On 7 February 1952, New Zealanders woke and – whether they turned on the radio or picked up the morning newspaper – only then did most learn that the previous afternoon King George VI had died, and that his daughter Princess Elizabeth was now our queen, Queen Elizabeth II. 70 years ago, before most of us were even alive.

To look at today’s New Zealand media one might suppose that some decades ago New Zealand had angrily tossed out the monarchy. There has been barely any mention of the 70th anniversary of the accession of New Zealand’s Head of State and what coverage there has been seems determined to treat it as British news, not as news about our own Head of State – she holds that office by laws passed by New Zealand’s Parliament, and polls suggest that today’s New Zealander’s still favour the system of constitutional monarchy that we share with the UK, Australia, Canada, and a variety of other countries. Much as a significant chunk of the media class might lament it, Elizabeth is our Queen, and has been for 70 years now. Whether as Queen of New Zealand or of her other realms and territories, her reign is now one of the very longest ever in recorded history. If one dates modern New Zealand from some time in 1840, she has been our head of state for almost 40 per cent of our history. A remarkable life of service.

(And, in fairness, while the media have preferred to play down any sense of Elizabeth as our Queen, the Prime Minister did put out a gracious and fitting statement.)

Anyway, I got a bit curious about how the accession of the Queen, 70 years ago, had been marked in New Zealand and recorded in the New Zealand media. Papers Past is a wonderful resource although of the major city papers sadly only the Press is available for 1952.

I started with the edition of Tuesday 5 February. In that paper it was reported that preparations were well underway for the planned visit to New Zealand in May of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip – undertaking the tour that the King himself had originally hoped to do. The Assistant Comptroller of the Royal Household had arrived on the 4th “to discuss final details and matters of etiquette. The economist is me could not, however, help noticing this element of the story.

It was a different time indeed, when the Cabinet was allocating cement.

The arrival of the Princess and her husband at the Kenyan lodge, where she was receive the grim news of the death of her father, was recorded in another story in which it was noted that the Queen and the Duke had attended Evensong at the small local church where “she spoke to the man who alone laid every stone of the church”.

What of Wednesday 6 February? It was a normal working day in New Zealand (and, as far as I can see from the table of contents there were no stories about the Treaty of Waitangi or the like). The Prime Minister – Sid Holland – was in Paris. Back here there were further reports of the forthcoming royal visit, including a push to keep handshakes to a minimum, and stories from the visit to Kenya. It was mid-summer and in Dunedin the touring West Indies cricket team had just beaten Otago.

King George VI died at Sandringham in the early hours of 6 February (New Zealand time being 12 hours ahead of that in the UK). The news was announced to be public at 11am (UK time).

In those days, the front pages of newspapers still seemed to be devoted to classified advertisements. It was no different in the Press of 7 February 1952. The news of the King’s death, and of the accession of Queen Elizabeth, appeared on page 5. This appears to be the editorial, and these were the first few sentences.

The Cabinet had met as soon as our government received the news, and the acting Prime Minister (Keith Holyoake) issued a statement in the early hours of the morning.

Despite the late hour – and presumably only for later editions – there are large numbers of stories, and photos (including one of the new heir to the throne, Prince Charles) over two pages (even managing to note that the forthcoming visit to New Zealand was now cancelled). There was an article about the visit by the then Duke and Duchess of York to New Zealand – and Christchurch in particular – in 1927 (among many other details, the Duke had had dinner with Labour leader Harry Holland in Westport).

The death of the King was marked immediately by the closure of all New Zealand schools on 7 February, and the closure of all government departments (other than essential services) for the afternoon of 7 February. No doubt there were many statements by local dignitaries around the country, but this was the statement by the (Labour) mayor of Christchurch.

In Greymouth, the mayor had requested that the bell of the local Catholic church be tolled 15 times (soon after the news first came through), once for each year of the King’s reign.

By the next issue of the newspaper – that for Friday 8 February – we still got through a great deal of other news first (the cricket test began that day in Christchurch) before the best part of three pages of coverage of the royal news.

There was a thoughtful editorial, even if it was a little wide of the mark with its suggestion “many [ in New Zealand] will never see her”, given the huge crowds for her first tour of New Zealand two years later. There was news of the forthcoming New Zealand official proclamation of the accession of the Queen, to occur the following Monday (more details here from the next day’s paper). The article is well-worth clicking through to for the details of official mourning, for the suggestion that employees should as far as possible be given time off on that Monday to attend local ceremonies marking the accession. This is just one snippet

Tributes from all manner of individuals and bodies – here and abroad – flowed in, and find a place in the pages of the Press. Here is an account of official American tributes and observances. And preparations for the funeral. From the next day’s paper, many resolutions of sympathy and loyalty.

By Monday 11 February, plans were in place. The King’s funeral was to be held that Friday (the Queen had requested that the day not be a public holiday). And the Prime Minister – who had been visiting West Germany when the King died – made a broadcast to New Zealand from London. In the same article it was reported that Mr Holland would be received by the Queen on Wednesday. Meanwhile back here the Governor-General, the Cabinet, and other dignitaries had attended a memorial service at (now Old) St Paul’s in Wellington. There were reports too of the special services in the churches of many denominations. If you wanted legal detail on the accession process, the Press had it covered.

In the Press of the 12th, you could read the (quite lengthy) account of the Christchurch civic proclamation of accession ceremony held the previous day – several thousand attended that ceremony, and there were similar smaller occasions in the boroughs around the city.

On the 13th we read that both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition (Walter Nash), both of whom had already been in London, would represent New Zealand at the funeral for the King. We also read of the Queen’s own declaration in taking her oath.

Back in New Zealand, in the following day’s paper we read some remarks made by the Minister of Education at a combined (four schools) memorial service in Wellington Town Hall.

The next day’s paper was full of articles about the funeral, but also carried this report of the Prime Minister’s meeting with the Queen, including this snippet.

And on the 16th, we read of the two minutes silence in memory of the King, and of great bell in Christchurch Cathedral tolling 56 times, once for each year of the King’s life, and so much more.

It was another age in many ways, but these surely were the monarchs of New Zealand, not by force or coercion but by the free consent, and loyalty of people, high and low, of all races and religions up and down New Zealand.

As indeed, Elizabeth II today is, by free choice of our own Parliament,

“Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of New Zealand and Her Other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith—”

We shall not see her like again, whether in New Zealand or in her other realms and territories. But the 70th anniversary of her accession, to our throne, should very much have been New Zealand news.

