MFAT
May 9th, 2009 at 10:16 am by David FarrarTwo good articles on MFAT and NZ Aid. Fran O’Sullivan has a look at MFAT and what the (yet to be announced) appointment of John Allen means. Fran says:
The commission’s panel was encouraged to look at the top MFat job in an “expansive way” and select a new chief executive who could (and this is the most important point) provide leadership for New Zealand – not just the Foreign Affairs Ministry – to help propel a much more aggressive approach offshore.
Fran says it is about getting less silos and better co-operations from not just MFAT, but also NZT&E, Immigration Service, Education NZ, and Tourism NZ.
Meanwhile in the Dom Post, Nick Venter looks at NZ Aid:
He starts with why NZ Aid was made semi-autonomous:
Eight years ago an independent review of New Zealand’s aid programme raised major concerns about the way aid money was distributed.
The reviewers reported that the Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry, which administered the aid programme, regarded aid as “an instrument of foreign policy”, that almost a quarter of the total aid budget of $250 million was spent on tertiary education scholarships – despite poor completion rates and the failure of many students to return home.
The ministry had used $500,000 of aid money to relocate the Samoan Department of Lands, Surveys and Environment so a new New Zealand high commission could be built, that the ministry used its development agency as a “dumping ground for non-performers” and that there was no “formal documented system of analysis or defined criteria used for determining the annual allocation process”.
McCully says:
“You don’t make changes like this if you don’t have to,” he said. “But in terms of the audit reports that have been brought down and some of the examples that I have looked at, over months now, I made up my own mind that I wasn’t going to carry the can for those things.”
Mr McCully has publicly questioned NZAid’s priorities, the amount of money it puts into “unproductive” regional bureaucracies, the size of its staff (281) and the proportion of the aid budget spent on internal overheads (about 8 per cent), but concern about accountability persuaded him to put it back under the umbrella of the ministry.
He says the agency, headed throughout its existence by former diplomat Peter Adams, wrongly assumed that being a semi-autonomous body entitled it to operate outside the normal state sector controls. “NZAid looked at the word autonomous and ignored the word semi.”
One of the consequences was that NZAid did not tell the ministry things it needed to know, “sometimes involving large amounts of money or serious matters of national interest”.
McCully also seems to think overheads were too high:
Mr McCully said he had also been concerned by NZAid’s response to questioning of its overheads. “I was annoyed to find that we were running overheads that were about 8 per cent of the total budget and that NZAid regarded themselves as being immune from any sort of scrutiny in that respect.
At a time when I was putting MFAT through the wringer, I was being told that NZAid were not open to that degree of scrutiny because we just gave them a bulk number and they decided how much of it was going to be overheads . . . . When I said, ‘Okay, presumably that will go down quite a lot when the budget goes up to $600 million,’ I was told, ‘No, it will go up to 9 per cent.’ I said, ‘How is that?’ They said, ‘That is just what we have decided.’ “
The story also focuses on what the goal should be:
He is also sharply critical of Mr McCully’s decision to abandon the poverty alleviation focus favoured by other Western governments as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
“Economic development is an important contributor to poverty alleviation, but it’s a means to an end, not an end itself.
“The key to poverty alleviation is benefiting those most in need. Traditionally the elites benefit when money is pumped in with an economic development focus. You achieve poverty alleviation through investment in education, health, literacy and governance.”
Mr McCully, who has described poverty alleviation as a “rather nebulous concept”, says the success of the new focus will be measurable in, among other things, improved trade statistics.
“It is unacceptable that we should be exporting a billion dollars worth of goods to the Pacific and having empty ships coming back here. It shows that we are spending too much of our money on stuff that might help alleviate poverty this year but it does not do anything about next year and the year after.”
One thing is for sure – all eyes will be focused on NZ Aid for the next few years.
Tags: Fran O'Sullivan, John Allen, MFAT, Murray McCully, Nick Venter, NZ Aid
May 9th, 2009 at 11:57 am
It appears to me that McCully is moving from giving aid recipients fish to giving them fishing rods. Surely not a bad thing. What I do not understand is how they justify the 281 staff at NZaid.
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Allen’s appointment is yet to be confirmed and accepted.
If anyone can turn MFAT toward an NZ Inc approach however, he could.
Frankly, it’s way past time that the silo based approach was removed not just in this arena but in all others in govt.
What the hell are they thinking when they don’t leverage their purchasing power into one single entity for example, not to mention a hundred and one other opportunities.
If whole-of-govt thinking was applied across the board without consideration for petty turf protection of any kind from anyone no matter who they were, I would not be surprised at all to find that administration costs could be halved, staff cut by a quarter, outputs increased by a third.
It would be extremely worthwhile to commission a detailed study on this but you’d probably need to use offshore consultants since the very small handful of firms capable of doing this within NZ, already have a huge vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
281 staff sounds like a terribly high number. But it’s an organisation administering a overseas aid budget of $460 million. That means that once you take out a certain number of administrative staff necessary for any organisation like this, the average staff member there is looking after millions of dollars of programmes. 8-9% is not particularly high, and nearing the low side – if you’re scrimping on the administration of programmes, you’re going find it difficult to get the outcomes you want. 5-7% starts to make things very difficult, and you get more mistakes being made, such as the Tonga one cited.
