debate and distill what is relevant and what (probably) isn’t, and so on.   That is particularly so when The Treasury is offering a perspective on proposed policy initiatives or expenditure (you might expect individual sectoral agencies to have a wider range of skills and expertise).

But to the extent there is a debate, I don’t think it is about those areas, or the centrality of economics expertise in shaping policy analysis and advice on them.  The Treasury hasn’t been very active in generating serious advice on productivity –  they might say they’ve been underfunded, or had masters who weren’t interested –  but I doubt they’d seriously suggest that if they were going to do much work in this field that economics/economic history wouldn’t be the primarily relevant set of skills.  The review of the Reserve Bank Act is being led by people with a pretty strong economics background, and appropriately so.

There is also some lack of clarity in the paper about whether they are talking about policymaking, or policy advice and the analysis that informs it.  Often they talk about policy makers, but mostly (I think) they means advisers (like themselves, although not necessarily limited to the public service).   Policymaking is mostly done by ministers (and, to their credit, Makhlouf and Mukherjee push back against suggestions that more policymaking should be done by independent agencies) and no one thinks that a formal economics training should be some sort of prerequisite for getting to sit in Parliament, let alone the Cabinet (even serving as Minister of Finance).  For what it is worth, Donald Trump’s degree majored in economics.  (Margaret Thatcher did chemistry, Roger Douglas accounting.)

But perhaps the more worrying conflation is around what sort of policy we are talking about.  Specifically, the authors do not draw any sort of distinction between things we might more normally think of as “economic policy” (see above, and the title of their paper) and “public policy” more generally.

If, as a Cabinet minister (or a voter) I wanted public service advice on the appropriate specification of an inflation target, or on positioning New Zealand to cope best with the next serious economic downturn, it is advice informed by economics that I should want, and would benefit from.     There may be some other useful perspectives, but they will be peripheral in nature.

But if, as a Cabinet minister (or a voter), I wanted advice on the appropriate freedom of information legislation to adopt, economics isn’t the set of skills I would sensibly be first looking to.   Same might go for abortion policy, or policy around freedom of speech, or defence policy, whether New Zealand should be a republic, or policy on scandalising the court.  It isn’t that there are no relevant insights that economists might offer on such issues, or questions they might pose –  including the always-relevant issue of resource constraints and opportunity costs – but it is unlikely to be the most useful paradigm (or even set of paradigms) for informing and framing decisions ministers and MPs have to make in such areas.

A senior Treasury official recently mentioned to me a conversation with another public servant, who had posed the question “if I’m doing public policy [perhaps “doing public policy well”], am I doing economics?”      To which the answer surely has to be, and should be “not necessarily”, and “it depends”.  Top-notch senior public servants need to be able to discern which skills and experiences, and formal frameworks, are relevant to which issues, and hire (and contract in, and consult) accordingly.

Many of these issues seem to resolve to the staffing and role/clout of The Treasury.   I happen to think that huge spending departments (eg Health, Education, and MSD) would benefit from having a stronger economics perspective in their policy advice and evaluation activities, but I doubt anyone thinks the policy and research functions of such agencies should be stocked only with economists.   But is it reasonable to expect that a small central agency such as The Treasury will be able to maintain anything like critical mass in the sorts of disciplines central to the advice and practice of these spending ministries? (One could say the same about climate scientists for example.)  I doubt it.   And thus, it still seems likely that when Treasury is challenging and reviewing ministries’ spending or regulatory proposals, the discipline they can most usefully and consistently bring to bear is economics (and, perhaps, some basic accounting).  It should be a matter for ministers, meeting as a Cabinet, to determine what weight to put on a Treasury perspective, as opposed to the perspectives of other expert advisers, and their own wider “political” considerations.  If there was a brief period when The Treasury (and its paradigm) was in some sense “too dominant” that was, in the end, a political choice.

In the end, there is a great deal of straw-manness about the Makhlouf/Mukherjee paper.  The authors quote the line from the former Secretary to the Treasury, Henry Lang, about “a fine mind” being more important than any specific formal academic qualification in a particular discipline.    They also note the importance of communications skills.  And they repeat a great quote from Keynes

“the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher – in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician”

Has anyone ever argued that a narrow economics training is the only useful or appropriate qualification to be a good Treasury official, or a top public servant more generally?  I don’t believe so.  Of course, narrow expertise (of all sorts) has its place, and perhaps in a small country we are more at risk than larger countries of not even having those deep reservoirs of specialist expertise.

But isn’t Keynes’s conception –  although articulated as applying to a “master-economist” –  actually true to a considerable extent of what we should be wanting from the top-tier of public service policy advisers, whatever academic discipline they have taken their first degree in?   It is things about character, breadth, and depth, ongoing intellectual curiosity and sound judgement that are likely to be the key considerations (as distinct, say, from keeping on side with the State Services Commissioner).    I happen to think we should be recruiting as Secretary to the Treasury someone with credibility among economists, but it wouldn’t be close to the only thing I was looking for, and I can think of many senior economists who would be quite unsuitable for the role.  And there are plenty of people who took a broad range of papers at university, who have more or less given up on intellectual drive or curiousity by the age of 40, and are content to repeat (perhaps with some energy) current mantras and conventional wisdom in their middle age.    Trained in economics or not, such people are dangerous (if only because they fill spots which should be occupied by someone nearer that Keynesian vision –  if perhaps with a bit more humility, and awareness of the crooked timber of even the greatest official, than perhaps Keynes tended to foster, in himself or others.)

This post has gotten rather long and discursive.  Perhaps I would just end with one final point. The focus of the paper tended to be on the public service.  And yet a strong public service and effective policymaking is more likely when there is a strong academic contribution.    Unfortunately, there are not many academic economists making a prominent contribution to debate on economic issues (or an economic perspective on other issues) in New Zealand.  The incentives for them to do so are not particularly strong, and if there is one thing economists tend to agree on it is that incentives matter.  Perhaps the Treasury, in its stated desire for economics to play a bigger part (the Secretary talked in his closing remarks of this as “a moment in time” when economists “can really make a difference”), might look to their advice around incentives in the academic context. I’ve told before the story about the conference the Reserve Bank and Treasury hosted in 2011.  We were offering substantial amounts of money (by academic standards) for papers that might shed light on issues around (New Zealand)macroeconomic imbalances, productivity underperformance etc.   We managed to sign up the Irish academic who is shortly taking up the job of chief economist of the ECB.  We couldn’t find a single New Zealand academic willing to take up our offer.