There is a lot of personnel change going on at the upper levels of the Reserve Bank. It has been an ongoing process since Adrian Orr took office as Governor only just over 3.5 years ago. It seems to be the way with new public sector CEOs – clear out the previous lot, and then churn until you get the tolerable set of loyalists – perhaps compounded in Orr’s case by a reputation over the years for not tolerating dissent and really only welcoming true believers (or those who can simulate the appearance and live by the lies/rhetoric/spin). He seems to be in the midst of a second clear out….in under four years. Compare, for example, the senior management group in the first Orr Annual Report (2018) with the group Orr will have gathered around him by early next year (when recently announced departures take effect). There isn’t much overlap, and not one of the changes – I’ve seen – has involved people moving on to bigger and better jobs.

A couple of months ago it was announced that the Deputy Governor, Geoff Bascand, was leaving. Bascand is probably in his early 60s but there was no hint that he was retiring. I guess he was old enough that, if Orr gets a second term, he was never going to be Governor, and perhaps some mix of a bit more golf, some consulting, some directorships (and no more involvement in the trying Reserve Bank superannuation scheme) had its appeal, but on paper it looks like quite a loss to the Bank. Of the internal people on the Monetary Policy Committee (and it is an internals-dominated committee) he seems to be the most capable – thoughtful, fluent, and with the intellectual capability to churn out, say, a somewhat-respectable speech. Did he come to find working for Orr all a bit too much?

Who knows. But then yesterday there was a second curious departure from the upper ranks of the Bank, and the Monetary Policy Committee. And that brought to mind the Oscar Wilde line from The Importance of Being Earnest”, in whic Lady Bracknell remarks, “‘To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

The unexplained departure of one senior monetary policymaker might not be very interesting, but when two (of four) leave in quick succession, it looks like more of a story, and probably not one reflecting entirely well on the Governor.

The latest departure is Yuong Ha, the Bank’s Chief Economist, who has been in the role for less than three years (an Orr appointee) and is only about 45. The Bank’s press release gives no hint of what he will be doing next, suggesting that he does not know.

It was a curious appointment in the first place. Ha may have been a competent section manager, but had never been seen as one of the Bank’s thinkers or intellectual leaders (and surely the Chief Economist should normally have been where the MPC looked for such leadership). It was always possible that he could have surprised and stepped up in the role, but sadly it wasn’t to be. There were a succession of (often individually small) mis-speaks – my favourite was when he suggested in public that things like the LSAP couldn’t offer much, about 10 days before the Governor/MPC went all-in on their new and very expensive toy, claiming a great deal of effect. And in almost three years, he had not been allowed to do a single on-the-record speech, through some of the most difficult and turbulent times for monetary policy in quite some time. If Orr has now engineered his departure, it is probably for the good of the institution. But it doesn’t speak well of Orr’s judgement in having appointed him in the first place – especially as the vacancy arose only after Orr engineered the departure (by demotion, and then resignation) of Ha’s predecessor, John McDermott.

Of course, in the public sector one can’t just buy-out people you no longer want around, suggesting that some further restructuring has been used to achieve the outcome. McDermott was got rid of by creating a new rank between McDermott and the Governor, and (presumably) telling McDermott he wasn’t going to get the more senior one (the one that carried the title he already had). The Assistant Governor role is soon to be vacant – Christian Hawkesby having been appointed as Deputy Governor – so perhaps Orr is going to collapse the two jobs into one again, with Ha being given to understand he wouldn’t get the more elevated (direct report) position. We’ll see soon enough I guess (more adverts to follow after the raft of Assistant Governor positions advertised a month or two back).

But whichever way Orr goes, there are now two vacancies on the Monetary Policy Committee (and, which we’ll come to shortly, two of the three external members have terms which expire early next year). This is, supposedly, a very powerful and important statutory body, and you might hope for a bit more media and parliamentary scrutiny (there almost certainly would be if more than half the committee was potentially changing in the US or the UK). It isn’t as if there are outstanding candidates for the two internal positions – whether outside economists or internal people who buy their research or other intellectual leadership cry out to be appointed. And of course, anyone appointed has to be willing to work with and for Orr, independent thought discouraged. One possibility is that Orr (and the Minister) appoint the head of the financial markets department and the new chief economist, but who (really capable) will want the chief economist job is an open question.

For a serious, open, and accountable central bank, the first wave of external members of the MPC have been something of an embarrassment (for a Governor who wanted to keep control, and a Minister happy to go along, all has probably been fine). Not one of the three has given even a single on-the-record speech, and I’m pretty sure that among the three of them there has been only a single media interview. There is no transparency, no accountability, and little reason to suppose these three have added any value. One (probably the least qualifed for the role) was, so the papers revealed, appointed primarily for diversity reasons. The other two – Bob Buckle and Peter Harris – have terms that expire early next year. Buckle is the only one of the three with a focus on macroeconomics, but recall that Orr, Robertson and the Board chair got together to ban from the Committee anyone likely (now or in future) to be doing any active work or research on macro/monetary issue – one of the more ludicrous (if revealing) aspects of the entire RB reform process. Unless, the Minister – perhaps encouraged by Treasury – has had a rethink, presumably the incumbents will be reappointed. The title looks good on the CV, and the fees make reasonable retirement pocket money. But taxpayers and citizens deserve more and better. At present, not one of the remaining members of the MPC commands – and demands – respect as a key thought leader in a powerful independent government agency.

But it isn’t just the MPC and management where change is afoot. Parliament has recently passed amending legislation that means that from the middle of next year the current Bank board – a largely toothless beast, notionally charged with monitoring and holding management to account – will be replaced by a real Board, in which will be vested all the powers given to the Bank, other than those explicitly assigned to the Monetary Policy Committee. On paper, it is a step forward, and will finally put in end to the 30 years in which the Governor alone held huge discretionary policymaking powers. And the Bank wields huge powers, as policymaking agency in many areas of financial regulation (as well as implementing agency). The new Board – despite its primary focus being organisational and financial regulatory – will also be charged with the appointment of the Governor and the MPC members (subject only to ministerial veto).

Even the government and Parliament recognised that – on paper at least – they were handing a lot of power to these people, and in the new law there is explicit provision that the Minister of Finance can’t just appoint his mates, but must consult with other political parties in Parliament before making an appointment. They don’t get a veto, but the consultation requirement is presumably supposed to act as something of a dragging anchor.

