The other week the Treasury simply asked me to withdraw my Official Information Act request because ministers are very busy people who did not need to be bothered by it.
I am yet to receive a reply either from the Minister of Finance nor the Chief Executive of the Treasury disavowing this conduct. All I was trying to find out was the rate of return on about $40 billion in assets – the SOE portfolio. That rate of return has not been published for over two years now
Debate over the Reserve Bank’s new charging policy has continued. Under a heading “The perils of user-pays democracy” Bryce Edwards had a nice summary of the articles and commentaries that had appeared by late last week. And since then the flow has continued – including a Rob Hosking piece in NBR, a Dominion-Post article about, and interview with, the new Chief Ombudsman, and an op-ed this morning from Bronwyn Howell at Victoria University, run alongside the hard-copy version of Geoff Bascand’s defence (that first appeared last week).
If the Reserve Bank is monitoring the reaction and debate, which I’m sure it is, it can only conclude that it is losing in the court of public opinion. It isn’t just about journalists, bloggers, academics etc, but in the comments sections to the various articles the balance of opinion seems to tilt quite clearly away from the Reserve Bank’s stance.
Losing in…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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