A very interesting analysis on Crikey by Bernard Keane on the turmoil the occident finds itself in. In the opening paragraphs we find this zinger about what the right wing believes it was to protect the west from.
Protecting from whom? Name your favourite other—the Soviet Union. Islam. China. Declining birth rates. Secularism. Immigrants. Globalism. But no matter the threat, it was always existential.
Except the real threat to the postwar order, Keane notes, has come from the right, namely the current occupant of the White House. He also says that the real decline is down to three decades of the west failing to compete with the rest of the world.
It’s worth a read, and also worth asking oneself if his comments about Australia might equally apply to us.
Keane is right about the need to compete on the world’s terms, regardless of your nation. Postwar the west got to decide those terms. Today the balance has shifted. Such is the nature of free-market economics. If you fail, then all you might have left is bullying. Just like in the playground: the bully was always the intellectually wimpy unable to fend for oneself or to engage any critical thinking. Some people carry that through to adulthood.
It was an awareness of what the world wanted that led me to be the first to create digital fonts in this country, and create Lucire—to compete in a global market-place. You can argue whether the offering was good or bad but at least I got off my arse. When I went on about ‘frictionless exports’ in my second mayoral campaign—building on the ideas of the first, which included the free wifi programme for te Whanganui-a-Tara—it was, again, encouraging the growth of sectors where this country could successfully earn foreign exchange and shift the balance of trade more in our favour.
That presented multiple opportunities for this city: not only signalling to foreign investment that Wellington was open for business, but building up our own businesses, including those getting incubated at Creative HQ, to a world-class standard so they could become export earners. I think I talked about global champions. And we have numerous examples of that in this city. Both FNZ and Xero hail from here—indeed from my own classmates.
There are other positive effects from this, namely higher-income earners. Who could conceivably pay their share of the rates. Which would cover other infrastructure upgrades. One negative spin-off, as we found with Mayor Lee in San Francisco, was a hefty rise in property prices, but history tells us that happened anyway.
Yet there is a propensity for many people not to rock the boat—even though I would have thought that the idea of building up our own intellectual capital for the sake of our balance of trade was a reasonably orthodox idea. Or maybe Keane is right and it isn’t. Not enough people want to play in a global market-place and compete. Think Big became a dirty idea here as neoliberalism entered the fray, and too many wound up thinking small.
In Keane’s country we saw General Motors–Holden’s go from a major export earner when it had a German expat as CEO to an inwardly focused operation that signed its own death warrant by failing to compete. Indeed, the US car makers are instructive: GM and Ford must be, by now, synonymous with being quitters. Both had offerings that were competitive, and both ceded segment by segment to please Wall Street, opening the doors to Asian competitors more than happy to snap up market share. After all, the Japanese had already done this when the UK car industry faltered so badly in the 1970s. And that was before China became the biggest car (ICE and EV) manufacturing nation on earth.
That’s just one example, in a sector I feel reasonably qualified to comment on. But in fashion, too—another sector where I have had some experience—there are occidental conglomerates with portfolios of brands, where maintaining brand image is more important than innovation, even though they got to where they were under their founders through innovation.
The multinationals are saying that there is a model that works, so don’t upset the model. But they fundamentally misunderstand the part innovation played to create that model.
Or is it an intentional misunderstanding? That by not rocking the boat, profits are assured, fewer risks are taken, and less investment is required. In other words, apathy.
Contrast that to what has been happening in China, the number of cellphone brands that have become mainstream in less than a generation, or, as I wrote in Autocade Year of Cars 2025, the 18 domestic luxury brands that are now on the Chinese market, likely coming to a car showroom near you. Not all of them will succeed, and the brandscape will consolidate, but there’s adventurism and investment happening, the sort of pioneering spirit that gave the occident the Apple Macintosh.
There are pockets of innovative thinking all over the world, including our own city. They need to be given every chance to succeed either by city business agencies, incubators, or national exporting organizations. It was very telling that a very successful exporter warned me not to go to New Zealand Trade & Enterprise for advice on a certain issue that I had (and this is before the cutbacks). Clearly we need to have the right thinking again, an entrepreneurial mindset, and champion those world-class businesses. If you don’t compete, you can’t succeed.
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