Chris Joye continues his renaissance today with a deconstruction of the dangers, limits and appropriate parameters for the forthcoming Son of Wallis inquiry. He outlines how the RBA’s governance arrangements will likely be included though not the recent bribery allegations. The rest of Joye’s argument is as vital as it is rare in Australia:
It is unseemly watching former RBA and Treasury bosses like Ken Henry, Ian Macfarlane and Ted Evans happily jump on to major bank boards within months of their resignations from office. It is even more worrying that nobody questions this practice. Mr Hockey would do well to establish a minimum period before gamekeepers morph into poachers.
Mr Hockey’s personal team has the skills to ensure he does not become beholden to the public service. His highly regarded and refreshingly experienced chief of staff Grant Lovett ran fixed-income at investment bank UBS. His chief economist Tony Pearson worked for many years at the RBA and then with the determinedly independent Saul Eslake at ANZ Banking Group. Finally, there is Mr Hockey’s wife, Melissa Babbage, who ran foreign exchange at Deutsche Bank.
Good stuff but let’s not forget that Joe Hockey’s dream team are also former insiders and we don’t want the open door policy going the other way for regulatory capture, either. But Joye is right that:
This is why the composition of the Hockey review, and the secretariat that services it, will be so important. It needs to be arm’s length from a bureaucracy preternaturally opposed to change, which will be keen to dull criticism and massage outcomes.
And it also needs to be led by not just high-profile financiers with cosy relationships with incumbent institutions, but independently-minded experts that have the analytical capacity to interrogate the information they receive. Such folk are not easy to find.
Joye suggests Dominic Stevens, Challenger’s former chief executive. My preference is for an academic outsider to run it. Frank Milne would be ideal.
