Professor Robert MacCulloch: Message to All Graduates.....

Message to All Graduates: don't Apply to Finance Minister Nicola Willis' Social Investment Agency. Its a PR Scam.

Finance Minister Willis has declared its business-as-usual in Wellington, where insiders get the top jobs, and tax-payer 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? Its a mathematical technique that relies on actuarial modelling. For example, maybe there's a scheme that proposes spending public funds to improve child health-care, whose main effect may be to reduce poorer health outcomes when children get older, in turn reducing future health-care 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 & 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 & 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 & related subjects in NZ is: don't work for Willis's Social Investment Agency, nor Seymour's new Ministry of Regulation. Why be bossed around by Boards & 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 & work experience will be rewarded. Finance Minister Willis has sent you a message. Nothing has changed. Its jobs for boys. Its business as usual under National. She is failing to deliver change. We're back to Ardern-style public relations & comms games, as symbolized by the PR appointments at Willis' new Ministry.

Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.