The below was written on April 22, 2013, in response to an article in The Dominion Post. It was offered to the newspaper as an opâed, then to The Wellingtonian, but it was eventually declined.
The Dominion Postâs headline on April 22 confirmed what many of us knew after numerous friends and colleagues left Wellington over the last several years.
Our population growth is below the national average, as are our employment and economic growth. In fact, the regional Wellington economy is stagnant.
In 2010, I stated that we needed to look at our creative sector, and encourage creative clusters, to get Wellingtonâs economy back on track. Even then it was evident that the early 2010s were not going to get off to a healthy start. If we were to get central governmentâs support for any projectsâeven the Mayorâs light-rail programmeâthen surely the wisest thing would be to increase the industry in our city first?
The free wifi I campaigned on was never meant to be seen in isolation. It was a signal to international businesses in that sector that Wellington was open to investment and collaboration. That inward investment and sharing of knowledge could, in turn, help local firms expand and export.
We had reached the limits of our natural resources, so we needed to start using intellectual property, and increase R&D in our city. While ICT is healthy in Wellington, the priority must be to identify companies, in this and other high-value sectors, that can become nationally or internationally competitive with the right nudge. We should not be, as the late Sir Paul Callaghan stated in a 2011 address, locked into a single sectorâand that was what the clusters were all about.
With my 2013 candidacy, not much has changed about these ideas. The real difference is that they have become far more pressing.
The next mayor needs to work with oneâs counterparts in the region and agree on identifying, using rigorous criteria, which are our next champions. Which firms, for instance, are those that are sitting on $1 million revenues today that can be at $10 million shortly, if they were given the right exposure, contacts or opportunities?
And since nationally, high-tech exports are growing at 11 per cent per annum, according to the World Bank, itâs not a bad sector to start with. It just shouldnât be the only one.
Wellington businesses are not asking for hand-outs, but the right connections. These firms also need to be encouraged to look beyond just being content with a small patch, when Wellington business-people often hold great ideals and more socially responsible ways of doing things. These can, in fact, inform the way business is conducted in other cities, and contribute to how New Zealand is marketed and seen abroad.
I do not advocate a policy of âgrowth for growthâs sakeâ. But I do argue that the innovative way successful Wellington businesses have approached their sectors can take a larger share of the global pie.
In my case, itâs putting 26 yearsâ experience on the line, the majority of that in exporting frictionless products and services.
We can opt for politics as usual, or identify and nurture the right players in our business sector.
When it comes to business, it must be international in scope, inspiring politicians at the national level about what Wellington is made of.
We can consider electing people who have spent time bridging cultures and creating those international links, which we need right now if two other cities are getting the governmentâs focus. Wellingtonâs businesses have gone under the radar for too long, and they need an ally who can balance their needs while ensuring citizensâ rights are protected.
I see our city having spent too much time breaking its own rules, and being forced to answer through formal proceedings brought by Waterfront Watch and other groups.
The system and its rules are healthy, but the players need to change, and a cultural change, internally and externally, is needed for Wellington in its local body elections.
The New Zealand International Convention Centre has been announced in Auckland. In 2010, my campaign team proposed a convention centre for Miramar Wharf, which would include a technology complex, in a format that could have been licensed to other countries, earning royalties for the Wellington business that came up with the idea. The location was to address concerns from the hospitality sector about taking business away from the centre city, and the proximity to the airport could have helped some of our visitors. (This is a matter of record and was briefly covered by The Dominion Post.)
I felt that the project fitted in with our city’s image. I was drawn to the idea of royalty incomes for a New Zealand business, which would have showed that Kiwi ingenuity and intellectual property could be exported in a frictionless fashion. There was also a concern that we could not attract international conventions here, even in the late 2000s, and this complex could have solved it. I had been to enough conventions and conferences overseas to have seen first-hand the sort of numbers involvedâand how we needed something ourselves. It was to preempt similar moves by other cities, long before the Sky City deal was announced.
I know there are issues with thisâincluding whether residents would want a complex there, and there would be a great need to consult with the public first. Nonetheless, it was worth raising it, and I’m grateful that it received a tiny bit of coverage, so you know I’m not engaging in revisionism today.
With hindsight, it would have respected the memorandum issued by WCC in the 1990s that a casino was not desirable for our city. I note that at the mayoral debate for the hospitality sector in 2010, opinions on a casino were divided roughly 50â50. The Dominion Post is covering this topic today, and it highlights to me that this city has been caught on the back foot again.
