What a pleasure it was to be back on The Panel on Radio New Zealand National today, my first appearance in a decade. That last time was about the Wellywood sign and how I had involved the Hollywood Sign Trust. I’ve done a couple of interviews since then on RNZ (thank you to my interviewers Lynda Chanwai-Earle and Finlay Macdonald, and producer Mark Cubey), but it has been 10 years and a few months since I was a phone-in guest on The Panel, which I listen to very frequently.
This time, it was about Hong Kong, and the new national security legislation that was passed last week. You can listen here, or click below for the embedded audio. While we begin with the latest development of social media and other companies refusing to hand over personal data to the Hong Kong government (or, rather, they are ‘pausing’ till they get a better look at the legislation), we move pretty quickly to the other aspects of the law (the juicy stuff and its extraterritorial aims) and what it means for Hong Kong. Massive thanks to Wallace Chapman who thought of me for the segment.
Friday morning’s interview with Sonia Sly on Kiwi Summer was the most fun I have ever had on radio.
Radio New Zealand National was the most fair and balanced medium I dealt with when running for Mayor of Wellington in 2010, and I was glad that Sonia thought of me for its summer programming this year.
I joked to friends prior to the interview that 2011 was much like 2010: go on to National Radio to dis the Wellywood sign in the first half of the year, and have a fun interview in the second half.
This was a casual, fun interview thanks to Sonia putting me at such ease. It goes on for a healthy 17 minutes, covering my involvement in Lucire, judging the Miss Universe New Zealand pageant, my branding work, including the Medinge Group, and my typeface design career. The feedback I have had is that people enjoyed it, and I’d like to share it with you all here. Here’s the link, and you can always find it at the Kiwi Summer page for the day, where other formats are listed.
And if you’re wondering where the opening reading comes from, it’s taken from this review of the Aston Martin V8 Vantage I penned many years ago.
Stowe Boyd wrote (and I re-Tumbled) the big drop in US and Canadian Facebook traffic this week:
Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the first time the country has lost users in the past year. Canada also fell significantly, by 1.52 million down to 16.6 million, although it has been fluctuating around that number for the past year. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all posted losses of more than 100,000.
Stowe’s a lot more philosophical than me and puts this down to:
The moral of this story is that you can make a business out of simplifying what is chaotic and confusing, but only at the outset. As people become habituated to what at first was scary and headache-inducing, they will move away from controlled experience to more personally managed negotiation of the world.
I don’t think anyone will lose money betting against Facebook’s rise, since history has told us that no enterprise lasts forever. The question is only when. While Stowe makes the comparison with AOL, those of us outside the US can’t make the same connection. However, I have always drawn the comparison with Altavista, which, 12 years ago, was the number-one website in the world. Even we played a tiny part, licensing Lucire content to the Altavista Entertainment Zone.
The organizational point he makes is an excellent one, but I have always felt that Facebook would decline somewhere along the line due to its callous approach to privacy and its lack of transparency. Of course, we see things through our own constructs, and my bag has been about how modern brands are built through transparency and connecting to audiences. Stop doing that, and audiences might get tired.
So we come to the fatigue that sets in with consumers. It’s the only explanation I have for Quora, which experienced that wave of sign-ups in January. It reached the tipping point, but, honestly, have any of you who sent me an invitation a few months back returned? I haven’t, because I can’t see a point to it.
People flocked to it in case it was the next big thing, where their friends would ultimately wind up. We have a need to socialize as people, and if they are leaving Facebook in droves—and six million Americans qualify as droves—then where are they going?
Facebook has become a great place to campaign—as I found last year—but it is getting either more commercial or cause-oriented. My Facebook feed, for more than the last year, has been filled with the stuff that was once on Digg; and the most time I have spent on Facebook this year was over that blasted Wellywood sign, cataloguing the flip-flops of Wellington Airport’s “leadership”.
As a social tool, I wonder. Many years ago, I had my laptop open on my desk, solely on Facebook, while I worked away on my desktop machine. We have become used to it, we realize our networks are largely the same as they were pre-Facebook, and we might as well keep things off the site since we get concerned about privacy. With the change to the Facebook groups, we’ve been losing people—my old school group is in the one hundreds because I chose to start a new one for fear of Facebook deleting the old; the others were set to spam by default by Facebook, and lost more. Facebook itself is driving users away.
