Robert MacCulloch
Robert MacCulloch is a native of New Zealand and worked at the Reserve Bank of NZ before he travelled to the UK to complete a PhD in Economics at Oxford University.
Finance Minister Willis has declared its business-as-usual in Wellington, where insiders get the top jobs and taxpayer-funded window dressing is the order of the day. Her new Social Investment Agency was never her idea – she picked up that hobby horse from one of her old bosses, Bill English.
What is the “social investment approach” anyhow? It’s a mathematical technique that relies on actuarial modelling. For example, maybe there’s a scheme that proposes spending public funds to improve child nutrition, like school lunches, whose main effect may be to reduce poorer health outcomes when children get older, in turn reducing future healthcare spending. The public cost of the scheme can be weighed against the future fiscal savings to society. Actuaries can put probabilities on the likelihood of the better future outcomes to estimate whether the scheme makes financial sense. The Ministry of Social Development has already been employing actuaries to do these sorts of calculations.
Finance Minister Willis, however, wanted her own whole new agency. She made a political appointment in the form of former Police Chief Andrew Costner to head it. He’s a lawyer. Who has he appointed as his Deputy Chief Executive? A chap who “has an extensive background in public relations, having worked for some of the world’s leading public relations firms in London, Hong Kong and Wellington”. His other deputy is another lawyer.
Meanwhile Finance Minister Willis has hauled out of retirement career civil servant Graham Scott to be chair of the board - he’s now into his 80s. I cannot count a single member of the board who has any actuarial qualifications, whatsoever, even though the entire new agency is meant to be based on doing actuarial calculations. One new board member has been “a director on government boards, including KiwiRail and Auckland Transport”. Amazing. Another says he was a “professorial fellow” at Waikato University, even though he was not. He was a professorial teaching fellow – there is a world of difference.
My advice to university graduates in maths, finance, economics, actuarial studies, statistics and related subjects in NZ is: don’t work for Willis’ Social Investment Agency, nor Seymour’s new Ministry of Regulation. Why be bossed around by boards and senior leadership teams comprised of Wellington insiders with flakey backgrounds who’ve played board games all their lives and never done a social investment calculation on a real-life proposal, nor a cost-benefit analysis.
The world has changed, except for in NZ. Those of us with tech skills aren’t taking orders anymore from the kinds of boss-clowns that Willis wants on her boards and management teams. To all hard-working students of NZ – go overseas where your hard earned skills and work experience will be rewarded. Finance Minister Willis has sent you a message: nothing has changed. It’s jobs for boys. It’s business as usual under National. She is failing to deliver change. We’re back to Ardern-style public relations and comms games, as symbolized by the PR appointments at Willis’ new Ministry.
This article was originally published by Down to Earth Kiwi.
