An appointment can look excellent on paper. The qualifications are there. The process has been followed. The right things have been said.
Then the person has to do the job.
That is where competence matters.
If somebody holds public office, exercises public power, administers public money or makes decisions affecting other people's lives and businesses, the public is entitled to expect something fairly basic.
Can the person understand the problem?
Can they make a decision?
Can they explain it?
Can they exercise judgment?
And when something goes wrong, can they take responsibility for it?
Race, religion and background do not answer those questions.
Performance does.
Policy is easy from a distance
Government has a difficult job.
I do not underestimate that.
Decisions have to be made with incomplete information. Competing interests have to be balanced. Revenue has to be raised. Services have to be provided. Not everyone will agree with the result.
That is government.
But there is a danger in making decisions too far away from the people who have to live with them.
A policy can look perfectly sensible in Wellington.
The modelling works.
The objective sounds reasonable.
The consultation document is well written.
Then it reaches a real business.
The margins are thinner than the model assumed.
The timing is worse.
The compliance cost is higher.
The owner cannot simply pass another cost on to somebody else.
That is when theory meets reality.
I see this repeatedly in tax.
The policy objective may be reasonable. Sometimes it is difficult to argue with.
But the legal mechanism chosen to achieve it can produce consequences that were not anticipated or were anticipated but not given enough weight.
The people who designed the rule move on.
The people who have to comply with it do not.
They live with it.
The spreadsheet and the business are not the same thing
Business has one useful discipline.
Eventually, the numbers have to work.
Payroll arrives on Friday whether the policy is elegant or not.
The bank expects payment.
The landlord expects rent.
Employees expect wages.
Tax has to be paid.
Customers expect what they paid for.
You cannot issue a policy statement explaining why the money is not there.
That does not make business morally superior to government.
Business can be badly managed, wasteful and foolish. I have seen enough of that as well.
But failure in business eventually becomes difficult to hide.
A company can borrow for a while. It can sell assets. It can blame the market, the bank, the landlord, the government and, if necessary, the weather.
Eventually the numbers tell the story.
Government is different.
A poor process can continue for years.
A department can become slower without disappearing.
A programme can cost more without closing.
A bad decision can disappear into a much larger system.
The taxpayer remains.
That is why judgment and accountability matter.
There is also a considerable difference between a business that exists on a spreadsheet in Wellington and one that has to make payroll on Friday.
The spreadsheet assumes.
The business pays.
The spreadsheet can move a cost from one column to another.
The business owner has to find the money.
That is not an ideological point.
It is a practical one.
Law has its own reality
Law also looks different once you leave the textbook.
What seems fair, what makes commercial sense and what the law actually says are three different questions.
Any lawyer who has practised long enough knows that.
A client may have behaved reasonably and still be wrong in law.
A government department may have a sensible policy objective and still exceed the power Parliament gave it.
A tax result may look commercially absurd and still follow from the legislation.
That is why details matter.
The person advising has to understand the law.
The person exercising power has to understand its limits.
The person drafting legislation should understand what the words will actually do once they leave Wellington.
Good intentions are not enough.
Neither is presentation.
Why I look at systems this way
I came to New Zealand as a young immigrant, still at school.
That has influenced the way I look at institutions.
Not because immigration gives anyone special wisdom. It does not.
But living in different systems teaches you not to assume that the way one country does something is the only way it can be done.
You compare.
You notice what works.
You notice what does not.
You notice things that people who have spent their whole lives inside one system sometimes stop seeing because they have always been there.
That perspective can be useful.
But perspective is only an input.
The work still has to stand up.
That is why I have little interest in judging people by categories that tell me very little about whether they can perform the role they hold.
Different backgrounds can improve decision-making.
Different professions can see different problems.
Different experience matters.
But at some point somebody still has to make the decision.
And the decision has to be judged on its quality.
The public is not there to serve the system
There is a distinction I have learned to make over the years.
You notice where government protects the public, and where bureaucracy merely protects the bureaucracy.
They are not the same thing.
Rules are necessary.
Controls are necessary.
Public money has to be protected.
Public power has to be exercised carefully.
I have no difficulty with any of that.
But a process can reach the point where following the process becomes more important than the reason the process existed in the first place.
That is when people begin to hear:
“That is the policy.”
Or:
“That is our process.”
Sometimes that is the correct answer.
Sometimes it is simply an answer that stops the conversation.
The real question is whether the result makes sense.
The public is not an inconvenience standing between a department and the completion of its process.
It is the reason the department exists.
The public provides the money.
The public grants the authority.
The public lives with the consequences.
It is entitled to expect reasonable competence in return.
Not perfection.
Not brilliance in every case.
Competence.
A decision within a reasonable time.
An explanation that makes sense.
A person who understands the subject.
A system that does not require three departments to answer a question one competent person should have been able to resolve.
And when something has gone wrong, somebody prepared to say so.
Why Money & State exists
This is why I wanted to create Money & State.
Too much public discussion stops at intention.
What was the policy trying to achieve?
What values does it represent?
What message does it send?
Those can be legitimate questions.
They are not enough.
I want to know what happened.
Did the policy work?
What did it cost?
Who paid?
Who benefited?
Who carried the risk?
What does the law actually say?
What did businesses have to change?
What happened that was not in the policy paper?
And who was responsible for the result?
Those questions are less comfortable.
They are also more useful.
I am not interested in slogans from the left or the right.
I am interested in what happens when the slogan becomes a policy, the policy becomes legislation, the legislation becomes administration, and eventually somebody receives the letter, pays the tax, employs the worker, challenges the decision, sells the asset, closes the business or discovers that the system does not work quite as neatly as its designers expected.
That is the territory Money & State will examine.
Tax.
Debt.
Law.
Business.
Public systems.
Public power.
And the people who eventually have to live with all of it.
Because every policy, every law and every public appointment eventually reaches the ground.
That is where the language falls away.
That is where intentions matter less and results matter more.
And that is where competence becomes difficult to fake.
That is where Money & State starts.