Some weeks ago, with no fanfare, the first appointments were announced (or appeared well down a Bank web page). The Governor and these first three appointees are acting as a “transitional board” to oversee preparations for the new regime, but all three have been apparently appointed by the Governor-General, and presumably have been consulted on. Unfortunately, the three appointees are at least as underwhelming as the government’s MPC appointments.

The current Board chair, Neil Quigley (Vice-Chancellor of Waikato University) is staying on as chair of the new Board and the two other appointees are both professional director types, each with a long list of (present and past) directorships but no obvious expertise in the matters they are to be responsible for. There are, we are told, five more appointments to be made, but it is hardly confidence-inspiring (unless your model is one in which everything changes but everything stays the same, with all power in Orr’s hands). It doesn’t seem like good practice – and must be quite unusual now – to keep on a chair who has already done almost a decade on the Board, especially when that Board had a reputation for doing little but providing cover for the Governor.

But the bigger issue is that no one involved – management or Board – has any reputation for excellence as practitioner or thinker on these important areas of policy the Board will be responsible for. Take management. Orr and his new deputy (and head of financial stability) are both economists by trade. Nothing wrong with that of course, but to the extent they have wider experience it is solely in funds management (Orr as head of NZSF, Hawkesby a few years at a local funds manager). Neither has any real background in the core business of banking, or in regulation. And neither have any of the new Board members announced to date. Those with long memories might think of Quigley as something of an exception, in that earlier in his career he did some interesting (mostly historical) work on banking regulation, but…..that was probably 25 years ago, and in recent decades he has largely been an enterprising university manager, skilled at playing the PBRF game etc. It could have been a good opportunity to have found some really good people, including perhaps one from overseas, who could have added gravitas and standing to the new institution. A former top banker perhaps? A leading thinker on financial regulation? Instead, so far, we have a typical group of the sort of people who end up on all manner of government boards, supposedly playing a key role in setting an important area of policy, of appointing future key monetary policy makers, all with a management team that is underwhelming at best, and evidently subject to frequent churn. One can only wonder if any of the other political parties pushed back at all.

I write more about the Reserve Bank because it is the organisation (and policy areas) I know best. I don’t suppose the Bank is much worse than most other New Zealand government agencies, and perhaps it is unrealistic to expect it to for long ever be much better than the rest, but what a lost opportunity the expensive and longrunning reform process of recent years has been. The government could have laid the foundations for an excellent and highly-regarded institution. Instead, it seems only interested in the appearance of change, the shadow not the substance.

I’ve been reading a couple of books in the last week or so about the decline and fall of the Soviet Union (USSR). The first is Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000, by Stephen Kotkin a Princeton historian who has since gone on to write an (as yet unfinished) three-volume life of Stalin, and the second The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR, by Chris Miller, another US academic historian.

Both are quite short, but for anyone interested in the era they are well worth reading. Kotkin’s book was first published in 2000 so really rather close to the events he was trying to make sense of (the revised edition I read dates from 2008), while Miller’s book is much more recent, published in 2016. Kotkin attempts to synthesise and offer an overall interpretation, while the Miller book draws deeply on Soviet-era archives, up to and including minutes of Politburo meetings. I found Kotkin interesting for a number of points, including the (obvious once you think about it) way in which this heavily armed behemoth, heir to hundreds of years of Russian imperial expansionism, dissolved so peacefully. He highlights the contrast, not far away and at much the same time, with the wars of the Yugoslav succession, but also with the unwinding of European empires a few decades earlier. Another point he emphasises is that the dissolution of the empire was, at least in part, a consequence of way the Soviets had set up their system. The tie that bound the individual republics (set up after the Revolution) together was not, so he argues, the central state itself (republics were not legally subservient to the central state) but rather the Communist Party, and once the Party’s monopoly on power was reduced/eliminated by Gorbachev there was little left to hold the Union together – other perhaps than brute force which by 1991 no one was willing to consistently use (not even those who staged the feeble coup of August 1991).

The Miller book was much closer to the usual concerns of this blog. It was a fascinating discussion of economic policy in the last years of the Soviet Union, with a particular emphasis on what the Soviets were learning from China. I hadn’t known how closely and carefully Soviet officials and scholars were studying the Chinese experiments with economic liberalisation after the late 1970s, or the extent to which (a) they were recognised as successful and (b) especially after 1985 were imitated. Miller also highlights how Soviet officialdom already knew what gains could be on offer from reform, from previous (abortive, short-circuited) experiments, including under Brezhnev in the 1960s. The macroeconomics was also enlightening – both the extent to which the Soviet Union had maintained macroeconomic stability and fiscal discipline up to the early 1980, but then the extent to which budget discipline was thrown to the wind in the Gorbachev years. That was partly bad luck – falling oil prices, partly the consequences of ill-thought-through initiatives (eg loss of tax revenue from the assault on heavy vodka drinking) – but much of it was in an attempt to buy off reluctance to reform from the powerful interests and patronage networks which – so Miller argues – by this time dominated the Soviet system (be it the agriculture sector, oil and gas, the military and the associated industrial complex or whatever. Miller argues that those around Gorbachev thought of this partly as a reasonable gamble – if they could materially accelerate growth, as in China, they could grow their way through the deterioriating fiscal (and hence monetary) position. It was not, of course, a gamble that worked, and the first few years after 1991 saw widespread economic chaos.

Miller argues that the strategy was never likely to have worked, and contrasts that with the experience in China. Why couldn’t it have worked? In the end, his claim reduces to the proposition that those who really favoured reform simply did not have the political clout to make it happen, even if one of those was the General Secretary himself. For decades after Stalin – under whose reign of terror many were shot, senior people were moved around frequently – the patronage networks (within which people often spent an entire career) were able to grow to become a force they simply weren’t in China (just after the further upheaval of the Cultural Revolution). Add to that things like the fact that life in the USSR was relatively comfortable in 1985, in a way that it hadn’t been in China in the late 70s. The imperative for change was much weaker, whether near the top, or at the grassroots (he contrasts the attitude to agricultural reforms of Chinese peasants and Russian farm workers). And there was the military, consuming a huge proportion of GDP in the USSR and reluctant to adjust, in contrast to the reduced military expenditure in China in the first years of economic reform.