My last few social events were all organized on that wonderful medium called email, so for social things, it seems old-tech is the way to go.
Speaking of old-tech, the New Zealand Government says terrestrial TV will disappear from the lower North Island (te Ika a Maui still sounds better) on September 29, 2013. I found myself thinking, ‘Who cares?’
I am not on Freeview, and I do not have Sky. I can’t get one of the network on-demand services due to their antiquated geo-targeting (I forget which, since I have little reason to use it). I estimate I consume seven hours’ television programming a month—as a kid I would have managed that in two days. That means I listen to the wireless a lot more than I watch TV, something I have in common with a gentleman I know in his 70s. Keep trending these figures and by 2013 TV mightn’t even merit a mention on this blog.
Even if a Freeview box drops further in price, I would have to question why on earth I should spend money on something I do not use. I was, after all, one of those idiots who paid to have a 750 Mbyte Zip drive installed on a PC in 2002. In the words of President Bush (43), ‘Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.’
When I Tweeted that I did not care about the demise of TV, I had a number of people, on Twitter and Facebook, tell me they were in the same boat. Television, it seems, is a thing of the past. It should be little surprise, for the television networks themselves have been complicit in killing it, with increasingly poorer programming. If only the broadband internet here was not stuck in the early 2000s.
There have been a few times in the history of this blog where I stepped away from writing regularly. At the end of 2006, I had a pretty good excuse: I was in France. This time, my reasons for stepping away for a few weeks do not include: (a) I was spending too much time with the Miss Universe New Zealand contestants; (b) laziness; (c) being trapped in 1983 and discovering that DCI Gene Hunt controls the Lost island.
I was, however, chatting to a few more of the parties that we needed to realize some of my election promises. And doing a few media interviews. And looking at more ways Wellington could get nearer balancing its budget, as our deficit has ballooned over the last decade.
On May 15, I joined my opponent, Councillor Celia Wade-Brown, on Access Radio’s Espace Français, in what was my first political interview in French. I expected a nice-natured chat till our hosts said they wanted a political debate. So the Councillor and I gave the audience one, coming from very different angles. I believe we are the only two Francophone candidates. And I don’t think Access does a Cantonese programme.
You can listen to the interview here, though they only store the programmes for six weeks. You can also download from this link.
I kept Leauna Zheng waiting for weeks while I prepared my emailed responses to her interview for Skykiwi, the leading Chinese expats’ site in New Zealand. Despite her wait, she wrote a marvellous article (in Chinese, here), and for those of you relying on Google Translate, please note that the term Chinese expatriate is not translated correctly. (I believe this is the first Chinese-language interview to include my name in Chinese ideographs.)
And, finally, my interview with Bharat Jamnadas on Asia Down Under aired last Sunday. He’s very kindly put it on YouTube, though the aspect ratio is a tad off and I look thinner than usual. There are very nice comments from two members of the Wellington business community, Laurie Foon of Starfish and Brent Wong of Soi, to whom I am extremely grateful.
The conversation at the end about Wellington v. Auckland was a good laugh, but there were some serious bits.
And this Tuesday just gone, it was a pleasure to play a “dragon” in a Dragon’s Den-style setting analysing some of New Zealand’s entrepreneurs for New Zealand Trade & Enterprise.
My thanks to Bharat, Leauna, Kenneth Leong, Laura Daly at Access Radio, Jean-Louis Durand and Arlette Bilounga, and Maria Gray and David Powell.
This weekend was spent in recovery mode after getting some weird stomach bug before Anzac Day. Without getting too gross, let’s say it took a lot out of me. That’s right: I was energetically drained.
But it’s not to say that the campaign has stopped or slowed. Things seem to be proceeding at a good pace—sometimes so well that I have to admit I have less time to blog.
I met with both a Mr Andrew Jackson and a Mr Calhoun in the last two weeks, which I am sure our American readers will be getting a chuckle over. While the Andrew Jackson I met is British-born and not related to the American president of the $20 banknote, Brian Calhoun of Silverstripeis directly descended from the seventh vice-president.
