Minister chastises Reserve Bank bosses for lack of transparency on Orr’s departure

Neil Sands

Finance Minister Nicola Willis has publicly rebuked the Reserve Bank over its handling of information about Adrian Orr’s shock resignation in March, telling the central bank to pull its socks up.

The RBNZ was evasive about the reasons for Orr’s departure after it was announced and responded to multiple Official Information Act (OIA) requests on the topic only this week, well beyond the 20 working days set down in legislation.

Nicola Willis

Willis said she expected government agencies, including the central bank, to meet statutory obligations and be transparent with New Zealanders. “Of course, they need to balance against their legal obligations when it comes to employment discussions and agreements, but on this one I think they could have pulled their socks up,” she told reporters.

In addition to the delays, the RBNZ also characterised Orr’s departure as “a personal decision” because he felt it was the right time to leave. In fact, documents released under OIA shows he quit because Willis and the RBNZ would not agree to his request for increased funding for the central bank.

“This caused distress to Mr Orr and the impasse risked damaging necessary working relationships and led to Mr Orr’s personal decision that he had achieved all he could as governor of the Reserve Bank and could not continue in that role with sufficiently less funding than he thought was viable for the organisation,” the documents said.

RBNZ chair Neil Quigley has expressed “regret” at the bank’s handling of the OIA requests. “We are taking into account the feedback that we have received on our management of these OIA requests and looking carefully at how we can improve our response times in the future,” he said.

Quigley said he was limited in what he could say immediately after Orr’s departure, when he said the resignation was for personal reasons, because of the terms of Orr’s exit agreement, as well as funding discussions which were ongoing at the time.

The lack of upfront information in the wake of Orr’s departure led to heated speculation about why he left, with Infometrics chief economist Brad Olsen among those who criticised the way it was handled.

“It’s taken what could have been an unpleasant but very straightforward communications challenge and turned it into a huge circus. There’s a thousand better ways they could have gone about this,” he said at the time.