There is one contrast between the USSR and the PRC that emphasises that in China the Communist Party kept hold on power and Russia it gave up power. For the CCP that is a clear victory (whatever it means for the Chinese people). But the other often attempts to tell a story about relative economic performance, with an emphasis on those first few severely disrupted years after 1991 in the (former Soviet Union) and, of course, the high growth rates the PRC continued to report for a long time. In this part of the world, New Zealand politicians and business people are nauseatingly prone to praising what they see as the economic success of the PRC (as if somehow this covers for the innumerable abuses of the regime).

China was, of course, richer than Russia for a long time. For not inconsiderable periods of history China was at least as rich – or richer – than anywhere on the planet. Russia never was. But here is the (rough) picture of GDP per capita comparisons for various years, drawn from the (widely-used) Maddison database.

By 1913 – the eve of World War One – estimated GDP per capita for the “former USSR” (of which Russia is the largest chunk) was almost three times that of China. The “former USSR” in turn enjoyed real GDP per capita less than a third that of the leading bunch of countries (including New Zealand), and less than a third that of (say) France and Germany

By 1980 – several decades each of Communist Party rule – real GDP per capita was about six times that in China (as noted above, the starting points for reform were very different). China really was an utter basket case.

But where do things stand now, after decades of fairly rapid growth in China, and decades on from the chaos of the immediate post USSR period?

Here are the IMF’s estimates for real GDP per capita for the former Soviet Union countries and China.

Even using these official numbers – and people like Michael Pettis will argue compellingly that GDP in China does not mean what it does elsewhere – China currently has real GDP per capita a bit less than Belarus, a bit more than Turkmenistan. The Baltic states are stellar performers but even authoritarian Russia, heir to all that 1990s dislocation, has real per capita incomes 55 per cent higher than those in China.

And what about labour productivity? The IMF doesn’t produce estimates for that, but the Conference Board does. Here are their latest estimates for the whole former Soviet bloc, and China.

China makes Belarus look really rather good, and on these estimates China is still lagging behind Moldova. The gap between China and Russia is huge and – as best as can be told from these estimates – Chinese productivity growth has slowed sufficiently it is no longer obvious they are even closing the gap.

Russia, of course, is hardly a stellar performer. You can see it even on these charts, and in GDP per capita terms it is still only about half the incomes earned per capita in France and Germany/

And then one last set of comparisons.

China pales by comparison with all of these economies, even grossly-underperforming New Zealand.

There were things the USSR was able to learn from the PRC 40 years ago. But how to generate a high income country, that might match the material living standards in the West – a constant aspiration – was not then, and is not now, one of them.

Several years ago the Law and Economics Association hosted an event in Wellington in which the New Zealand Initiative’s Eric Crampton and I each told our stories about New Zealand immigration policy. My account is here, and a link to the talk I gave is here.

A few months ago a couple of Victoria University of Wellington academics responsible for a Masters class (in a programme I didn’t even know existed (Masters in Philosophy, Politics and Economics)) invited us to do something similar for their class. We did that today.

My text (a bit fuller than what I actually used) is here (if Eric chooses to link to his slides on his blog I will include a link) (UPDATE: link here). My focus was solely on the economic dimensions of immigration policy, and in particular on the implications for economywide productivity (as the best proxy for whether large-scale policy-led non-citizen immigration has been beneficial for New Zealanders). My focus was primarily on the long-term programme, and entirely on the situation in normal times (ie I was not addressing the current Covid mess, which reflects poorly on the government but has no necessary connection to the appropriate medium-term approach).

My approach tends to start from a series of stylised facts about New Zealand’s economics performance in recent decades. This was the list I used this time.

But first, the gist of my story, which starts from a set of stylised facts about our economy.  Most of them are not in contention, even if the meaning and implications are debated:

• New Zealand’s productivity growth has continued to languish, and even after the reforms of the 80s and early 90s (including a return to large-scale immigration) there has been no narrowing of the gaps. We’ve fallen further behind Australia, and increasingly behind central and eastern European OECD countries.  It would now take a two-thirds lift in the level of productivity to catch the OECD leading bunch,
• Foreign trade as a share of GDP has stagnated, and this century has gone backwards. This in the new great age of globalisation,
• New Zealand’s exports have remained overwhelmingly reliant on natural resources (whether agriculture, tourism or whatever).
• Consistent with this, the rapid growth areas in our economy have been the non-tradable, not internationally competitive, sectors,
• Also consistent with this, our real exchange rate has remained high, even as productivity has declined relative to other countries over decades,
• Even as real interest rates have fallen, they have remained persistently higher than those in other advanced economies,
• Business investment as a share of GDP has been weak (OECD lower quartile),
• Indications are, globally, that if anything distance has become more important not less, with high value economic activity increasingly clustered in big cities near the major markets of the world,
• Unlike what we see in the US and Europe, GDP per capita in by far our biggest city isn’t much better than that for the country as whole – if anything the gap has been narrowing.
• Over the last few decades, no country has aimed to bring more migrants (% of population) than New Zealand did – although Canada and Australia have come close to matching us, and Israel too.   
• OECD data show the NZ migrants also have the highest average skills levels (but still a bit behind natives) of migrants to any OECD countries.

Not one of the expected economywide benefits of a large-scale immigration promotion policy has shown up. Not one.   And we aren’t five years into this experiment, by 25 to 30.

I stepped through my standard arguments for why large scale immigration here may have been damaging to our medium-term economic performance. I noted that of the handful of OECD countries that have tried anything on the scale of New Zealand’s experiment (Canada and Australia and – in a slightly different context – Israel) none stands out as a productivity leader, and yet very little of the literature on the economics of immigration looks specifically at this group of countries. What isn’t always appreciated is that New Zealand has much more experience of large scale immigration and emigration (the latter, of nationals) than almost any other country – the sustained outflow of natives has been a thing since at least the mid 1970s, while our governments have actively promoted large-scale non-citizen immigration for all but about 15 years since World War Two.

When we’ve considered the economic performance over recent decades of the active immigration-promoting countries, and the countries experiencing outflows of their own people, the ball should really be in the court of the pro-immigration economists to show us, concretely, where and how large-scale immigration is lifting the productivity and incomes of the natives.   That is particularly so in New Zealand, given the disadvantages we can enumerate in advance – distance and continued natural resource reliance – and the signal implicit in the decades-long outflow of natives.

I talked about a number of other problems, and (in particular) gaps, in the existing literature before ending with this conclusion.

