Online: Civic Financial Services Strategic Finance

Hugh joined the Office of the Auditor-General as a sector manager in the local government group in 2016. He is responsible for Councils and their associated entities in the Canterbury and West Coast regions. He also has responsibility for port companies. Before joining the Office, Hugh was an Audit Manager at Audit New Zealand.

Stephen Halliwell has worked for many councils across the Motu, specialising in local government financial and risk management. He has worked in local and central government, licensing trusts, electricity and health sectors, bringing more than 30 years’ experience of much change. Currently Stephen chairs Clutha’s Risk and Assurance Committee and is providing leadership to Hamilton on its three waters reform journey.

Stephen is a leader experienced in dealing with complex situations, with many stakeholders, in highly visible community and political environments

Based in Wellington, Michelle is a Director in PwC’s national Public Sector specialist tax advisory team.

Michelle spends a lot of her time advising the local authority sector on tax issues across the spectrum, including tax governance, tax risk management and everyday transactions entered into by local authorities.

Michelle recently spent 18 months working for a local authority so is acutely aware of the inner workings and pressures facing local authorities.

Michelle has recently been working on tax policy issues that affect local authorities including proposed income tax changes and the donee status of mayoral relief funds.

Adele is the General Manager Corporate Services at Western Bay of Plenty District Council. She is passionate about local government having been in the sector for 15 years. She has previously worked for both Wellington and Napier City Councils before moving further north. Adele is the current Chair of the Financial Management Reference Group at Taituāra supporting the sector activities and contributing to the key financial work programmes.

Dr Sharman has an extensive background in climate and sustainability policy areas, most recently as Head of Policy at Ara Ake, the entity responsible for accelerating energy innovation to support New Zealand's transition to a low-emissions energy future. Previously, Dr Sharman worked for the New Zealand Productivity Commission where she developed the Commission’s final recommendation on the climate-related disclosure regime for New Zealand.

Prior to this, Dr Sharman was a consultant to the European Commission while at consulting firm Amec Foster Wheeler (now part of Wood), focusing on climate and energy policy. She also worked for the International Hydropower Association where she contributed to the international implementation of the Hydropower Sustainability Assessment Protocol.

Dr Sharman lives with her husband and two small children in Wellington and in her (limited) spare time enjoys gardening, cycling and beekeeping.

Jonathan is a member of Simpson Grierson’s environment and planning group, specialising in public law and local government in particular. He is one of New Zealand's leading experts on the structures, processes, and funding of local government, with significant experience in council’s rating functions and associated decision-making.

Matthew is a senior associate in Simpson Grierson’s local government team. He specialises in local government law with a particular focus on local government funding and financing issues, including rates and development contributions. Matthew’s experience includes advising local authorities on their consultation obligations, annual and long-term planning processes, rating and funding issues and commercial contracts. He regularly on decision-making processes, conflicts of interest, CCOs, local elections, official information, delegations and bylaw issues.

Based between Pōneke and Tāmaki Makaurau, Nathan supports a range of central and local government clients in relation to major capital projects, long-term planning and strategy, and on major reform programmes.

He began his career supporting local authorities across Aotearoa with managing their funding, financing and and interest rate exposures, before taking more of an interest in the application of alternative funding and financing structures for major projects.

Nathan is passionate about the relationship between infrastructure delivery and urban land markets, and how this can be monetised through value creation and capture.

Hillmarè Schulze is the Chief Economist at BERL. She draws on her experience, being a practising economist for more than 30 years across the globe. She has worked in multilateral and bilateral organisations, private and government sector. She is currently heading BERL, and values the credible and independent voice that the team brings to the economic and policy dialogue in New Zealand. BERL has been in business for more than 60 years, and prides itself on being a private economic consultancy, supporting central and regional government, private companies as well as various Māori and iwi entities by providing a credible evidence base and economic analysis to support good decision-making. She is a strong supporter of regional economic development, the Māori economy and making sure that the next generation has the tools to be productive global citizens.

Prior to joining BERL, Hillmarè worked for Te Puni Kōkri and the then Department of Labour. She moved to New Zealand in 2016, from the World Bank, where she worked as a senior economist focussed on 47 African countries.

She believes that economic development is a means to an end, and definitely not the end itself. Economic development should support families and communities to grow and thrive.

Jordan Hughes joined Ibis in 2009 as an Implementation consultant/trainer, and moved into the Product Manager role during 2014, responsible for the financial modelling products in the Ibis suite of software.

Through his time consulting across Australia and New Zealand Jordan has gained extensive experience personally working with over 100 Councils. With a good level of knowledge of the rating legislation for all the different territories Jordan has also expanded his knowledge of local government rating complexities through working on such projects as Amalgamation impact studies, legislation review projects, Special Rates Variations and many other Rating review projects.

Raymond re-joined Taituarā in June 2014 as Sector Improvement Manager, before commencing his current role as Chief Advisor at Taituarā. He has spent most of the last 20 years in local government related roles, most recently with the Department of Internal Affairs.

