Bernard Hickey: Of strategic thinkers and leaders there is little sign
5:30 AM Sunday Nov 18, 2012
Sutch generated much of the intellectual grunt of the great reforms of the 1930s that helped pull NZ out of the Depression and redevelop its economy and social system. Photo / NZ Herald
Where are the new "young Turks" of New Zealand's policy-making? Where is the next Bill Sutch or Sir Rod Deane?
Maybe I've missed them and they're in the background pushing for change, but I can't see them yet and New Zealand needs them to start making a noise.
This country has a great history of intellectuals and thinkers who got involved in the messy, hard business of mashing ideas into policy. Such thinkers act like a government rugby team's halfback, driving the bureaucracy's forwards around the paddock before spreading it wide for politics' backs to score tries and win votes.
New Zealand has had two great "halfbacks" in the past century. Both were economists with crucial roles in public life somewhat behind the scenes at times of great and necessary change.
Bill Sutch began as a policy-making adviser to the then centre-right Minister of Finance, Gordon Coates, in 1933. He carried on in that office when Labour won the election and Walter Nash became Finance Minister.
Sutch generated much of the intellectual grunt of the great reforms of the 1930s that helped pull New Zealand out of the Depression and redevelop its economy and social system. He went on to serve as Secretary for Industries and Commerce in 1958. He was later accused of being a Russian spy - wrongly - and acquitted.
In the late 1970s and 1980s Sir Rod Deane reshaped the nation. First as Chief Economist and Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank in the early 1980s, Sir Rod clashed with then Prime Minister Robert Muldoon over New Zealand's economic direction. He was of a generation of policy advisers and bureaucrats who radically reshaped New Zealand from 1984, deregulating government and the economy.
Fast forward. I see massive debate in Europe, USA and Asia about how to respond and reform after the Global Financial Crisis. Assumptions about banking, monetary policy, government spending, social policy, the environment and corporate structures are all being challenged.
Yet, in New Zealand public life and inside the Reserve Bank and Treasury I can't see the next Bill Sutch or Sir Rod. I can't see the same intellectual energy and creativity in policy circles here that I see in Britain or America.
A recession is always part of the economic cycle (and we are only just on the verge of a recession) so don't go throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Whats needed is for more enforcement by the FMA to make sure our regulation is being properly enacted.
Keep your big changes ideas such as Karl Marx and communism to your dreams please.
How good do you think NZ would be now if Telecom had been kept in public hands and Rod was made the CEO and allowed to have free reign to do what he did then, but for the benefit of NZ not the people who gained from the privatisation?
Of course the justifiers for privatising everything always manage to bring up how we couldn't have afforded to do it. Well. How have we afforded to bail out the finance investors and the earthquakes in Christchurch? Of course the government could have kept things and not privatised but still put the likes of Rod Deane into doing exactly what he did.
The old adage that governments can't do things as well as private is a load of rubbish. All it takes is for the government to set everything up and then let the forward thinkers as you call them get on and do the business.
Just imagine if we never went down the privatising road and kept everything we owned as a NZ identity but run on a commercial basis. How much is the BNZ exporting now that could be staying here? Sometimes forward thinkers are proven on hindsight not to be all that forward after all don't you think?
Unfortunately politicians and Reserve Bank boffins do not understand that a country needs to earn export dollars to pay for consumption and we need real economic growth to improve living standards.
This Government is stalling for time by cashing up our Assets.
John Key will be remembered for his pro asset sales mantra.