IAIN RENNIE FOR TREASURY, NEVER (SADLY) THE HIGH JUMP

Relic Rennie. Really? When will all this end?

On 14 November 2024, 60 year old Lifer Public Servant Iain Rennie was appointed as “Secretary” (Big Cheese) of the New Zealand Treasury. As Treasury Secretary, Rennie is now the principal economic advisor to the New Zealand Government.

Rennie’s appointer was Sir Brian Roche, whom Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had, 10 days earlier, appointed as New Zealand’s Public Service Commissioner (NZ’s Chief Public Servant). Rennie himself was Public Service Commissioner from 2008 to 2016, appointed back then by Labour Party Member of Parliament David Parker.

Rennie’s sole academic qualification is a Bachelor of Arts degree from Victoria University of Wellington. Worse still, Rennie’s BA (Vic) was in economics, the vocation that extinguishes whatever predicative powers a would-be economist might otherwise possess (current Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr is an economist). As the saying goes, God invented economists to make astrologers look good.

In some sense Rennie, with the predictive powers of a goldfish and his profound detachment from reality, is eminently qualified to head New Zealand’s Treasury. Tom Scott summed it up perfectly, with this timeless cartoon:

But, while Rennie is a cartoonish figure, his appointment is absolutely no joke. Confidence is New Zealand’s public service has been in steady decline for years, in no small part because of recidivist public servants like Rennie. That confidence of course cratered with the Government’s response to COVID, and the New Zealand Public Service’s wholesale complicity in the Ethno-Authoritarian State that the ousted Labour Government tried to abuse COVID in order to create.

Rennie demonstrated his outlandish otherworldliness in an interview he did with the Global Government Forum in 2016, covered by that strange and slightly sinister Forum in 2020 as follows:

https://www.globalgovernmentforum.com/grown-up-government-an-interview-with-iain-rennie-new-zealands-former-state-services-commissioner/

That coverage includes the following deluded blurt from Rennie:

“All of us need to stay humble about where we’re at. We’re certainly not through this pandemic by any means,” he adds. “But we’ve done well in New Zealand, and I think that’s partly a consequence of the general high level of trust and confidence that there is in government here. That trust – and I think it’s important for other countries to reflect on this – is really important in times of crisis.”

And in an interview with the Herald on 27 December 2024, Rennie repeated his bizarre mantra that New Zealanders have faith in public servants and institutions to extricate New Zealand from the shit into which these very same people have tossed us https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/economy/treasury-ceo-iain-rennie-on-nzs-deteriorating-finances-lets-not-panic-but-lets-actually-sort-it-out/IR6MFKOB6VFTBBFC7NAOIFXXCE/:

“I think there is confidence that our fiscal institutions will respond and consolidate over the next few years, and that gives us a really important breathing space that a Government doesn’t have to have some of the same, quite precipitate responses.”

To what “fiscal institutions” might Idiot Iain be referring? Well…they’ll be his own new fiefdom, the Treasury, and his ruddy friend Adrian Orr’s Reserve Bank. Note the glib complacency…”Government doesn’t have to have…precipitate responses”. Steady as she goes, eh Iain?! Let the useless madness continue.

Nowhere in any of Iain’s grandiose pontificating will one find the remotest suggestion of reducing the size or cost of New Zealand’s public service. For Iain and his Ilk, the Public Service Aotearoa is New Zealand’s Main Event. Bugger the tax-paying productive economy, working classes, small businesses, and all the rest of us.

What completely escapes Rennie is that the continuing revolving door appointments of people like him are at the causal heart of New Zealanders’ loss of faith in our public institutions.

New Zealand’s very own Deep State

Notions of “Deep State” in countries other than New Zealand are closely tied with a global military-industrial complex that conspires with career central government officials and military personnel to foster self-enriching things like endless wars.

So, given New Zealand doesn’t have much in the way of military and isn’t currently at war with anyone, what might a New Zealand Deep State look like? Well, it’s of course Iain Rennie and all the other members of the elitist public sector managerial class. Theirs is a simple war for self-preservation and perpetuation, to continue to purloin a grossly inflated and undeserved slice of NZ’s national pie, with rich cream on top.