Both gentlemen shared the same visions as I did. Andrew, who was introduced to me via my fellow Medinge director Patrick Harris, looks at the Wellington region over the next 10–20 years in his job with the Ministry of Economic Development. While I stated that I did not believe in a super-city for Wellington in 2010—we are governable, after all—I had to admit that there would come a time where the capital would have to compete for resources from central government as a region. And that region might look very different in the 2020s with a second international airport and a light rail service. If elected mayor, it’s not going to be something that will be built between 2010 and 2013, but I’d sure need to be aware of long-term developments for the region. (It also highlights the need to grow jobs under the creative cluster plans, so we can begin talking options.)
On that note, it would be prudent to recommence the regional mayoral meetings in a slimmer form. Right now, mayors from all over the Wellington region come with entourages, ensuring nothing gets done. Let’s take that back to meeting with mayors and regional MPs without all the red tape and get some high-level agreements made after October 2010.
Meanwhile, Brian presides over one of the most successful software companies in the land—and I like Silverstripe’s current mantra, ‘Be more human’. It links to my own ideas that humans are in charge of technology and not vice versa. And Silverstripe, under his leadership, has done remarkably with annual growth rates of 63, 70 and 57 per cent.
His belief is that Wellington businesses can grow if they have the right advice and adopt a leadership posture to what they do. It’s a good cultural argument: let the brand be well defined, and live the right attitude within the organization (these are not Brian’s words, but what I took from what he said). I remarked that that was largely how I got my own businesses to where they were.
But here’s something significant: Brian, as I, believes that Wellington can be one of the world’s leading cities. We can lead in terms of web, tech and software development, for starters, being the sort of place that attracts both talent and envy. We’ve both been around the world, we’re aware of what ingredients need to be in place to make this happen, and we’re certain on the steps we need to take to make some of Wellington’s businesses world-class champions.
I’d rather have free wifi in the central city and a vibrant creative cluster than another sculpture (as much as I like the ones we have) or another stadium suffering from a NZ$20 million cost overrun. And I know we can build these businesses from the ground-up and keep them Kiwi-owned—rather than asset-strip and have foreigners snatch them up, which still seems to dominate the thinking of central government.
Speaking of which, I see that a bill amending the Local Government Act 2002 has been tabled. And that bill says that if a private corporation wants to control our water, it can do so for 35 years. That company set up to sell our water back to us no longer needs to be majority council-owned.
This is madness. Not only have we owned our water from day one, it is anathema to my thinking that some foreign corporation raking in US$50 billion per annum could control it. These corporations exist, and you can bet they are eyeing New Zealand up lustfully in the hope that the law is changed.
Better to have water stay in public hands and have all of us contribute to proper conservation programmes, I say. But, say the privateers, surely we can charge for water? ‘What? The poor can’t afford it? It’s not as though they need to wash every day, is it?’
The ghosts of Slater Walker and their ilk still walk the hallways at some political parties’ HQs. And they still think they are in charge.
Incidentally, I seem to be getting decent (and by ‘decent’ I mean ‘fair and balanced’) air time on the radio airwaves. So far I’ve done Newstalk ZB a couple of times, as well as their competition over at Radio Live. Laura Daly at Access Radio did a wonderful interview with me earlier in April (I will be back on that station with my opponent Celia Wade-Brown in Espace Français on May 15 in my first political interview in French). Radio New Zealand National, meanwhile, interviewed me a few times during the whole Wellywood saga, but I am glad that I had a more personal one-on-one with Sonia Yee during her Asian Report last week. Here’s the link to the programme for those who might want a slightly less political broadcast (the MP3 is here).
To be confirmed is an interview with the BBC, in my politician guise. I have not been on radio in the other hemisphere for something like seven years, and that time it went to some of the most way-out places (it was UN Radio). I have one reservation only: my accent goes all over the place. Remember how the Rt Hon Jim Bolger went funny with his when foreign dignitaries came and he sounded like he was mocking the foreigners? Or, a few years before, Michael Fay during the America’s Cup lawsuits and his Americanized pronunciation of water?
Yeah, I do that. And even more disturbingly, I know I do it while I’m doing it, and cannot stop it.
It’s going to be hell if a northerner interviews me and I start sounding like Jimmy Nail. I am told that I do a very good Lily Savage when I have the ’flu. And if I get a southerner, you will think I was trying to impress Keeley Hawes (which I try to do, anyway, never mind Matthew). Not one is sufficiently “Kiwi” for Wellington voters. Though I might find that British expatriates based in Wellington might suddenly vote for me. Because in any case I will sound better than Harold Wilson.