There might be all sorts of reasons for favouring high immigration – better ethnic restaurants[1], defence, a liking of big cities, or trains. If your country has prospered greatly, you might be happy to share the gains widely.  But the economic case for large scale immigration, as a way of boosting the productivity outcomes for natives in already advanced economies[2], looks thin at best.  Not many countries have run the experiment in modern times, notwithstanding the models that are claimed to support such an approach.  New Zealand has been at the forefront – actively promoting large scale immigration for all but 15 years since World War Two.  Unfortunately, New Zealand has had the worst relative economic performance of any advanced economy over those decades – we haven’t just come back to the pack, but now languish well down the rankings, have led the GDP per capita tables just 100 years ago (when abundant land, small population, and asymmetrically favourable technology shocks combined in our favour).

As I review the experience of advanced countries, if one wanted to take a punt on policy promoting large scale immigration (and few have) the best places to try look to be countries:

• Close to the centres of global economic activity (whether Europe, North America, or East Asia),
• Having experienced an asymmetric productivity shock – whether from the market or other policy reforms – favouring longer-term economic prospects in your country,
• With economies with substantial reliance primarily on sophisticated manufactured products and high-tech services,
• With their own people coming back home

And it looks like a highly risky strategy if your country is

• Very far from anywhere,
• Heavily dependent on (fixed) natural resources,
• And has seen little sign of asymmetric favourable productivity shocks for your industries in a quite a long time,
• Somewhere your own people have been leaving in large numbers

These look to be quite general insights.  And yet few if any of the countries that have three or four of the first characteristics have gone in heavily for policy-led immigration (perhaps Ireland or the UK might have been the closest- but UK immigration per capita was also about a third of New Zealand’s (per capita), and the UK is no productivity star).   Of the countries that went heavily for policy-led immigration, even Canada and Israel each meet only one of the three criteria – and neither can readily show the economic gains from large-scale migration. Australia and New Zealand meet none.

As for New Zealand, we can (sadly) tick all four items in that second class of conditions.  This was – and is – perhaps the least propitious advanced economy on earth to experiment with a large-scale immigration strategy.  And yet we did. If it was perhaps defensible in 1946, and optimistic in 1990, persisting now it just stubbornly wrongheaded, defying experience and evidence.    It isn’t quite as wrongheaded as a strategy to promote mass migration – however able the people – to Kerguelen, the Chathams or the Falklands, but not far short of it.  Australia has coped better with its experiment only because they were able to bring to market lots of natural resources previously lying idle.

It isn’t that people are any different here – locals or migrants.  And water still flows downhill.   But the opportunities just aren’t very good at all.  It is an old line but no less true for that: a definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result.  We’ve tried this one far too many times for our own good.

[1] I recall Eric Crampton once suggesting an Ethiopian quota

[2] The contrast, say, to the economic gains New Zealand Maori may have received from 19^th C immigration.

A couple of weeks ago the Sunday Star Times had a full page article – in a Money supplement, self-described as offering “Intelligent Money News, Tips and Insight – by Jade Kake headed Debt as we know it is a colonial construct (the online version runs under the title “Maori have colonisers to blame for concept of individual debt”.) The column ends even more starkly: “Debt is a colonial construct”, observing that “the implications of which continue to be felt in the colonies”.

As it happens, Ms Kake herself could probably be described – without animus – as something of a “colonial construct”. When I looked her up it turned out she was Australian (born, bred, and educated), of parents who themselves had been born in New Zealand and the Netherlands respectively. Lots to celebrate there one might have thought, and certainly it would have been inconceivable – impossible really – prior to, say, 1769. These islands and the descendants of their first settlers had been almost entirely cut off from the rest of the world- whether people-to-people movements, trade or technologies. And one of those missing “technologies” was credit – or debt.

There doesn’t seem to be any real debate about that. Ms Kake states it herself, and when I looked up some books on the pre-contact Maori economy they all made more or less the same point. There was some gift-exchange elements, but nothing at all resembling credit/debt as it had been known for some time – rather a long time in some places – in much of the rest of the world. A few years ago there was a book by the American sociologist David Graeber called Debt: The First 5000 Years. and I’ve written here about debt jubilees from thousands of years ago But that innovation, and evolution, had completely passed this part of the world by. Consistent with the absence of so many technologies and trade here, material living standards were very low.

“Colonial” is one those ill-defined words. Sometimes it means lots of permanent settlers from abroad, and sometimes just a period of control and government by a foreign power. In New Zealand, of course, it involved both, although the control by the foreign power was very short-lived. But, as people sometimes point out, even if these islands had never fallen to any foreign power, or if there had been little or no foreign settlement, many of the technologies would still have found their way here. Credit/debt is surely one of those sets of technologies. And that is a good thing.

Ms Kake is, of course, less sure (to put it mildly). But even she doesn’t really seem able to make up her mind. On the one hand she laments the arrival of the first bank in New Zealand (an ANZ forerunner) – but interestingly doesn’t mention our first very early quasi central bank, the Colonial Bank of Issue – but by the end of her column she is lamenting what she sees as evidence that it can be a bit harder to get credit if you are “visibly Maori”. If the latter is true it is, of course, unfortunate, but then we are left thinking that really credit/debt isn’t so bad after all. It depends – on what is used for, the reasons it is taken on, the conditions applied etc etc. Hitler’s regime borrowed in World War Two, but so did our side to defeat him. But when private parties take on debt, and do so not under duress, it is generally enabling and empowering.

Could one envisage a modern technologically-advanced world without debt? One could (and I briefly did here, in a debate a couple of decades ago with a visiting monetary reformer), but they’ve tended to go hand in hand. And no doubt Ms Kake would tar arms-length equity investment – also unknown here in centuries gone by – as another “colonial construct”. One might – as I do – wish there was much less household debt (because governments fixed the land supply regulatory disaster and got house/land prices a long way down), without having any particular qualms at all about young couples being able to borrow to buy a first house (rather than, say, generally wait until they were 50+ to buy a house outright). Much the same goes for business credit. Credit/debt is a sophisticated device enabling risk-taking, enabling smoothing of consumption, and so on. Financial development tends to go hand in hand with more intensive economic development and much higher material standards of living – not necessarily causally, although there are probably causal aspects (long-distance trade tends to rely on credit, on trust).

