The deregulator goes home

TONGA’S first Reserve Bank Governor, Queenslander Alan Gee, is returning to Australia after laying the foundations for change in the island kingdom’s economy. Gee, who held the job for two years, was a keen deregulator.

“With a lot of measures you don’t get an immediate big bang effect where suddenly everything is improving,” he said. “What you are doing is laying the foundations for gradual improvements.”

Further deregulatory options in the pipeline include lifting a ceiling on interest rates and introduction of more banking competition.

The Reserve Bank joined the bank of

Tonga and the Tongan Development

Bank.

Said Gee: “For any country, it is better to have market forces setting prices, and interest is a price.”

Before becoming governor of the reserve bank in 1989, Gee had been an adviser to the Tongan finance ministry.

He lived in Fiji for 30 years, where he capped his career there as Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of Fiji. He returns to Australia to settle on a 14-acre (5.7 hectare) property 50 kilometres north of Brisbane.

Tongan Siosius ’Utoikamanu, a graduate of universities in New Zealand and Britain, has been appointed as the new Tongan Reserve Bank Governor. □