Foreword

Treasurer Daniel Mookhey

If anyone wonders how compelling a history of the NSW Treasury can be, this book is your answer.

Walking a Tightrope is a rollicking read. It is the 200-year history of the NSW Treasury, as haggled over by a brilliant set of scholars.

Their reflections comprise a terrific tableau of key scenes from this institution’s long history.

The original decision to grant colonial NSW its own Treasury. The control by the colony’s bunyip aristocracy of the fledgling institution. How the institution escaped their yoke as representative democracy took root in NSW. The gold rushes, wool booms, coal booms and property bubbles that followed. As well as the banking failures, recessions, depressions and strikes they led to.

These and other episodes explain why the Treasury became so powerful. In turn they explain how the Treasury wielded its power to make NSW continentally pre–eminent. They are canvassed in this book.

But, crucially, the book also canvases the impact the Treasury’s power had on those without any power whatsoever.

The First Nation peoples violently forced to make way for the expansion plans for NSW’s original landed gentry, banished from their land and then robbed of their culture. The tens of thousands of men and women made to walk the breadlines in the aftermath of stock market failures and banking crisis: their needs put below the needs of the State’s bondholders.

These stories and more are deserving of their place in this honest reckoning of the rise and rise of the NSW Treasury.

As the 67th person entrusted with the stewardship of this institution, Walking a Tightrope has given me an opportunity to consider our State’s past. To celebrate achievements and extend our triumphs. To learn from errors and correct our path away from injustice. To see how we have changed and why.

This book is an example of complete storytelling: a look at our successes and our failures in key moments. Through it, I hope the next 200 years shine ever brighter.

The Hon. Daniel Mookhey MLC
NSW Treasurer

Secretary Michael Coutts-Trotter

Early in my career, I had the privilege of working for our State’s longest-serving Treasurer, Michael Egan AO.

Michael believed that a Treasurer should always seek, trust and respect frank advice from Treasury staff, even if they didn’t always take it. To an audience of parliamentarians, he laid out his view on how Treasury should operate:

That sums up a large part of Treasury’s role in helping governments to grapple with the implications of the economic problem – the gap between limited resources and unlimited wants and needs.

While the economic problem hasn’t changed over two centuries, the theoretical frameworks and methods underpinning Treasury’s advice to governments have consistently evolved based on developments in professional knowledge and the hard-won lessons of experience.

This book’s title – Walking a Tightrope – reminds us that Treasury’s job is not always (or ever) easy, but it is vital. No government department survives for two hundred years unless it is useful and needed.

Generations of Treasury staff have proved their worth in peace and war, boom and bust, free trade and protectionism, abundance and austerity, during COVID–19 and now beyond it. They’ve met the challenges of the day with integrity, intelligence, creativity and humour.

The toolkit of analysis and advice has improved, but what’s always mattered most is the quality of the people who’ve worked in Treasury. Whatever lies ahead of us, the difference between success and failure will turn on the brains and character of Treasury staff.

As a former Colonial Treasurer, William McMillan, observed:

Thankfully, today it’s not just men working on the State’s great challenges, but a Treasury staff representative of the diversity and talent of the whole community.

This history reminds Treasury staff that we’re all just passing through, that we are stewards of an essential public institution, and we must try to leave it a little better than we found it.

Michael Coutts-Trotter
Secretary
NSW Treasury