It is simply silly to say the debt is a “colonial construct” – it was simply one of the many things (institutions, cultures, technologies) that residents of these islands got access to when these remote islands finally opened, so late, to the wider world. There was – and is – nothing particular British – or even Dutch or northern European – about debt, technology itself transferred to, refined in etc, those parts of the world from elsewhere well before anyone settled here.

There has been a bit of debate over the weekend about the legacy of colonisation in New Zealand, prompted by some remarks by National’s education spokesman suggesting that in his view colonisation had, “on balance” been beneficial for Maori. One might debate aspects of his framing, and I don’t want to launch into an extensive debate here (a couple of pieces of mine that might be relevant are here and here). But, equally, the state of economic development and material living standards tend to speak for themselves about at least some aspects of such a question.

There is a big academic literature on the influence on imperial government, colonial settlement etc on the level of (say) real GDP per capita of different countries, and I’m not going to attempt to summarise it here. My own take is that the effects of imperial rule are not that large, but those associated with colonial settlement often have been. British settlers to (say) New Zealand and Australia in the 19th century brought with them many of the aspects – legal systems, culture, education or whatever – that had then made Britain the country with the most advanced economy and highest incomes.

Here is the IMF’s estimates of real GDP per capita this year for a variety of Pacific countries.

All of these lands were governed for a time in the 19th or 20th centuries by countries from outside. Two had large scale settlement – complete with the attendant, often embodied, “institutions” broadly defined – from places that were among the very richest and most productive on earth. It shouldn’t really be a surprise that the inhabitants of those two countries now – and not just the descendants of the settlers but the descendants of the earlier inhabitants (categories now often quite mixed) – have by far the highest material living standards of any of the countries in this region (all of which had previously been largely cut-off from the technologies of the rest of the world). Of the other countries on the chart it probably isn’t a coincidence that Palau and Fiji had the largest degree of settlement of peoples from outside the region. (As far as I can see the French territories – French Polynesia and New Caledonia – would come between Palau and New Zealand on the chart, but their stories are complicated by the ongoing ties to – and subsidies from – France.)

My best guess is that if, somehow, these islands had not been settled by outsiders but had simply been governed from outside for 100 years or so – as with most of these other Pacific states – real GDP per capita here might be similar to that in Samoa. They have computers, they have phones, they have credit. But they do not have an advanced economy offering high material living standards for their people (many of whom prefer to migrate to New Zealand). There might be reasons to debate this view, but even if these islands somehow generated per capita incomes twice those of Samoa they’d still be very low by advanced country (or modern New Zealand/Australia) standards.

Material living standards aren’t everything by any means. But they do seem to count for quite a lot.

Yesterday was the Reserve Bank’s six-monthly Financial Stability Report. It might these days almost be almost better labelled the “Make the financial system ever less efficient report”, and with little real challenge or scrutiny from the assembled media.

With the Governor off sick it was left to the Deputy Governor Geoff Bascand to front the press conference. He seemed ill-at-ease and a bit uncomfortable in the spotlight – surprising in one who has held senior positions for so long – and often offered answers that were longwinded without actually saying much.

One of the questions he was asked on several occasions was about the reforms announced last week, and whether they reduced or increased the powers of the Minister of Finance and/or the Bank when it came to imposing direct controls on lending. Bascand never once answered the questions directly, delivering lines about how the new law would provide “greater clarity” but in what he said, and in what he didn’t say, he more or less confirmed the interpretation I ran in a post last week that the de facto powers of the Minister will be reduced – since the Minister will have no say on which tools the Bank can use, whereas under the ad hoc convention of the last decade the macroprudential Memorandum of Understanding between the Bank and the Minister governed that. Under the planned new legislation the Minister will be able to stop the Bank putting in place controls on broad classes of lending (eg residential mortgages) but at least under this government that will be an empty power, since the government is already content with the Bank having LVR restrictions, and the Bank will be free to apply any other controls it likes, whenever it likes. You might think that is a good thing. The Bank probably does. But it hands over much too much power to an unelected unaccountable Board.

But what I really wanted to focus on in this post was the area the Bank itself (and much of the media coverage) focused on: housing. 

You would barely get the idea from any of the material that the Bank has no responsibility for housing at all.  Its financial regulatory powers over banks have to be exercised to promote the maintenance of a sound and efficient the financial system.   And that is pretty much it.     The government is in the process of reforming the law to downplay the efficiency dimension, but (a) the law today is as it is, and (b) even under their new law the focus is supposed to be on the soundness of the financial system.   A couple of months ago, as is his right, the Minister of Finance issued a direction to the Bank requiring them to “have regard to” this government policy:

But this direction alters neither the statutory purposes the Bank must exercise its powers for, nor alters the Bank’s statutory powers.   The Governor promised that the Bank would explain quite what import this section 68b direction actually had, but it appears that that would have been embarrassing or awkward, because no such explanation is offered or attempted in the FSR.  In fact, they both misrepresent the substance of the direction, and then do more than suggest that it “aligns well with the Reserve Bank’s objective to promote the maintenance of a sound and efficient financial system”.   But bear in mind that not even the Cabinet paper that discussed this direction (and the equally empty change to the monetary policy Remit) envisaged much effect on anything much.

So we are simply left with those twin goals of maintaining a sound and efficient financial system.    But amid all their talk of housing financing restrictions, old, new, and foreshadowed, there is barely a mention of the efficiency of the financial system.   Which is probably just as well (for them) as there is no conceivable way that there most recent restrictions, described here, do anything but seriously impede the efficiency of the financial system.

The Bank hasn’t even attempted to make an efficiency case for almost completely banning any loans to residential rental property providers in excess of 60 per cent of the value of the property (all the while allowing much easier access to credit for owner-occupiers). If there are any real differences in the riskiness of such loans, not already factored into pricing and capital requirements, they are small relative to these differences in rules. So what we have isn’t a set of rules that is about either soundness (which capital requirements already manage) or efficiency – in a banking system that has proved itself robust over many years – but purely political interventions, resting on no sound statutory foundations, to attempt to skew the playing field in the housing market, consistent with Labour Party wishes and political preferences. Thanks to the Reserve Bank the market in houses will function less well, and the market in housing finance will be much less efficient and effective (and that without even addressing the “new homes” carve-outs, which again are all about politics and not at all about risk – new developments tend to be riskier – or efficiency).

Now, on a good day there are still some shreds of economic rationality and logic buried somewhere in the Bank. Deep in the FSR we find this good paragraph

I especially liked that slightly desperate footnote “see it isn’t only us”.

