There was the 20 per cent planned increase in spending on staff salaries – with inflation coming down it must be a big increase planned in staff numbers, and the really extraordinary $35 million planned spending on “engagement with the public and other stakeholders” (this on top, apparently, of the item further down about communication of MPC decisions).
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No one seems to have any clear idea what this $35 million is (nothing they’ve published gives any real sense) and although, as I noted to someone the other day who asked if I had any idea, it just can’t be quite as bad as it sounds, it sounds pretty bad indeed.
Today, @Charteddaily was at it again, having dug out from Parliament’s website the Reserve Bank’s responses to their 2022/23 financial year Annual Review undertaken by FEC. There are all sorts of gems apparently, from the $5500 spent at the Maranui cafe in Lyall Bay for offsite planning/team-building (lots more on other such events). Perhaps, and just possibly, some level of expense on those sorts of things is necessary and even warranted (it was, after all, 2022/23 a year of Labour fiscal excess), but when I scrolled through the documents what really caught my eye was the bloated spending on communications functions. Here are the permanent staff numbers
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So that was eleven full-timers on “content and channels”, and six for internal communications alone (this is an organisation with only two offices and about 500 staff). @Chartedaily checked and found that The Treasury has only six communications staff in total……. Now, the Reserve Bank is a little more public facing than The Treasury, so you might expect a few more, but….more on internal comms than Treasury has in total? Really? Well, apparently so on the Orr/Quigley/Robertson watch (and Robertson gave them a second big boost to their funding agreement during this period).
Then there is some time series data
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Note that on top of the 27 permanent staff there were 4 contractors (although a later table suggests they mostly work on other stuff). 27+ communications staff (and they still can’t even commuicate monetary policy competently – see last two OCR reviews). Oh, and the salary budget in 22/23 was five times what it had been in 2018/19, Orr’s first full year. (I recall doing an OIA several years ago when the comms staff were around 18, and that seemed flabbergasting enough……but 31 of them now).
What has the Board and Board chair been doing? Presumably just what Nicola Willis wanted given that (a) she just reappointed the Board chair, and (b) raised no issues around spending restraint in her letter of expectation to the Board.
One part of the communications empire is responsible for OIA requests, so you’d assume that with so many resources they’d be just superb in responding to those requests. But….whereas in 2019/20 78 per cent of their 100 OIA requests were responded to within the statutory 30 days, in 2022/23 only 54 per cent of their 94 requests were. That won’t greatly surprise anyone who has ever dealt with them, but is still striking to see it in print.
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It is a great deal of money being spent by an organisation with very weak accountability, and without even the excuse/rationale that they do a lot of direct public-facing stuff. They don’t sell stuff to the general public, or grant things to the general public. They mostly deal with banks, financial institutions, other government agencies, and various vendors. Their policies affect many or most of us indirectly in various ways but – mercifully – we aren’t yet subject to massive billboards of Orr and the MPC, or full page newspaper adverts etc. Not even a mea culpa for losing taxpayers a mere…..$11 billion (which swamps even the comms budget).
And it isn’t even as if their communications is that good. It just isn’t obvious what they – and more importantly we – are getting for the money they are spending. Their main documents seem okayish, but nothing spectacular. They seem not (mercifully again) to be running a TikTok account, and although they do have an Instagram account it doesn’t seem to have very many followers (as you might expect: central banking done well is supposed to be pretty dry and boring; grey men and women operating technocratically and (supposedly) expertly). You are rather left wondering what these 27+ people actually do all day? But that is probably just a failure of imagination….always meetings to attend, coffee catch-ups to hold, and so on.
It really is quite extraordinary. Not so much that Orr and Quigley would do this if they could (bad bureaucrats will, and recall that in his day job at a university Quigley was spending $1m on a lobbyist), but that ministers enable it and now, apparently, endorse it. It was Robertson-era excess in 2022/23 – the stuff National rightly complained about – but…..the chair has just been reappointed, the budgets are expanding again.
And that is now on the new Minister of Finance who seems to have done nothing about it. (You rather hope The Treasury monitoring reports to the Minister are doing something about highlighting such excess.)
Michael Reddell spent most of his career at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, where he was heavily involved with monetary policy formulation, and in financial markets and financial regulatory policy, serving for a time as Head of Financial Markets. Michael blogs at Croaking Cassandra - where this article was sourced.
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