Wellington still strikes me as a more desirable location, with Auckland and Queenstown, for instance, a stone’s throw via an air link. It’s the same with our airport. We have an opportunity to put ourselves on the map in the next few years, while Christchurch is still rebuilding, because they will come to threaten Wellington’s position as an innovative hub within the next decade. More importantly, we need to be positioning ourselves to a global audience, something that 20th-century political thinking still prevents us from doing.
Elementary is an modern-day, American TV version of Sherlock Holmes. It’s not an American remake of the Steven MoffatâMark Gatiss update, which I love, and some might say it has taken too many liberties with the original. Watson is now female.
I’ll leave you to comment, but I don’t make my thoughts of remakes a huge secret on this blog. And, I know, this is technically not a remake, but the timing is a tad suspicious.
However, there is nothing new under the sun. It’s not the first time CBS has attempted a contemporary Sherlock Holmes series, nor is it the first time it has made Watson female. In the mid-1980s, there was The Return of Sherlock Holmes, where Dr Watson’s great-granddaughter (Margaret Colin) awakens a cryogenically frozen Sherlock Holmes (Michael Pennington). It was actually filmed in the UK, with London standing in for various American locales. Of course, this meant that Canadian actor Shane Rimmer (whom Lewis Gilbert dubbed ‘the standard American actor’) had to have a part, as did Connie Booth.
If Elementary came before Sherlock, I might have given it a shot, but it reeks of metooism. And, of course, Elementary would never have existed if it were not for copyright expiry and the idea of public domainâsomething which I find ironic given how the US entertainment lobby behaves sometimes.
I know, I’m dissing a show I have never seen, and this is coming from a guy who watched all 17 episodes of the Life on Mars remake. Maybe I’m older now and don’t have the same time to waste.
If you’re a car nut, then you won’t be mourning, too much, the passing of former Czech president Vaclev HĂĄvel. Or, for that matter, Kim Jong Il. It’s Saab that has finally died as it files for bankruptcy after GM, which still licenses key technologies to the Swedish firm, vetoed its sale to Zhejiang Youngman Lotus Automobile.
GM has a JV with SAIC, the Shanghai automaker, and believes that if those technologies were to find their way into the hands of a small upstart Chinese rival, it wouldn’t be to its advantage. Saab, which had been teetering on collapse since March, when it first stopped production, decided to call in the receivers today.
GM had issued a statement at the weekend, saying, ‘Saabâs various new alternative proposals are not meaningfully different from what was originally proposed to General Motors and rejected ⊠Each proposal results either directly or indirectly in the transfer of control and/or ownership of the company in a manner that would be detrimental to GM and it shareholders. As such, GM cannot support any of these proposed alternatives.’
Swedish Automobile, the parent company of Saab, responded, ‘After having received the recent position of GM on the contemplated transaction with Saab Automobile, Youngman informed Saab Automobile that the funding to continue and complete the reorganization of Saab Automobile could not be concluded.
âThe Board of Saab Automobile subsequently decided that the company without further funding will be insolvent and that filing bankruptcy is in the best interests of its creditors.’
GM, in the two decades in which it owned Saab, failed to turn a profit with the brand. However, its parting gift, the new 9-5 saloon, was heralded by some fans as a return to form for the company. Hopes were high for it, and the 9-4X crossover, helping Saab back into a position of strength.
It’s easy to do a post mortem now, but the failure could be levelled at GM’s misunderstanding of the Saab brand. It may have been sensible to shift Saab models on to Opel platforms for economies of scale, but, in doing so, the cars lost some of their character. The lowest point was when GM created a rebodied Subaru Impreza and called it the Saab 9-2X, which fooled few buyersâone has to remember that Saab buyers tended to be well educated. Saab never fitted well in a business which targeted the mainstream: its own cars were always bought by people who enjoyed their quirkiness and the fact they did not follow convention.
GM only understood this when it was far too late, as the last two models demonstrated.
When GM itself had to file for bankruptcy protection in the US in the late 2000s, Saab, Pontiac, and Saturn were the victims.
When Saab was sold to Spyker, its boss Victor Muller invested heavily into the business to try to turn it aroundâbut he, and other investors, would have lost tremendously today. Saab fans will likely remember Muller favourablyâafter all, he put his own money into the business and shared his supporters’ passionâbut in a world where break-even points are at hundreds of thousands of units, Saab’s 30,000 in 2010 were never going to be enough. MG Rover Ltd. collapsed with 2004 sales of 115,000 in 2005.