Now the Reserve Bank can’t fix any of that stuff – it is all about central and and local government failure – but they are nonetheless quite happy to operate beyond their legitimate sphere and powers to feed a government narrative and paper over symptoms. providing aid and comfort to the government doing little to get to the heart of the issue (the government that disavows any suggestion that perhaps house/land prices should fall). But that’s Orr for you.

Now perhaps you are thinking “but isn’t the financial system imperilled by these higher house/land prices?” Well, the Bank itself doesn’t think so and in the rest of the report they are at pains to stress how resilient the system is, how sound the banks are – even while being just about to resume their never-well-justified drive to push further up capital ratios that are, in effect, already among the very highest in the world. At the press conference, the Bank was at pains to note that the system could cope quite well with even a large fall in house prices. The Deputy Governor rightly highlighted that if prices fell recent borrowers might be in a difficult position, especially if for some reason the unemployment rate was to rise a lot at the same time but…….that simply isn’t a financial system soundness issue.

Much of the discussion in the document and in the press conference etc was about what fresh horrors – housing finance interventions – the Reserve Bank might be cooking up, in league with the government. Unsurprisingly perhaps – since they’ve wanted this tool for years – their preference seems to a debt to income limit (or a series of them, perhaps further impairing the efficiency of the system by picking favourites). Even the Bank seems to recognise that LVR limits are already so tight, especially on residential rental providers, that it might be embarrassingly inconsistent with their mandate to go further, and (sensibly) they don’t seem at all keen on banning interest-only mortgages. It is all a bit hypothetical at present – since as they note the latest LVR controls only came into effect last week – but there is no stopping a bureaucrat with an agenda (Bascand used to be regarded as a fairly pro-market economist), so we heard lots of talk about what they’d be prepared to do “if needed”. There were no criteria outlined for what might warrant further interventions, let alone criteria grounded in the Bank’s act. It really was handwaving stuff, of the sort we might once have been familiar with under people like Walter Nash or the later Muldoon.

You will note that the Minister’s direction referred to the government’s desire to support “more sustainable house prices”. The Bank has picked up that line and has clearly been toying with how to give it substance – but appeared to have made little or not progress, one of their staff even suggesting it was a new phrase and there wasn’t much research around about it. All the FSR itself says is this

And that’s it. And it didn’t seem to have taken them far. Bascand claimed to be optimistic that in time the Bank would be in a position to opine regularly on whether house/land prices were above, below, or close to sustainable levels, but he offered no real hint of what he thought sustainability might mean in this context, let alone attempting to tie it back to the Bank’s actual role, around the soundness of the system. For now – clearly keen not to get out of step with his political masters – he couldn’t even bring himself to suggest that lower house prices would be a good thing, although for some reason he did claim (on RNZ this morning) that a gradual fall would be better than a sharp one (offering no clue on why the death from a thousand cuts might be preferable, and for whom).

And, from the few hints he offered, his concept of sustainability seemed idiosyncratic to say the least. Apparently if the population was trending up it was okay for house prices to rise and stay up – quite why was never stated (and he ran this population line several times). We heard a lot about interest rates, but no real suggestion as to why low long-term global neutral interest rates supposedly mean higher house prices (they don’t seem to in much of the US, places where it is easy to bring land into development). It was just a muddle. I guess he couldn’t bring himself to say that no sustained fall in house/land prices was likely unless/until the government sorted out the regulatory dysfunction around land use, nor could he easily own up to the fact that if such laws seemed set to remain problematic then, with well-capitalised banks, what was any of this to do with the Reserve Bank.

It really was all over the place, not well-grounded in any of the Bank’s statutory roles, and yet…….these are the people the government wants to hand more discretionary power to, to further mess up access to finance. It was all too characteristic of the pervasive decline in the quality of policymakers (political and official) and policy advisory institutions in this country.

The sprawling burble continued with questions about whether banks should lend more to things other than housing – one veteran journalist apparently being exercised that a large private bank had freely made choices that meant 69 per cent of its loan were for houses. Instead of simply pushing back and noting that how banks ran their businesses and which borrowers they lend to, for what purposes, was really a matter for them and their shareholders – subject, of course, to overall Reserve Bank capital requirements – we got handwringing about New Zealand savings choices etc etc, none of which – even if there were any analytical foundation to it – has anything to do with the Bank. (He did, in fairness, note that there wasn’t much sign of strong business credit demand.) But I guess once you start down the path of the highly regulatory and intrusive state, it is hard to get free of the tar baby – in fact, bureaucratic life then selects for the sort of people who relish this stuff.

On a quite different topic, there was a box in the FSR on what was described as “Maori access to capital”. The Bank has apparently decided that, with no evidence whatever that there are distinctive Maori issues around either monetary policy or financial stability, to spend scarce public resources promoting this sort of stuff. Again, it is all highly non-analytical – no sense, for example, of why these ill-identified so-called Maori issues (in the ambit of the Bank’s functions) might be different than those of (say) ethnic Indians or Chinese, Catholics or atheists, left-handers, ethnic Samoans, women, men or whoever. It is all just a political whim, pursuing the personal ideological agendas of the Governor and at least some of his senior management (one of his offsiders has an extraordinarily political speech out this morning).

Anyway, we are told that

This work aims to use the Te Ao Māori strategy to incorporate a long-term, intergenerational view of wellbeing into the Reserve Bank’s core functions. It will also inform the Reserve Bank’s financial inclusion work and the allocative efficiency elements of its monetary policy and financial stability mandates. The Reserve Bank is treating this work as a high priority within its strategic work programme.

So with no serious problem identification, no serious grounding in the Bank’s statutory functions (which incidentally have no “intergenerational” character at all) all this is – in the Governor’s view – a high priority use of scarce public resources.

One can’t help feel that the Bank’s core functions might be in need of any spare resources they happen to have.

I’ve been bothered for some time by how lightly the Director-General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield, was excused over his lapse of judgement in accepting hospitality from New Zealand Cricket at a time when preferential access to the Covid vaccine for the New Zealand cricket team was a matter of some concern to New Zealand Cricket, and when Bloomfield himself exercises considerable clout in such matters (having both formal statutory powers assigned to him ex officio, but also being (one of) the Covid minister’s chief advisers). It wasn’t even as if this was a single lapse, since Bloomfield acknowledged that he had last year several times accepted tickets to rugby games, and yet the Rugby Union had been negotiating with the government re the ability to host foreign teams in New Zealand.