There probably are some savings to be made. But you get these by doing a line by line review of expenditure, and fixing specific problems. The reason McCully has given is in the article:
As is noted above, he is also taking money from AIDS, malaria, sanitation, schools, hospitals, and local infrastructure (such as roads and bridges). It’s pretty hard to sell those fish you’ve caught when you’re sick and can’t get to market. He describes poverty as “a nebulous concept”, but there are a number of indicators used to measure it.
Where the newly directed funding will go is as yet unknown. I’ve got no problem with helping facilitate Pacific trade, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of other goals.
By the way, the article gets it wrong. It’s NZAID, not NZAid.
And finally, McCully and Groser are going round pissing people off. Not just woolly bleeding-heart lefties either (as you might be tempted to discount resistance as). This isn’t the 1980s over again, but the political landscape is more volatile this time. You can’t go around making an ever longer list of discontented and expect to retain power.
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
So are you saying george that they shouldn’t do the right thing lest they piss people off?
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
I’m saying they’re doing the wrong things, and pissing people off. They’re doing it in a lot of sectors, and making enemies of people who wouldn’t otherwise be hostile if they did things in a more consultative manner. It may not have the public fireworks of the Auckland blowup, particularly where public servants are involved. Yes, I know pissing off public servants is something that no-one here cares about, but National would be wise to slow down and work with people instead of fighting them and implementing their grand vision in a single go. MFAT was hardly a bastion of socialism.
They don’t see it that way of course, and neither does O’Sullivan, with her calls for a “long overdue shake-up”.
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
They are going to make “enemies” no matter what. It is a natural outcome of a policy which aims to increase accountability and thrift where previously there was neither.
You cant work WITH people to make their own roles obsolete, unless there is something better for them to move on to. The government cant promise that, so any idea of noble cooperation from those in the firing line is simply wishful thinking.
I can understand why NZAID could appear to have bloated staffing levels; they might be operating in multiple theaters with specialists required in each. But the lack of accountability will inevitably lead to skewed priorities and a loss of focus.
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Yeah I gathered that from your previous post, but my question is, why are they doing the wrong things?
Isn’t efficiency which, as I understand it, is what they’re doing, a worthy objective?
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Gordon Campbell has written a long and detailed article on the changes, which he says McCully has oversold in rhetorical terms.
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Yes, it is. McCully seems to think he can make NZAID more efficient, and I have no doubt that they’ll find some things. But I don’t think it’s possible to do things completely differently, as has been suggested. In light of Campbell’s commentary, I think they aren’t in for huge changes.
Likewise, foreign policy objectives have been put aside at NZAID until now, in favour of poverty reduction. The balance will now shift, the question is how far.
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
I worked on a project or two in the Pacific under MFAT pre 2002, and the management was a shambles. There was a constant turn-over of unqualified (and sometimes uninterested) trainee diplomats running each programme from Wellington. It was a recipe for wasteful spending, and the absence of long-term staff meant the same stupid mistakes were made over and over again. Then over and over and over some more.
I got out of the game before NZAID was set up, but my old mates still in the islands say having a group of people who actually know something about development has been a great improvement. They are dreading the prospect of going back to working under somone killing time until he becomes the Second Secretary in Paris.
The Gordon Cambell piece linked to above looks very well-informed to my eye. None of the arguments McCully has advanced for the change look even remotely convincing.
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Mfat are a bunch of effette careerists who treat the public, politicians and taxpayers’ money with sneering distain. They are little gods who have their own agenda. The episode over the Don Brash memo was a disgrace and this Department has a great deal to do to make up for that.
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
George, I’m a fan of Jeffrey Sachs. Provided McCully follows his prescription and I see so far nothing incompatible, I’m comfortable.
Have a look at the Columbia speech video on that link, if you’re not familiar with him.
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
George, check out Jeffrey Sachs’ website and look at the Columbia video.
McCully in my view is compatible with what he’s saying.
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
In the 80s I worked for a Government department, and I was seconded to an overseas NZ Embassy when the title was still Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I was on MFA overseas allowances for the duration of my attachment.
When I was told the cash figure of those allowance I could hardly believe my ears! Sufficient be it to say that I quickly realised how so many MFA people could run to second and third homes and similar assetts. The supplementary local allowances were at a level that enabled the recipient to salt away their actual salary.
However, my experience is now over twenty years out of date and MFAT overseas allowances may be more modest. (Why is it that I somehow think not?)
Vote:May 9th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
As some of you know I am arguing that we need to be genuine leaders not “leaders of the followers” in the field of climate change.
We have to demonstrate to our opinion makers and the media that taking the revolutionary position in the great ideas of science is in the great New Zealand tradition..
Most of us are familiar with the radical theories of Rutherford, (the nuclear atom), ANAC (Particle doping of silicon chips),
McDiarmid (conductive polymers) Dr Bruce Cain (DNA binding chemotherapy for cancer treatment), and I am sure there are many others.