As hindsight is 20-20, Saab and Youngman might be accused of wishful thinking, believing it to be unencumbered by GM’s IP rights. However, the American business held the right of revocation over key licences that make up Saab’s 9-3, 9-4X and 9-5 models.
It’s not the first time intellectual property has got in the way of car businesses. One of the most famous examples was BMW arranging with Rolls-Royce trade mark owner Vickers plc to license the brand for motor cars, as Volkswagen negotiated to buy the Rolls-Royce Motors business. And all Volkswagen really had to do to find this out was visit the Rolls-Royce website home page at the time: right at the bottom, stated clearly, was the message that the Rolls-Royce brand was licensed from Vickers plc.
After being interviewed about the outcome of the ‘Wellywood’ sign vote yesterday (a summary of what I told Newstalk ZB can be found on my Facebook fan page) I was reminded about how a few Wellingtonians, who supported my quest to stop the sign in 2010 and 2011, were not that thrilled that I used intellectual property law as my technique.
Those following this in 2010 and 2011 might remember that I was the person who called up the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the Hollywood Sign Trust, and was, last year, the mayoral candidate most active in trying to stop Wellington Airport from erecting the sign at the Miramar cutting. This year, with no local election to be concerned about, I remained active, more so upon seeing just how arrogant the Airport’s “leadership” was, before it flip-flopped again by saying that it should consult with the public (the same public it called insignificant weeks before).
And yet, months later, I was also miffed about the Copyright Act amendments and the introduction of the “three strikes” law, one which the Government seems to be uncertain about as it supports it at home, and opposes it at the United Nations.
This is not a populist about-turn on my part. I have a view of intellectual property which was refined in part by my time at law school, where I sat the first IP paper offered formally by Victoria University, and my work for TypeRight, the advocacy organization, which wound up winning an award from Publish magazine in the US. This experience leaned toward copyright, more than trade mark and patent, though I secured reasonable experience in TMs working in brand consulting and acting as an expert witness. Through that exposure, I began with the classical argument that the protection of authors, and rewarding them, are good things. No protection, no incentive.
But, this must be balanced by the rule of law. What we had before the latest amendments to the Copyright Act already worked. Copyright owners could, indeed, pursue infringers, and a plaintiff and a defendant could fairly be represented in a tribunal. It would be up to the copyright owner to front up with a statement of claim, and they had better be ready with sufficient proof to make the case air-tightâjust as any other plaintiff in a New Zealand court would require. That seems fair. I have relied on American law often when it came to pursuing piracy of our articles, and, again, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act there worked well in giving both sides a fair hearing without the presumption of guilt.
As argued in some depth in 2009, and again in 2011, the three-strikes lawâwhich, I might note, the PM was against before he was for, as was the Hon Peter Dunne MPâputs the power firmly in the hands of the copyright owner, so that a defendant has to discharge the presumption of guilt. A copyright owner, as we have learned, can get an ISP to do its dirty work in New Zealand, sending out infringement notices to its customers. Whatever I learned in that IP class at uni, I had always believed the law would take place in a fair forum, and that the common-law presumption of innocence would always stand. What is happening here runs counter to that idea.
To be fair and balanced here, I should note that the law was proposed under Labour, and received the support of Labour when argued in Parliament, which makes me wonder whether the duty of being Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was fulfilled properly during the debates.
Such laws, unfortunately, do the idea of copyright no credit. They have sullied the good work that copyright has done in most of our recent history by protecting those who sought it, and deserved it. I think of those who were in the typeface design business with me, who opted to protect their works. Some designers only make a few dozen dollars per annum from a font that might have taken them six weeks to produce. Typically, $300 is a figure I hear for a design that doesn’t make the big timeâand the majority do not, just like in music. European Commission VP for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, told the Forum dâAvignon on November 19 a similar story: ’97·5 pe rcent of one of the biggest collecting societyâs members in Europe receive less than ⊠âŹ1,000 a month for their copyright works.’
As reported in The Register, ‘Kroes said, copyright as it now stands is failing to deliver the economic rewards that are supposed to be its aim. At the same time, âcitizens increasingly hear the word copyright and hate what is behind it. Many see the current system as a tool to punish and withhold, not a tool to recognize and reward.â’ The Register concludes:
In the context of the publicâs increasing resistance to punitive measures such as Americaâs SOPA, New Zealandâs three-strikes disconnection notice regime, the acrimonious âiiTrialâ in Australia (backed by the MPAA via its local sockpuppet AFACT), itâs also interesting to note that Kroes mentions the intermediary business just once in her speech â since, at least to The Register, it seems that most of the publicâs hatred of copyright appears to stem from how the intermediaries approach it.
