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NZ Treasury secretary nominated to World Bank

The government will nominate Treasury secretary John Whitehead as an executive director to the World Bank, Finance Minister Bill English announced today.

It is New Zealand’s turn to represent the constituency that it shares at the World Bank with Australia, the Republic of Korea and several other Pacific Island and Asian states.

New Zealand is due to rotate into the Washington-based role for a two-year term from August 2011.

Mr English says Mr Whitehead was chosen after a selection process that attracted 31 candidates from the public and private sectors.

“It is an important strategic opportunity for New Zealand to exert influence at the World Bank, and to develop networks and raise our profile,” Mr English said.

“I'm delighted that a person of Mr Whitehead’s calibre has emerged as the preferred candidate to represent the constituency.

“Mr Whitehead is an experienced economic policy-maker and strategic thinker, and someone with excellent people and representational skills. He will be a high quality executive director for our World Bank constituency,” Mr English says.

The Minister of Finance, as New Zealand’s governor to the World Bank, nominates an appointee and then constituency members are consulted on a ‘no-objections’ basis. The process also requires the nomination to be confirmed by the World Bank Board.

Mr Whitehead’s contract as chief executive and secretary to the Treasury is due to expire in April 2011.

Most of Mr Whitehead's 34-year career in the public service has been spent at the Treasury. Mr Whitehead was appointed as secretary to the Treasury in April 2003.

More by Niko Kloeten

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Comments and questions
4

is that world bank or world government? hard to tell these days.

A very good appointment.

Throughout the Western world – government has forgotten its purpose. It has now grown so arrogant and swollen as to believe its job is to shape and improve and generally interfere with our lives. And it’s not. Government’s job is to act as our humble servant.
What’s terrifying is how few of us there are left anywhere in the supposedly free world who properly appreciate this. Sure, we may feel in our hearts that – as Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe put it in their Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party manifesto – “We just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the same freedom of others”. And we may even confide it to our friends after a few drinks. But look at Australia; look at Canada; look at New Zealand; look at anywhere in the EUSSR; look at America – at least until things begin to be improved by today’s glorious revolution. Wherever you go, even if it’s somewhere run by a notionally “conservative” administration, the malaise you will encounter is much the same: a system of governance predicated on the notion that the state’s function is not merely to uphold property rights, maintain equality before the law and defend borders, but perpetually to meddle with its citizens’ lives in order supposedly to make their existence more fair, more safe, more eco-friendly, more healthy. And always the result is the same: more taxation, more regulation, less freedom. Less “fairness” too, of course.
Sure there’s no comparison (well not that much) between Obama’s US and Stalin’s Soviet Union; Coalition Britain and Mao’s China; Julia Gillard’s Australia and Queen Ranavalona’s Madagascar; sure the war we’re currently fighting doesn’t involve mass destruction like that of World Wars I and II. But it’s precisely because the ideological struggle we’re currently engaged in is so seemingly democratic and innocuous that it is in fact so dangerous. With Hitler and Stalin it was easy: the enemy was plain in view. Today’s encroaching tyranny is an of altogether more subtle, slippery variety. It takes the form of the stealthy removal of property rights and personal liberty under the UN’s Agenda 21; of the eco-legislation created by democratically unaccountable bodies like America’s Environmental Protection Agency; of the stealthy encroachment of the Big Government into the most intimate recesses of our daily lives – not just under barely disguised socialist administrations like Obama’s even under notionally “Centre right” ones... When the Enemy is as sly and insidious as that, it’s much much harder for the increasingly oppressed populace to rouse itself to the appropriate state of alarm and rebellion.
At stake is exactly the same thing the Greek alliance fought for when Western Civilisation was born at Salamis in 480 BC; the same thing we citizens of the West have been fighting for ever since: the right to forge our own destinies as free men and women, rather than remain infantilised, oppressed and enslaved as vassals of a tyrant state.

Congrats to John on his appointment.

Someone should point out to the Herald that the IMF is a separate - albeit a Bretton Woods organisation - from the WB. But on the other side of the street.

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