New Zealand has tended to pride itself over many years about the incorruptibility of public life. Unfortunately, we have seen too many cases over the last few decades that suggest this is more folk myth than reality, although clearly there are many places worse than us. But “many places worse than us” is simply not an acceptable standard; rather it expresses a degree of complacency that allows standards to keep slipping a little more each time, with excuses being made (“not really that big a deal”), especially for those who happen to be in favour at the time. But those sorts of cases, those sorts of people, are precisely where a fuss should be made, where mistakes or rule breaches should not be treated lightly. Integrity – and perceived integrity and incorruptibility – really matter at the top, and if there is one set of accommodations for those at the top, and another (more demanding) standard for those at the bottom it simply feeds cynicism about the political system and about our society.

What I worry about was captured quite well in a recent article in the Financial Times headed “British politics is morphing from delusion into sleaze”. Britain used to be highly regarded on this score too, but (sadly) no longer. Things seems worse there than here, but “many places worse than us” isn’t the standard we should tolerate.

I really don’t understand the near-deification of Ashley Bloomfield in some circles. Perhaps it is because I have not watched a single one of those 1pm press conferences. The man is a highly-paid very powerful senior public servant who, in the course of his stewardship at the Ministry of Health. seems to have done some things well and quite a few things not that well. But my indifference to the “cult of St Ashley” is really neither here nor there. A senior public servant could have, so to speak, walked on water, and it would still have been a staggering misjudgement to have been accepting hospitality from an organisation that wanted to lobby him/her. Even more so, when it was not just a single lapse.

When the story first broke, I lodged OIA requests with both the Ministry of Health and the Public Service Commission (former SSC) asking for copies of their policies on acceptance of gifts and hospitality. The Ministry of Health responded quite quickly and I wrote about their response in a thread of Twitter. Rather than go through all the material again, here is a copy of the thread I posted.

Good policy, simply ignored by the chief executive (Bloomfield). It wasn’t as if this was the sort of decision he’d had to make under extreme pressure or on the spur of the moment. If he wasn’t aware of his own agency’s policy – which would be pretty extraordinary – no doubt he has not just an EA but a whole office, any one of whom could have been asked to check the policy and get back to Bloomfield. He could have checked with his senior colleagues whether taking this hospitality was likely to pass the smell test. If he was still in doubt, he could have checked with his employer, Peter Hughes, the Public Service Commissioner. It appears he did none of this things, until after the story broke. From someone who has huge powers vested in them, it is not just a lapse of propriety but a stunning lack of judgement. If this is how things we come to hear about are dealt with, how much confidence can we have re other matters the Director-General is responsible for.

One hears suggestions that, Bloomfield having eventually realised it hadn’t been appropriate, all was made good by the fact that Bloomfield wrote a cheque for the equivalent of the cost of the tickets and donated it to the City Mission or some other worthy charity. In fact, that is almost pure distraction, since the money was never the main issue – on his salary he’d not have had any problems going to the cricket or rugby at his own expense if he’d wanted it (as many thousands of others did). Writing a small cheque simply doesn’t adequately deal with the inappropriate behaviour in the first place – any more than it likely would have were it to have been someone well down the public sector food chain.

Anyway, that was the Ministry of Health response. Yesterday, the Public Service Commission finally responded to my request. They provided me with the PSC’s own policies, for their staff and management, and a link to the guidance the PSC provides to public sector chief executives on such matters. I thought they were both pretty good documents.

The guidance to chief executives (of whom Bloomfield is one) is most relevant. This from the first page was just the sort of thing one would hope to see.

And this was pretty good to.

Did Bloomfield never read it?

And, slightly off topic, I was quite impressed with the austerity of this section of the guidance.

In some respects, the PSC’s own policies for their staff – not binding on Bloomfield – are even better.

Good stuff. The SSC policy even extends to immediate family.

Stringent rules, and aptly so.

So the Ministry of Health has stringent policies, the SSC has stringent policies, and the SSC guidance to chief executives is also stringent. Not one of those sets of policies should have led any employee – no matter how junior, or senior – to think that accepting sporting hospitality from entities trying to influence (“persuade, convince, explain”) the public servant would be anything close to appropriate. Such offers should have been declined immediately and repeatedly. And not necessarily because Bloomfield’s advice or decisions would have been influenced by hospitality – though as he is human too, who (including himself) can really know – but because it is simply a dreadful look, that corrodes reasonable public expectations around the integrity of the public service, all the more so in this time of Covid when the state has been wielding more extensive than usual powers, and then (somewhat inevitably) exercising discretion around exceptions to the rules.

But what actually happened? We might deduce from Bloomfield’s later comments that the Public Service Commissioner had told him his conduct in these matters had not been acceptable. But we are left to guess even at that. Perhaps defenders of Bloomfield might cite personal privacy, but when you are a very high official and you overstep the bounds in public, any rebuke also needs to be clearly visible to the public. Otherwise, we might reasonably think one of the public sector elite was looking after another of that same elite, perhaps even playing politics.

Because the political “leadership” was far worse. We – the public can’t do anything about Peter Hughes or Bloomfield – but we rely on the politicians we elect to demand high standards from the public service. And what happened in this case? Both the Prime Minister and the Covid minister did little more than laugh off these breaches, suggesting that no one begrudged Bloomfield an afternoon at the cricket after all his work. Pure distraction, pure minimisation, when the issue was never about him having a Sunday afternoon off at the cricket, but about who hosted him, and what interests his host had in influencing him.

I don’t think accepting one invitation to a sports event should be a firing offence – even for someone as powerful and prominent as the Director-General of Health. Repeat offences, as we saw in this case, do raise the ante somewhat, because they create doubts about the man’s judgement, and even about a possible sense of entitlement. David Clark lost his position as Minister of Health for offences that, in the scheme of things, were less serious, albeit embarrassing to the government.

But we should have been able to expect the Public Service Commissioner, the Prime Minister, and the Covid minister (for that matter the Minister of Health) to all have made it crystal clear, in public, that Bloomfield’s behaviour represented a serious and repeated lapse of judgement, a breach of the clear standards expected of MoH staff and public service chief executives, and that any repetition of this sort of lapse would be utterly unacceptable.

Or are the rules only for (a) show, and (b) little people?