The distinction needs to be drawn. We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. What we should be weary of are not just the intermediaries as The Register notes, but some of the parties who inspire, lobby and even offer to draft these laws. It seems those parties are often those who care little for the thoughts of the community, whether it be an Airport CEO, or politicians who are so inept at understanding their subject they confuse fact with fiction.
While I will not be drawn on who will get my electorate and party votes for this General Election, the behaviour of some of the powers-that-be seem to support those who claim that we no longer live in democracies in the occident, but plutocracies.
Prof Sir Paul Callaghan’s address for the Chancellor of Victoria University, Ian McKinnon, held at a packed-out the Wellington Town Hall, was inspirational, and I felt that he confirmed a lot of my thinking for this city.
It’s great we have free wifi in certain parts of Wellington now, and in our libraries, because that means we start bridging the digital divide.
The next stage is to spread the wifi network to other parts of the cityâduring election year, I was told this would be at a cost of $250,000.
Thanks to Opera Mini not working any more with Twitter, I was unable to live-Tweet Sir Paul’s speech, but here were the pertinent notes on my Facebook (expanded here with some extra thinking).
Callaghan: we have reached the limits of our natural resources, so we need to start using our brains. Sounds familiar?
Callaghan: R&D is terribly low. Again, sounds familiar with the themes of my 2010 campaign.
He did show a graph, not dissimilar to one I kept with me on the campaign trail, where our ICT sector lagged well behind, as a proportion of GDP, a country such as the US. I’m not saying we emulate the USâgoodness knows successive governments’ desires to emulate certain economies have landed us in what Sir Paul calls the ‘New Zealand paradox’. We’ve done everything the experts reckon we should do, yet our GDP has been lagging.
So, what next? This was the next status on my Facebook:
Callaghan: we should be prescriptive, not be locked into one sector. We are innovative people. Seems to justify my creative clusters idea. I like this guy.
Prior to my making this note, Sir Paul had shown how poorly a national focus on biotech had benefited this country. His conclusion: the biggest innovative players, the ones generating high-value jobs, were in niches, such as Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, Rakon, and, of course, Weta Workshop.
I believe creativity can breed if people can learn from each other, and I’ve always maintained the vision of forming creative clusters. Admittedly, during the campaign I did target more an ICT focus, because we had been lagging, and it would have been wise to have had a focus on it from Positively Wellington Business. (Indeed, a lot of these city agencies could do with considerably more transparency and networking.) But Sir Paul is right: we are good at playing in niches and even dominating them.
Here’s a stat that he says Kiwis don’t know enough about, which might be leading on to why so many young people leave overseas (he mentions a one-million-strong diaspora):
Callaghan: World Bank shows our high-tech exports are growing at 11 per cent p.a.
The New Zealand Government does not measure this, but the World Bank doesâand it seems evident from what Sir Paul discussed and what I found prior to my campaign that high technology, especially for an isolated country, benefits us. These create largely frictionless exports, and the ones that are manufactured here can be highly value-added.
There was one sobering moment toward the end, and it was this:
Callaghan: disparity between races at schools, reflected in our income gap. We export more of our talent and they don’t come back.
Māori and Pasifika students are not achieving as wellâand we really need to show all groups that there are no glass ceilings in society based on race. I know they exist, and it’s high time we began dismantling thinking that creates classes in our city and our nation.
Prof Sir Paul Callaghan is, by any measure, smarter than me. If you can explain Adam Smith to me in five minutes versus a year of Econ 101, then you are smart. And it’s always quite a buzz when someone of his stature and reputation says things that make you think, ‘I wish I had you endorsing my campaign last year.’
In 2002, I did something really stupid. I bought a brand-new, 750 Mbyte Zip drive.
After all, I had had three years of use out of my 100 Mbyte one, and since 750s looked like the way of the future, I had one installed.
I can still count the number of times I used it on one hand, because CD-ROMs became common currency and replaced the Zips.
So when I see we’re building more roads, it reminds me of the Zip drive. Investing in a 20th-century technology in the 21st century.
When, in fact, we can grow a city and a country more effectively by ensuring its technology is up to speed with the rest of the world.
If we’re going to attract the best and brightest minds to our shoresâand many of them are in the IT world, and software is a frictionless export that overcomes the tyranny of distanceâwe need to have an infrastructure that isn’t stuck in the previous century, either.
