Mike's Minute: It's revealed Adrian Orr left with little dignity

It's hardly a surprise, is it? Adrian looks at what Nicola is offering to run the place, packs a sad, and is off. 

It’s a pathetic end to a tumultuous period in which we, the people who paid him, deserved an awful lot better. 

The fact this information on the Orr resignation had to be dragged out of the bank by way of the Official Information Act, the rules of which were ignored as the bank failed to meet deadlines, shows you just what sort of place we are dealing with. 

How you conduct yourself is critical. It's critical to all of us and even more critical the further up the totem pole you are. 

There's nothing wrong with Adrian quitting if he genuinely believed the money being offered to run the bank wasn’t enough. 

But you do it with some dignity. 

You quit, you serve out your period, you offer reasons for you quitting and you move on with life. 

In doing it that way you give us all an insight into what sort of human being you are. And in this case, you might well have been able to give us insight into how your organisation runs, what its thinking is, what the gap is between the bank and the Government and why you might be right, and they might be wrong. 

It doesn’t have to turn into a scrap or a fallout. Just a series of adult ideas as to why people might see things at odds to each other. 

If Covid taught us nothing else, it taught us the critical role of a central bank and what sort of people run it. 

The way Adrian ran it is well documented and the general view held by many is widely traversed. But the sudden departure was another insight into why Adrian did things the way he did. 

He is petulant. You don’t leave out of the blue and in silence. You don’t bail on hosting an international finance conference having said you were looking forward to it. 

It's toys and sandpits with Adrian and then obfuscation from the bank when a few simple questions were asked. 

If you can't conduct yourself, and the bank can't conduct themselves, with any great level of clarity, transparency and professionalism, is it any wonder the economy got run over the way it did? 

Ol' Adrian won't be missed. But you would have hoped for something a bit more sophisticated on the way out.   

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