Judgment, or lack thereof

With Rennie not being the sharpest tool in the shed, one might reasonably expect him to possess sound judgment. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, evidence of Rennie’s lack of judgment isn’t hard to find. Take, for example, Rennie’s handling – in 2014, as Public Service Commissioner - of the end of sex-pest Roger Sutton’s time as CEO of the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority.

In November 2014, Roger Sutton resigned as CEO of CERA after a CERA staffer complained about his bullying and harassment of a sexual nature. Sutton and the complainant signed a confidentiality agreement prohibiting them from disclosing details of the matter and a subsequent investigation found Sutton guilty of “serious misconduct”.

And that ought to have been the end of the matter. But low and behold, then Public Service Commissioner Rennie arranges a press conference to announce Sutton’s resignation, a conference at which Rennie, demonstrably siding with Sutton, invites Sutton to give his version of events, in breach of the confidentiality agreement. Rennie had earlier announced, after the finding of “serious misconduct”, that if Sutton had not resigned, Rennie would have let Sutton’s lucrative lark run its course rather than sacking him. Good gracious.

What can we make of Rennie’s handling of the Sutton affair? Well, clearly, Rennie is not a man who respects binding confidentiality arrangements or can judge what’s appropriate or how to behave. But more importantly, Rennie is unequivocally someone who sees his role (back then as Public Service Commissioner, now as Treasury Secretary) as simply to defend at all costs his elite public servant comrades, regardless of their conduct or performance i.e. to protect and sustain the Apparatchik Club.

How Inept Iain’s appointment as Treasury Secretary can do anything but further undermine confidence in New Zealand’s public institutions is anyone’s guess. His most recent incarnation is simply another recurring nightmare in the Kafkaesque fevered dream of New Zealand’s public “service” lanyard-wearing managerial class. As Public Service Commissioner, Rennie was instrumental in creating the dysfunctional public service sector that he now claims, as Treasury Secretary, he’ll look to reform.

(Un)Grand themes

Well then, what malignant factors contribute to this interminable, mendacious Merry-go-Round of chinless wonders like Rennie?

First, there’s New Zealand’s insidious level of political bipartisanship when it comes to senior public servants. Iain Rennie has enjoyed the support of both the Labour and National parties over the years. There’s an unspoken pact between the major political parties that they’ll continue to appoint the same moldy old mandarins to the top spots.

New Zealand need not adopt U.S.-style wholesale senior public servant changes on transfers of political power. But what’s the likelihood of a Labour Lovie and career public trougher like Rennie putting New Zealand’s obese senior public service on any sort of diet or regime of concerted productive work? For all practical purposes…nil. Any such productive diet would of course put him off-side with the next Labour-led Government.

The other strain of chronic disease that infects Rennie and his fellow travelers is Globalism. The corollary of his Globalism is an express abhorrence of “Populism”, which really means he’s no fan of common working people or democracy in general. His interview with the Global Government Forum includes the following revealing comments:

One of the really early learnings [note that pseudo-intellectual word “learnings”] that I took as state services commissioner was to borrow the UK’s capability review idea that was introduced under the Blair government [Blair being the warmongering British Prime Minister who, with the odious George W Bush, destabilised the entire Middle East with their 2^nd Iraq War].

It has to be senior leaders prioritising the development of their own agency and using the capacity to leverage [note that pseudo-intellectual word “leverage”] networks of civil servants across the world either digitally, or maybe in time in person, to learn and improve

Asked by the Global Government Forum what’s his favourite book, Rennie replied:

And one of the books I found really insightful in helping me with that work is a book by a British journalist called David Robson called The Intelligence Trap, which is subtitled ‘Why smart people make dumb mistakes’. It’s a really very insightful book about how all of us, and particularly people who are more intelligent than many, can have really poor processes or poor decision-making frameworks.

Rennie patently thinks he’s “more intelligent than many”, and is too stupid and arrogant to see he’s not. Rennie is not a solution, he’s a massive cause and symptom of the Problem.