A forward-looking technological investment for better internet speeds or a real wifi network is better valueâand potentially generates more jobs for this nation.
Which makes me wonder just how clued up the major parties are in this year’s General Election.
The disappointment I’ve seen in business-damaging legislation, from the Copyright Act to what potentially exists in the TPPA, suggests that neither major party understands what it takes to grow business sustainably in this nation.
And now to see a sudden change of heart from certain members of the government and the Opposition when the UN has published a report calling internet disconnection a violation of human rights shows they never understood the law in the first place. From Ars Technica (emphasis added):
Michael Geist notes that on Friday, Sweden made remarks at the UN Human Rights Council that endorsed many of the report’s findings, including the criticism of “three strikes” rules. The statement was signed by 40 other nations, including the United States and Canada. The United Kingdom and France, two nations that have enacted “three strikes” regimes, did not sign the statement. âAll users should have greatest possible access to Internet-based content, applications and services,” the statement said, adding that “cutting off users from access to the Internet is generally not a proportionate sanction.” It also called network neutrality and Internet openness “important objectives.” Interestingly, the report is signed by New Zealand, which enacted legislation in April that sets up a special Copyright Tribunal for expediting file-sharing cases. The penalties available to the New Zealand government include Internet disconnections of up to six months.
That’s pretty worrying, when lawmakers don’t understand law. Would you have a mechanic who didn’t understand the mechanics of your car? A dentist who didn’t understand teeth? Or, for that matter, political party leaders whose opinion of their nation is so low that they might consider locking their nation in to backward industries?
That doesn’t sound like understanding New Zealand, and its ingenuity and pride, to me.
At least I learned from my Zip drive moment. You do when you spend your own money, outside the political world.
Above is the Australian ad. Complaints included that it looked like ‘foreplay’. My, my, it shows what is on the minds of certain people.
If advertising featuring a couple might “turn people gay”, then, with all the “straight propaganda” out there, there wouldn’t be any gay people in the world.
If we’re actually concerned about sexualized images out there, as the ACL claims, there is far more nudity in “straight advertising” to worry folk.
If an eight-year-old who sees this ad understands sexuality, then that’s a bloody dirty eight-year-old. When I was eight, not only did I not know what sex was, but all I would have seen in this ad are two blokes. Now move on and let me play with my Matchbox cars.
Wellywood sign: see blog posts from last year (like this).
You’d think Wellington Airport would know that the majority of residents are against this awful idea. An intelligent person would think: floating an idea in 2011 that was nearly universally rejected in Wellington in 2010 isn’t smart.
Yet that’s exactly what they’ve done.
As I said last year: copying someone does not celebrate our originality.
The sign runs counter to any notion of Wellington’s creativity and civic pride.
Let’s go through the motions again. Time to dig out last year’s emails to the Hollywood Sign Trust, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the licensing company with a new link to the Fairfax Press article.
Yeah, I’m a narc when it comes to protecting originality, more so when it’s going to make our city look like a global laughing-stock. I would similarly act for any Kiwi firm that gets ripped off by someone else. Even in non-election years.
In 2011, the issues that I spoke about during my campaign remain as pressing as they always did.
We still need better, wider and earlier consultation, whether we streamline current processes or create new ones for citizen engagement.
We still need to build a city-wide wifi network, one which exists but needs a few top-level negotiations to make it workâwith a real plan for expanding it to both lower socioeconomic areas and the eastern suburbs. It’ll create an infrastructure which will encourage more businesses built around teleworking, with a consequence of helping with traffic.
It is a long-term plan, but just as roads were once the solution for 20th-century problems, the internet infrastructure is the solution for early 21st-century ones.
Although, I must say, the ability for New Zealand to attract international investment for technological businesses has been hampered severely by central government and the copyright amendments.
If you were an investor, you’d now think twice about investing in a country that has a presumption of guilt with an ill-defined concept of file-sharing. If you wanted a legislative minefield, there’s always the People’s Republic of China.
If you were in the high-tech industry, you’d think twice if an MP equated the internet to Skynet, which, I might add, did not become self-aware on April 21, 2011. (Was this the reason for rushing the bill through under urgency, Mr Young?)
I don’t know the government and the opposition’s motives, unless their will is to see New Zealand remain a low-wage, primary-products-focused economy bending to the whims of American lobby groups.
New Zealand needs to capitalize on its creative advantage, Wellington even more so. We’re already behind the eight-ball on this, but our small population means we should be able to move more quickly.
And start doing things that are right not just for three-year outlooks, but 30-year ones.