He describes his job as two-thirds providing assistance to the local government sector and one-third providing advice to central government on local government matters. His ambition is to help develop a Local Government Act that doesn’t require changes every 18 months. He asks that you wish him well with this task.

Bruce is an established governance and risk expert within the public sector with active membership of audit and risk committees and directorships.

His practice also includes consulting work and investigations. His advisory work covers strategy, effective decision making, value for money and performance, organisational and functional "health checks”, and how clients can make collaborative frameworks “real”. Bruce's work has a strong focus on bringing together the financial and asset management disciplines within organisations to drive planning and performance plus deliver value for money.

Bruce is a fellow of Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand.

Natalie is a Partner in the Infrastructure and Merger and Acquisitions team's at PwC and offers a broad range of advice and transactional experience, with a focus on infrastructure and complex situations.

With over 15 years of corporate finance, banking and advisory experience, Natalie brings an extensive expertise in advising both Crown and private-sector clients. Natalie has a deep understanding of the challenges faced in the infrastructure sector in NZ, particularly on pathfinder transactions. Natalie also has strong international experience in restructuring, turnaround, and structured financing across the leveraged, M&A and project finance spectrum

Natalie sits on a number of project advisory boards and is a founding member of the Women in Infrastructure NZ Advisory Board.

In her spare time, Natalie can be found enjoying the outdoors with her family and golden retriever.

Mark has been the Chief Executive of the New Zealand Local Government Funding Agency since 2014 and his prior role was Treasurer at Auckland Council. 

Formerly he held senior financial market trading and sales roles with domestic banks and in the institutional wealth management sector as Chief Investment Officer at Perpetual Capital and General Manager of Alliance Bernstein.  

Mark currently holds investment governance roles including Chair of New Plymouth Perpetual Investment Fund, Chair of Waikato-Tainui Investment Committee and a member of the Nominating Committee of NZ Superannuation Fund.

When he is not working you are most likely to find Mark swinging a golf club, skiing down a mountain or in a DOC hut.

Konrad started at BERL as a Research Economist, before advancing to Econometrician. His areas of expertise are modelling and describing economic phenomena, and maintaining BERL’s Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model.

At BERL Konrad has gained much expertise and passion for measuring social impacts and new ways of understanding how to communicate value.

Konrad's skills:

• Formal econometric modelling skills including different methods of regression analysis, CGE modelling, as well as methods taken from other areas of data science
• Impact mapping and Social Return on Investment (SROI) methodology, including stakeholder engagement and SROI standards
• Communicating insights from complex modelling tailored to the audience, able to distil the findings into meaningful narrative
• Innovative solution finding skills, comfortable taking parts of multiple different methodologies and combining them in a useful way.

His experience includes:

• Open Polytechnic of New Zealand (OPNZ) Key Performance Indicators and Students to show how OPNZ impacts labour market outcomes
• Social renting to housing independence, demonstrating how housing tenure affects multiple social, health, and economic outcomes
• Earnings and wealth accumulation from following different pathways – regression (using a Support Vector Machine approach) modelling analysis/forecast and construction of an accounting model.

Outside BERL, Konrad has a strong interest in decentralised systems and crypto. He contributes economic insights to Bitfwd, and also enjoys video games.

I have been married for 42 years and have 4 kids and 5 granddaughters who I love to pieces.

Grew up mostly in Palmerston North in Highbury attending Takaro, Monrad and Palmerston North BHS. Then joined the National Bank in Palmy straight out of high school in December 1977.

I had spent 40 years with the Bank being shifted all around NZ and held senior executive roles with the Bank which was taken over by the ANZ (the bank was my second whanau, and I loved every day of my job). My last role was GM ANZ Business Bank/ Retail and was a part of the biggest financial merger creating the biggest Bank in New Zealand.

I should have retired but wanted to help my people progress so undertook a role as Director for Māori and Pacific with MSD which I had the opportunity with working with some fantastic people.

After three years the role of CEO, Civic Financial Services Ltd was put in front of me and it just felt the right fit.

Sports crazy I represented my country in both Football and Softball in age group and had the honour of coaching the best domestic football team in NZ called Napier City Rovers. ( Liverpool supporter)

Based in Auckland, Claire is part of PwC’s Infrastructure Advisory team and is currently working with local government in the three waters space. Prior to PwC New Zealand, Claire worked for PwC in San Francisco, in their Capital Projects and Infrastructure team. She supported clients across multiple sectors on projects in the US and Europe. Her core duties included advising in capital project delivery, portfolio and project governance, assurance and controls, risk management, and risk-based asset investment planning.

Mike is a partner in Simpson Grierson’s environment and planning group, based in Wellington. He specialises in local government and environmental law, with a particular focus on the regulatory functions and processes of local government (including under the RMA), and decision-making and governance obligations and requirements. He regularly represents local authorities in relation to RMA matters (including before the higher courts) and has appeared before many other specialist tribunals and council hearings on specific strategic and regulatory matters.