Doing it by the books

Prepared for anything

Treasury Secretary Dr Caraleemcliesh does her homework. Wrangling to get time to sit down with new Zealand’s top public finance official, I was asked what sort of areas I’d like to discuss in the interview, to give Mcliesh a direction in how to prepare.

My response was simple: we want to do a national portrait. We want to know about her as a person – her parents, education, early life – rather than the ins and outs of her views on the Government’s fiscal policy; it’s not the sort of interview you need to prep for.

But prep she did. Sitting down with Stuff in the Treasury’ s resplendent wh are nui, Mcliesh brought a ring-binder of preparation, although it was rarely consulted during our interview.

This is a typical Mcliesh anecdote. She likes to be prepared; she’s one of the only public service chiefs to take a laptop when appearing before a select committee, others preferring to speak off-the-cuff (occasionally at their peril).

But Mcliesh’s zeal for preparation appears to have come at the cost of access. This interview is one of the first round of media appearances she’s conducted since taking the top job at the Treasury in 2019.

It was granted only after several requests to the Treasury in 18 months. There are concerns that Mcliesh might not have the confidence of her predecessor Gabriel Makhlouf to fight Treasury’s corner – although Makhlouf’s candour had a tendency to get both himself and the Treasury in trouble.

Mcliesh was born in Sacramento, the state capital of California, and moved with her family to Canberra when she was 5. You can still hear long American consonants intermixed with her Australian accent.

She might have moved back to the United States, but her family got used to Australia’s relative safety. She recalls that when her grandparents visited for the first time they listened to the Canberra crime news, which was somewhat more placid than the equivalent bulletin in Los Angeles.

‘‘When they visited, that week’s report was on garden hose as being stolen,’’ Mcliesh says. ‘‘ So compared to LA, [Canberra] is quite a laidback and nice place to grow up.’’

Canberra was quiet. It was a public sector town, where Mcliesh grew up with her parents, sister, brother and two cats. It was also a fairly egalitarian place. She recalls nearly everyone going to public schools, no matter class or background. It was something of a shock to discover that not every place was like this.

‘‘When I moved to Melbourne for grad school, I found it a little surprising when people asked me, ‘What school did you go to?’

‘‘It took me a while to realise that actually meant something, that you’re trying to kind of place me, and it made me feel that I was glad to have grown up in Canberra.’’

Economics didn’t always appeal, but as a childmcliesh always enjoyed maths. This led to an interest in business. She says she ‘‘fell into’’ economics and recalls being ‘‘quite captured’’ by the discipline.

‘‘I remember in my first year, the lecturer talked about economics being the study of choice and that just so appealed to me.’’

‘‘There’s a discipline that can help to explain the way the world works, from the really global issues, global financial markets, all the way to what am I going to do on the weekend and how I think about opportunity cost?’’

Mcliesh flourished and continued studying, completing her PHD in finance at the University of Melbourne. She went into management consulting, an industry famous for long hours, and which mcliesh recalls as a ‘‘bit punishing’’. The typical management consultant’s career is to endure a couple of years of that punishment before doing an MBA, but this wasn’t for Mcliesh.

‘‘I’d been finishing my PHD part time – I did not want to see another university.’’

Instead, she took six months off and worked for the Red Cross in Botswana. Six months turned into 18 months, which turned into another Red Cross assignment in Bosnia. She ‘‘fell in love with working in development’’.

‘‘I found it just as intellectually interesting as the work I’d been doing and consulting, but it was for a purpose that I cared about.’’

Mcliesh’s travels underscored for her that ‘‘wellbeing was so much more than material wealth’’. Traditional measures – things like GDP – weren’t capturing everything thatwas important. ‘‘From a policy perspective, it just highlights the importance of just taking that broad view about what matters to people.’’

In the background to this Mcliesh fell in love and married husband Dirk – a consultancy colleague. The high-flying management consultancy world sent them off to different parts of the globe.

It meant the relationship was ‘‘a bit complicated’’ so they struck a deal: the first person to get their dream job could ask the other to move to that country. Mcliesh secured a job at the World Bank in Washington DC, so theymoved there.

There they had twins and her husband was able to choose the next location: Sydney. She worked her way up the New South Wales state Treasury before rising to managing director at TAFE, roughly equivalent to our polytechnics.

She wasn’t in the role long before State Services Commission headhunters came knocking, asking her about the top job at the New Zealand Treasury. The job appealed. Treasury had been doing work for years on living standards, and looking at ways of measuring value other than traditional GDP.

Mcliesh would make history at the Treasury – she is the first woman to hold the job. She’s also the secretary leading the country through one of its darkest economic shocks, including the biggest quarterly contraction in GDP on record.

She was the one who had to brief Finance Minister Grant Robertson on the Treasury’s dark forecasts for the economy. She was in ‘‘regular’’ contact with Robertson, describing what Treasury was seeing, although Mcliesh isn’t too keen to lift the lid on the details of those conversations just yet.

Treasury has come under fire for what some see as an increasingly woolly approach to economics: too much wellbeing, not enough GDP. Mcliesh is clearly aware of the criticism, but she doesn’t back away from the wellbeing focus, and the living standards framework that sits behind it.

‘‘There’s a really significant challenge around productivity in New Zealand, as there is with no climate change, housing, and, you know, lots of challenges that aren’t unique to New Zealand, rising health expenditure, changing demographics and so forth.

‘‘The living standards framework is a really robust, comprehensive way to start developing policies to address those challenges.’’

Coming into the job, she talked with people about what the Treasury was and what it could be. It’s the oldest ministry and in its lifetime it’s moved from being the government’s auditor to its chief economic adviser and forecaster.

‘‘It was interesting to me to hear just how divergent the views were, what Treasury is, what Treasury should be.

‘‘Now, there are some people who were saying that the Treasury has departed from its previous role and should return [to its previous role].

‘‘But also other people were saying, ‘look, Treasury is a little more operating in the past and needs to be more and more progressive’.’’

She’s happy with the balance, happy that people take different views on the Treasury – ‘‘the balance of viewswas something I’d rather have than one way or the other’’.

Mcliesh is getting used to the Wellington weather, a change from Sydney. Like many foreigners working in New Zealand, she’s had to grapple with being separated from friends and family. ‘‘A lot of us have friends, family connections in other countries. That’s probably been one of the more challenging aspects of the last year. Even though I didn’t actually have any plans to go back, just knowing that you can’t is hard.’’

Although we spoke just after the Government announced it would open the trans-tasman bubble, Mcliesh hasn’t yet booked tickets home. She’s enjoying her time here. Treasury secretaries aren’t known for having a lot of time on their hands, but when she does, she enjoys walking up Wellington’s Mt Kaukau with her family.

And unlike many Wellingtonians, she pronounces Kaukau correctly (cocoa rather than cow-cow) – clearly having done the homework.

‘‘I remember in my first year, the lecturer talked about economics being the study of choice and that just so appealed to me.’’