I have suggested to the ETS select committee that New Zealand has an opportunity to strike out in a new direction, following these historical precedents.
I have been trying to think of the closest precedent to challenging the current “conventional wisdom” of climate change.
Tonight, by pure accident, I watched a programme on Discovery Channel (Sky) on the revolutionary work on evolution by Alan Wilson. the New Zealander who went to UC Berkeley, and demonstrated that we could now learn more about the evolution of species by studying mitocondrial DNA than by digging up fossils. (I warm to this because I was at Berkeley at the same time, and the other feature scientist in the programme, Marie-Claire King, (see link below) was a scientist at Seattle, and I have just returned from Seattle – it was nice to see her talking against the backdrop of the seaside settlements of Seattle, so similar to Auckland.)
By transferring the focus of our research funding away from atmospheric gases to the earth, the rocks and the biological exchanges of agriculture we would be following in our great tradition of bucking the conventional wisdom.
The programme is repeated at 10.30 Sunday on Discovery and I recommend we all watch it and use these ideas to promote the idea that New Zealanders should once again “break the mould”. This is our nature.
Please focus on the last sentence of the Wikipedia extract below.
History repeats itself – and this time we have a chance to learn from history.
Here is the first part of what Wikipedia has to say:
Vote:Allan Charles Wilson (18 October 1934 – 21 July 1991) was a pioneer in the use of molecular approaches to understanding of evolutionary change and reconstruction of phylogenies. One of the great innovators of science, he revolutionised the study of human evolution. He was one of the most controversial figures in post-war biology; his work attracted a great deal of attention both from within and outside the academic world. He is the only New Zealander to win the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship and was short listed for the Nobel Prize when he died[1] at the age of 56. Allan Wilson’s scientific achievements were nothing short of profoundly significant.
Allan Wilson was born in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand, and raised on a farm at Helvetia, Pukekohe. He attended King’s College in Auckland and excelled in maths and chemistry. After school he gained a BSc from theUniversity of Otago. It was here as a Masters student that Wilson met Professor C.P. ‘Mac’ McMeekan, a New Zealand pioneer in animal science. He suggested that Wilson further his study in biochemistry instead ofgenetics.
In 1955 Wilson was invited to do his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. At the time the family thought Allan would only be gone two years; instead he stayed at Berkeley for 35 years, gaining his PhD in 1961 under the direction of Arthur Pardee, and setting up one of the world’s most creative biochemistry labs.
Allan Wilson first came to world attention when he published a paper titled Immunological Time-Scale For Human Evolution in Science magazine in December 1967. Together with doctoral student Vincent Sarich, Wilson argued that the origins of the human species could be seen through, what he termed, a “molecular clock”. This was a way of dating, not from fossils, but from the genetic mutations that had accumulated since they parted from a common ancestor. The molecular clock estimated the length of time from divergence, given a certain rate of change.
When Wilson, with his then-student Mary-Claire King, and Sarich analysed and compared genetic material of humans and chimpanzees, they found the material to be 99 percent identical.[2] From King’s work, using the ‘molecular clock’ reasoning (bigger differences equate to greater time since their last common ancestor) Wilson deduced that the earliest proto-hominids evolved only five million years ago. Most contemporaryanthropologists, who favoured a date of around 25 million years, dismissed his work as absurd.
In the early 1980s, as his findings for the age of the proto-humans were starting to be more widely accepted, Wilson again dropped a bombshell on traditional anthropological thinking with his best known work with Rebecca Cann and Mark Stoneking on the so-called “Mitochondrial Eve”hypothesis. In his efforts to identify informative genetic markers for tracking human evolutionary history, he started to focus on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA)—genes that sit in the cell, but not in the nucleus, and are passed from mother to child. This DNA material is important because it mutates quickly, thus making it easy to plot changes over relatively short time spans. By comparing differences in the mtDNA Wilson believed it was possible to estimate the time, and the place, modern humans first evolved. With his discovery that human mtDNA is genetically much less diverse than chimpanzee mtDNA, he concluded that modern human races had diverged recently from a single population while older human species such as Neandertal and Homo erectus had become extinct. He and his team compared mtDNA in people of different racial backgrounds and concluded that all modern humans evolved from one ‘lucky mother’ in Africa about 150,000 years ago.
This finding was as, if not more, controversial than his 1967 findings. Accepted thinking had various human groups evolving from different ancestors, over a million years in separate geographic regions, but at basically the same rate around the world. In Europe with Homo sapiensNeanderthals, in Indonesia with Java Man, in China with Peking Man. Again, as in the 1960s, many palaeontologists rejected Wilson’s conclusions; fossil scientists were unfamiliar with biochemistry and trusted their own data more than molecular data. It took 20 years to convince palaeontologists of the value of Wilson’s theory, but when they did, it married their science with that of genetics.
May 10th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Ummm, Owen
Perhaps I’ve missed it, but I DID think that we were discussing MFAT, rather than climate change.
Can you please therefore enlighten me (and perhaps othersa as well) as to what the relevance of your article is to the discussion about MFAT?
Can’t really seee where it fits in.
But then again . . .
Thanks.
Vote: