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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘economics’
31.07.2020
At some point as a young man, my Dad worked at a bank. He had a formal understanding of financeâdespite his schooling being interrupted by the SinoâJapanese War and then by the communist revolution, he managed to get himself a qualification in economics, and had some time working for a bank.
I was taught all about promissory notes, bills of exchange, cheques, honourable accounts, balance of payments and foreign exchange as a teenager. He impressed on me why certain things were sacrosanct in banking, the correct way to draw a cheque, and why the Cheques Act 1993 in this country was a blight on how bills of exchange were supposed to work. Essentially, I grew up with what might have been a 1950s or 1960s idea of what banking is, things that were still mostly observed by New Zealand banks into the 1980s and the 1990s.
Today [Wednesday, July 29] I opened a new business account at TSB, with whom I had banked personally since 2007, as had Jack Yan & Associates. I will be closing the account at Westpac, because itâs clear to me that they donât believe in the fair dinkum banking values that my father taught me. By the time you read this, the closure should be a fait accompli, as I donât wish them to put up more obstacles than they have already.
Westpac held my mortgage on the old house, of which I had paid off 88 per cent before I sold it. I began my banking relationship with them in 2006, for reasons I wonât go into here. My parents had banked âon the Walesâ when they were new immigrants in 1976, and stayed with them for some time.
Very early on, I noticed how confusing their statements were. You can contrast theirs to everyone elseâs in Aotearoa, and believe me, I know: Iâve banked with a lot of people. Trust Bank, Countrywide, POSB, National, ANZâall the usual suspects that a Kiwi growing up in the 1970s through to the 1990s will have encountered. No, in itself thatâs not a reason to leave a bank, but they seem to exist in their own bubble.
I got caught out once or twice on not getting a mortgage payment sorted because of the confusing statements. And there was one time that Westpac decided to be relentless about it, by setting a bot on me. The bot would call at various hours hounding me to sort this out, with a pre-recorded message, and if you hung up, it would call again. And again. And again. Never mind that you havenât had a chance to enquire with the bank as to what was going on. This amounted to a breach of the Telecommunications Act, and I put this to them before the activity ceased. And no, in itself thatâs not a reason to leave a bank.
You are stuck with the buggers, and over the years Iâd make the payments. As many of you know, some of our companiesâ income comes from abroad, which I always regarded to be a good thing, since it helps with foreign exchange and this countryâs balance of payments. Twice, I think, I needed a top-up because a client was slow to pay, and I would clear that within 30 days. As interest rates changed (the mortgage was floating), the bank would, from time to time, send a letter saying I could reduce my mortgage payments and still keep to the payment schedule, and in 2010 I took them up on it.
As some of you know, in 2015 Dad was diagnosed formally with Alzheimerâs disease and eventually I became his full-time carer as his condition worsened, with predictable results on my work. But hey, Westpac has all these posters around their branches with Dementia New Zealand logos telling us how great they are, and how they can help. Since Dementia New Zealand wonât acknowledge or respond to my complaint about this (Dementia Wellington, on the other hand, had), let me publicly say that this is bollocks. My experience tells me that it appears to be a feel-good exercise that counts for nowt for a bunch of arrogant twats in Australia.
My branch was great. They were decent, hard-working and friendly people, and many of them stayed for yearsâalways a good sign. But outside of the branch is where youâll find the rot.
In 2019, my partner and I found a home we wanted to purchase. After Dad went into a home in July 2018 I had begun renovating the old place anyway. The new house was a step up, and by the time we factored in all the costs, we would need to borrow under 20 per cent of the total purchase price.
Westpac wanted to see the balance sheets, as was their right to, and Iâll say now that they werenât rosy. Of course not, not when youâve been a caregiver. However, by this point I had got back in the saddle, and I could show them contracts that we had secured.
Apparently this wasnât good enough for that 20 per cent. The fact I had been a caregiver and had an account at a bank which had a Dementia New Zealand endorsement carried absolutely no weight.
The mortgage officer said that according to the balance sheet, I couldnât even afford the mortgage. Turns out he didnât know how to read a balance sheet and the âMortgage repaymentsâ line therein. And no, in itself thatâs not a reason to leave a bank.
Apparently, the fact my income was coming from abroad was a concern. Yet it was never a concern for Westpac in 13 years when I was paying the mortgage with that foreign income. Earning foreign exchange for your country and helping with its balance of payments are, seemingly for Westpac, a bad thing. I suppose it would be to greedy Australian bankers, who love to see a weakened New Zealand subservient to other nations. If you adopt this viewpoint when examining how Australian-owned publications here behaved (Iâm looking at The Dominion Post from that era), then it actually all fits neatly, given their editorial bias. And no, in itself thatâs not a reason to leave a bank.
I know some of you in banking will be going, âBut there are the anti-money-laundering requirements,â which I get, but what about the idea of an honourable account? Other than what I outlined above, I was a good customer, and every other bank will tell you the same: I kept honourable accounts. But maybe honour isnât a thing for Westpac.
Never mind. We approached two mortgage experts who worked tirelessly for us, and whom I heartily endorse here. Lynne Russell, an old friend of mine, was the first I approached. And Stephanie Murray was referred to me by a good friend from school. Both ladies went to second-tier lenders, told us that the foreign income was the problem, and proceeded to get us the best deal possible. Stephanie won out because of the interest rate, and she noted that the lender, Avanti Finance, was quite happy because I had a good credit rating. But while most Kiwis were enjoying home loans at around the 4 per cent mark, ours was nearer 11 per cent (and this was the lower one). Stephanie, and later my own solicitor, noted that my problem was not unique, and they had clients who were also earning money from abroad who the banks shut out. This is a grand mistake in my book, because these are the very people we should be rewarding and encouraging. Youâve heard of export earners, right, banks? We usually talk about them in positive, glowing terms. Turn on the news. Get schooled.
We still had renovations to do. At least Westpac would give me a top-up to get that sorted, surely. After all, we had already engaged a builder and he needed money for materials.
Um, no. Westpac shut off that avenue completely. From memory they could give me a couple of grand, and that was it. This was despite my having a six-figure mortgage that I had whittled down to around a fifth, a relatively small five-figure sum. At all other times, it was fine, even when I enquired about purchasing a car. But not any more. And no, in itself thatâs not a reason to leave a bank.
Harmoney came to the rescue there and we were approved within 24 hours. Interest rate: 14·55 per cent.
I had set up the direct debits with Avanti using my honourable (or so I thought) Westpac account.
Except Westpac had one more trick up its sleeve. They seemed intent on making sure we would never move, so, without notice, they doubled my mortgage payments. They kept going on about how I was falling behind. No one at the branch could explain why, not even one of their most senior staff. If I hadnât caught one of the debits, I would have defaulted on an early payment to Harmoney. Fortunately, I spotted it in time, and pulled some money from a TSB account to plug the gap.
And no, in itself thatâs not a reason to leave a bank.
But all together, they were reasons.
We sold the house, discharged that mortgage, and thanks to my very talented partner and her skills in money management and property investment, we managed to get our finances in order. I won’t elaborate on this since I regard this part as private, but let’s say Westpac should have had faith in us since we carried out what we proposed we do.
It was only when the Westpac mortgage was discharged that the bank apologized for doubling my mortgage payments and gave a reason for doing so.
Remember that letter in 2010 which said I could reduce my payments without affecting things? Turns out that affected things, and they wanted to grab what they could to make up for lost time. Not that they thought it was important to tell me any time between 2010 and 2019. They only played this at a customerâs most stressful point, and buying a house is one of the most stressful things you can do as an adult.
So much for me being such a massive risk to Westpac. We told them our game plan to get to where we are today, and we carried it out to the letter. Two well educated, well qualified and intelligent people. Yet we were viewed with suspicion from the first moment we said we wanted a new home. So how do they treat people with less education or with a shorter history? If they are the Dementia New Zealand-friendly bank how do they treat those who haven’t had to deal with dementia? The branch was awesome and did right by us but as they’re not the ones approving things, then I can only expect that others are treated far, far worse.
I felt they only apologized because they had thrown everything at us and realized we had a greater resolve.
This experience teaches me that if youâve kept up a decent history with Westpac, earned foreign exchange, and helped with your countryâs balance of payments, then they will shit on you. Since sharing parts of this story on Twitter, Iâve heard of similar unreasonable treatment by Westpac toward hard-working New Zealanders. The moment they learn you need them, youâre on their radar, and they will block every avenue you normally would haveâavenues that you exercised literally just months before, like the top-up. Because why have a customer who is freed of their grasp? Thatâs just not good for business. Better to keep them impoverished and not let them move to a nicer home. Better to let them know whoâs really in charge. And, ladies and gentlemen, that explains a great deal about why foreign ownership can be troublesome in so many quartersâand why Iâm happy to take this account to TSB. Thanks to Kerry Gribben and Panith Ear at TSBâs Wellington branch for sorting me out and making it totally painless. And Kerry was a total pro in not slagging off a competitor, especially given where he once worked (he didn’t tell me, but he knew a lot about Westpac’s processes!).
I had to choose a New Zealand bank on principle. The Cooperative Bank was on the radar, and they were really friendly, though I thought their charges were a little high and TSB looked better capitalized on the figures I could find. However, my respect goes to Brian Batchelor at the Wellington branch for being thoroughly professional. It would have been nice to have gone there, since Medinge Group banks with Coop in the UK, and a mate of mine who did some contract work for them says that our Cooperative (a different and unrelated entity) are genuine about their promises to customers.
Kiwibank didnât even reply to emails when we were trying to get a mortgage, and rejected all PDFs and ZIP files I sent their despite them saying their email systems could accept them. They just gave up all contact, so I figured they didnât need the business. And I hear they donât do foreign exchange anyway, which is just bizarre for a state-owned bank that should be encouraging foreign exchange in these economically tricky times. SBS had no nearby branches (technically, Blenheim isnât that far but you canât drive there without an amphibious car). Sometimes, you just go back to what you know.
Today (Friday), the day I am posting this. Westpac accounts shut (despite a massive queue at Lambton Quay). Really nice young chap behind the counter. Except I have 35 cheques on which I want the duty refunded. He didn’t know how to do that and wrote down the helpline number. I called that. Eighteen minutes later, the rep there didn’t know how to do that and referred it to my branch. I really need them to pay me back the NZ$1·75 on principle and then I will consider the matter closed.
Tags: 2000s, 2010s, 2019, 2020, Alzheimerâs disease, Aotearoa, Australia, balance of payments, banking, dementia, economics, entrepreneurship, family, finance, foreign exchange, foreign ownership, media, media bias, New Zealand, property, TSB, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in business, globalization, New Zealand, Wellington | No Comments »
17.02.2020

GM pulled out of Russia and India, so with hindsight, those of us Down Under, with a far smaller total population, shouldnât have thought we were particularly special.
Even where GM remains, such as South Korea, thereâs a broken model range, with a big gap where the Cruze used to be.
Itâs becoming apparent that GM, with no more right-hand-drive markets to cater for, will be a company that only offers full lines in China and the Americas.
Some GM-watchers have been calling for the demise of Holden for years, just as they had called for the deaths of Oldsmobile and Pontiac years before. But as I argued in a letter published in the (also-defunct) Condé Nast Portfolio, each brand occupies unique territory, and, had they not been diluted, could still appeal to certain buyers that more mainstream ones, e.g. Chevrolet, cannot reach.
Holden was always a tough case in Australia, where we noted it was very tied to nationalism. Once local manufacture finished, its sales plummeted.
It wasnât the case in New Zealand, where all cars had been imported for decades and we never had the sense that Holden was our âown carâ. However, GM New Zealand (as it then was) had created a handful of Holdens unique to this market that the Australians never saw. Once upon a time, it was a more independent beast.
When Holden ceased Australian manufacture, sales didnât drop the same way in this country. With Kiwis loving entries in the CD market, the Commodore isnât an uncommon sight, and remains the choice of the police.
But the same argument of economies of scale applies to New Zealand, a country with a population of five million: GM had no desire to allow this country much wiggle room compared with Australia. Whatever happened there would necessarily happen here.
Those 600 jobs that are going include redundancies in New Zealand.
Over the years it had seemed Holden was on life support. There was a golden age where the HQ series and its derivatives flew the Holden flag high, but after the oil crises, there was a real possibility the company could have bit the dust in the mid-1980s, becoming an import-only operation.
A plan circulated within GM to replace the top Holdens with Cadillacs, while the rest of the range would be made up of cars from around the GM empireâwhich, in those days, included Opel and Isuzu.
But the Australians won the day and the VN Commodore got the green light. By the end of the 1990s, Holden was in great shape, including an export programme for cars based off the VT Commodore.
You could say history repeated itself with the global financial crisis in the late 2000sâwhere GM, keen to continue, asked for US$50,000 million from the US taxpayer. But perhaps more importantly, it sold the controlling stake in its venture with SAIC of China to its Chinese partner for a mere US$85 million. That was one deal that allowed GM to raise funds elsewhere, but it also saw the beginning of a technological transfer to China. Even after GM bought back the share, SAIC would get control of the JVâs salesâ company.
Numerous SAIC cars were built on GM platformsâthe Roewe 950, for example. Cars made by GM ventures began appearing with SAIC-owned brandsâthe MG Hector in India, a rebadged Baojun 530, for one; it also appears as the second-generation Chevrolet Captiva in some other markets. Once upon a time GM might have earned a royalty for any car built on its tech, but itâs unlikely here as the two companies share in the profits.
While SAIC hasnât succeeded with MG Down Under, you notice more of a push these days, and it has already made an impact in New Zealand with the Maxus commercial line-up, rebadged LDV. Export sales arenât a big deal for the Chinese giant, but with the Chinese economy slowing, they could be eyeing up more international markets.
With SAIC keen to get more of the action for themselves, GMâs operations in many of its outposts became irrelevant.
Holden held on for dear life and arguably had one of its more competitive ranges for yearsâbut in this context, GM might not have had much choice.
It has little to do with the consolidation of markets and all to do with much higher-level strategic decisions. After all, hardly anyone in China will have grown up with idea of Holden being Australiaâs own car.
This post also appears in Drivetribe and Lucire Men.
Tags: 1980s, 1990s, 2020, Aotearoa, Australia, Baojun, China, economics, GM, history, Holden, management, MG, New Zealand, SAIC Posted in business, cars, China, New Zealand, USA | 3 Comments »
04.12.2019

Martin Wolf, writing in the Financial Times, touches on a few points that resonate with my readings over the years.
He believes capitalism, as a system, is not a bad one, but it is bad when it is âriggedâ; and that Aristotle was indeed right (as history has since proved) that a sizeable middle class is necessary for the functioning of a democracy.
We know that the US, for instance, doesnât really do much about monopolies, having redefined them since the 1980s as essentially OK if no one gets charged more. Hence, Wolf, citing Prof Thomas Philipponâs The Great Reversal, notes that the spikes in M&A activity in the US has weakened competition. I should note that this isnât the province of âthe rightââPhilippon also shows that M&A activity reduced under Nixon.
I alluded to the lack of competition driving down innovation, but Wolf adds that it has driven up prices (so much for the USâs stance, since people are being charged more), and resulted in lower investment and lower productivity growth.
In line with some of my recent posts, Wolf says, âIn the past decade, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft combined have made over 400 acquisitions globally. Dominant companies should not be given a free hand to buy potential rivals. Such market and political power is unacceptable. A refurbishment of competition policy should start from the assumption that mergers and acquisitions need to be properly justified.â
History shows us that Big Techâs acquisitions have not been healthy to consumers, especially on the privacy front; they colluded to suppress wages before getting busted. In a serious case, according to one company, Google itself commits outright intellectual property theft: âGoogle would solicit a party to share with it highly confidential trade secrets under a non-disclosure agreement, conduct negotiations with the party, then terminate negotiations with the party professing a lack of interest in the partyâs technology, followed by the unlawful use of the partyâs trade secrets in its business.â (The case, Attia v. Google, is ongoing, I believe.) Their own Federal Trade Commission said Google âused anticompetitive tactics and abused its monopoly power in ways that harmed Internet users and rivals,â quoting the Murdoch Press. We see many undesirable patterns with other firms there exercising monopoly powers, some of which Iâve detailed on this blog, and so far, only Europe has had the cohones to slap Google with massive fines (in the milliards, since 2017), though other jurisdictions have begun to investigate.
As New Zealand seeks to reexamine its Commerce Act, we need to ensure that we donât merely parrot the US and UK approach.
Wolf also notes that inequality âundermines social mobility; weakens aggregate demand and slows economic growth.â The central point Iâve made before on Twitter: why would I want people to do poorly when those same people are potentially my customers? It seems to be good capitalism to ensure thereâs a healthy base of consumers.
Tags: 1980s, 2010s, 2019, Aristotle, Big Tech, capitalism, consumerism, democracy, economics, economy, Federal Trade Commission, Financial Times, Google, inequality, innovation, intellectual property, law, M&A, Martin Wolf, monopoly, Murdoch Press, occident, philosophy, technology, theft, Thomas Philippon, USA Posted in business, internet, politics, USA | No Comments »
25.01.2018

SumOfUs/Creative Commons
Prof Jane Kelsey, in her critique of the still-secret Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement on Trans-Pacific Partnership (formerly the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement [TPPA]) notes in The Spinoff:
The most crucial area of the TPPA that has not received enough attention is the novel chapter on electronic commerceâbasically, a set of rules that will cement the oligopoly of Big Tech for the indefinite future, allowing them to hold data offshore subject to the privacy and security laws of the country hosting the server, or not to disclose source codes, preventing effective scrutiny of anti-competitive or discriminatory practices. Other rules say offshore service providers donât need to have a presence inside the country, thus undermining tax, consumer protection and labour laws, and governments canât require locally established firms to use local content or services.
If this new government is as digitally illiterate as the previous one, then we are in some serious trouble.
I’m all for free trade but not at the expense of my own country’s interests, or at the expense of real competition, and the Green Party’s position (I assume in part operating out of caution due to the opaqueness of the negotiations) is understandable.
Protecting a partly corrupt oligopoly is dangerous territory in a century that will rely more heavily on digital commerce.
While there may be some valid IP reasons to protect source code, these need to be revealed in legal proceedings if it came to thatâand one hopes there are provisions for dispute settlement that can lift the veil. But we don’t really know just how revised those dispute settlement procedures are. Let’s hope that Labour’s earlier stated position on this will hold.
Google has already found itself in trouble for anticompetitive and discriminatory practices in Europe, and if observations over the last decade count for anything, it’s that they’ll stop at nothing to try it on. Are we giving them a free ride now?
Despite Prof Kelsey’s concerns, I can accept that parties need not have a presence within a nation or be compelled to use local content or services. But the level of tax avoidance exhibited by Google, Facebook, Apple et al is staggering, and one hopes that our new government won’t bend over quite as easily. (While I realize the US isn’t part of this agreement, remember that big firms have subsidiaries in signatory countries through which they operate, and earlier trade agreements have shown just how they have taken on governments.)
She claims that the technology minister, the Hon Clare Curran, has no information on the ecommerce chapter’s analysisâand if she doesn’t have it, then what are we signing up to?
However, Labour’s inability to be transparentâsomething they criticized the previous government onâis a weak point after a generally favourable start to 2018. The Leader of the Opposition is right to call the government out on this when his comment was sought: basically, they were tough on us when we were in government, so we hope they’ll live up to their own standards. Right now, it doesn’t look like it. I suspect Kelsey is now the National Party fan’s best friend after being vilified for years. Bit like when Nicky Hager (whom one very respected MP in the last Labour government called a right-wing conspiracy theorist) wrote Seeds of Distrust.
And the solutions that Kelsey proposes are so simple and elegant that it’s daft they weren’t followed, since they are consistent with the Labour brand. I know, trade agreements can stay confidential at this stage and this isn’t unprecedented. But that’s not what Labour said it wanted. At least these suggestions would have shown some consistency with Labour’s previous positions, and given some assurance that it’s in charge.
What should a Labour-led government have done differently? First, it should have commissioned the revised independent economic assessment and health impact analyses it called for in opposition. Second, it should have shown a political backbone, like the Canadian government that also inherited the deal. Canada played hardball and successful demanded side-letters to alter its obligations relating to investment and auto-parts. Not great, but something. New Zealand should have demanded similar side-letters excluding it from ISDS as a pre-requisite for continued participation. Third, it should have sought the suspension of the UPOV 1991 obligation, which has serious Treaty implications, and engaged with MÄori to strengthen the Treaty of Waitangi exception, as the Waitangi Tribunal advised. Fourth, it should have withdrawn its agreement to the secrecy pact.
I once joked that National and Labour were basically the same, plus or minus 10 per cent. On days like this, I wonder if I was right.
Tags: 2018, antitrust, Aotearoa, business, Canada, commerce, economics, economy, free trade, global economy, globalization, Google, Jane Kelsey, Labour, media, New Zealand, oligopoly, politics, technology, The Spinoff, TPPA, transparency, Treaty of Waitangi Posted in business, globalization, New Zealand, politics, technology | 1 Comment »
11.11.2016

FJM88NL, licensed under Creative Commons
Iâve had a phone call and a lot of comments on this in the last couple of days: my Dad, who is 81 with early-stage Alzheimerâs, called the US presidential election for Donald Trump months ago. I posted it on my social networks the day he made his definitive call, and friends remembered it. Thank you for all your compliments.
Go back to 2015, he had called the Republican primary for Trump.
I wasnât as confident but I had Tweeted the week before the election that polls were understating Trumpâs actual support by at least 6 per cent.
In 2008, when everyone had dismissed Gov. Sarah Palin, he said that she wasnât going to go away, and that sheâd command an even greater influence in the first Obama term. While he predicted an Obama win, again quite early on, he wasnât optimistic and didnât think there would be great change in the US. You may or may not agree with that.
Going right back to the 1980s, when I was at college, and before China showed any signs of opening up, he made the call about its economic rise, and that I would be assured, by the time I was in my 30s and 40s, that many would want to deal with the country. It would be, I remember him telling me, a career advantage to being Chineseâin contrast to the racism we encountered far more frequently back then.
During the height of the Muldoon era, Dad, who counted himself as part of Robâs Mob, made the call that Sir Robert Muldoon would not be able to hold on to his power or reputation in his old age. When a documentary aired condemning Sir Robert after his death, so that he wouldnât be around to file a defamation suit, he said, âI told you so.â
Even in the elections I contested (and he encouraged me to run), while he refused to be drawn on what he thought my chances were, he was unequivocally clear that my rival, John Morrison, wouldnât win, in 2013. Dad certainly did better than some so-called political experts I can name.
And if you want to get really spooky, during the Martin Bashir interview of Princess Diana, he said that by the time she was 37, sheâd have a âreally bad yearâ. He didnât say sheâd die.
No, heâs not a Mystic Meg of any sort. Heâs a guy whoâs been around for a while and kept his eyes open.
If you want to know his secret, I can tell you that his political projections are based in part around reading. Not mainstream media, but websites that heâs discovered over the years himself. Heâs a keen web surfer and loves his news. He doesnât put that much stock in political âexpertsâ, and after having run myself, I can fully understand why.
Heâd even take in the viewpoints on Russia Today, which gives you an idea of how varied his reading was. Just today I caught him watching an address from Edward Snowden.
With Palin, it was probably the sudden rise of her fan sites set up by US conservatives. He hadnât seen such a rapid rise of sites that soon galvanized their support around the former Alaskan governor before. While mainstream media dismissed her and gave the impression that post-2008, she wouldnât matter, Dad had entirely the opposite reading. Politically centrist, and, like me, a swing voter, he kept following the sites out of interest, and saw how they morphed into the Tea Party movement. He also knew they wouldnât go away any time soon, and observed that there was a Palin effect, as the likes of Ted Cruz soon found out when contesting their Senate seats.
And, despite my own criticisms of this practice, Dad would read the comments. Sometimes he would wade through hundreds of them, to get a sense of what people were thinking.
It was his reading of media from left and right during the latest US presidential election that saw him made his calls very assertively.
Rather than dismiss certain conservatives as ill-educated, as some media might, Dad treated them as human beings. He knew they would galvanize and get behind Trump.
When youâve lived through a world war (including an occupation) and then a civil war, and saw your family start from the bottom again after 1949, you get to be good at knowing what people go through.
Heâs always been politically switched on, and had a keen interest in history and economics, the latter of which he studied at a tertiary level. But heâd always explain to me that it came down to people and their behaviour, and never rational decision-making. I might have only lived just over half his lifetime so far, but I find little fault in that statement. All new movements have plenty of power, till they become the establishment.
His thoughts on China in the 1980s could well have stemmed from that: I never asked him, and aphasia means heâd now find difficulty telling me anyway.
Sadly for the US, he finds appeal in the theory that the nation will break up, though he hasnât quite yet made the call in the same way he made the one for the Trump presidency. But as with his Trump prediction, Iâm publishing this one online.
Heâs never stated it as succinctly but he has, in passing in the 1980s and 1990s, said that the British Empire wouldnât last much longer beyond our current monarchâs reign.
You never know, we might be coming back to this post in a few yearsâ time. These are gloomy scenarios but Iâd rather put Dadâs ideas out there now, as I did with the Trump presidency, rather than tell you ex post facto how clever he was. The lesson: treat people as people, and itâs amazing how much that will reveal.
Tags: 2016, Aotearoa, China, conservatism, consumer behaviour, Donald Trump, economics, Edward Snowden, history, John Yan, media, New Zealand, politics, prediction, Sarah Palin, science, Sir Robert Muldoon, UK, USA Posted in China, culture, media, New Zealand, politics, UK, USA | No Comments »
09.11.2016

Above: When I refer to Hillary in the below blog post, I mean the self-professed ‘ordinary chap’ on our $5 note.
As the results of the US presidential election came in, I didnât sense a panic. I actually sensed a great opportunity for New Zealand.
Iâve been critical of the obsession many of our politicians have had with the US, when they were in an excellent position to carve our own, unique path as a country. Aotearoa, with its bicultural roots and multicultural awareness, has the advantage, in theory at least, of appreciating traditional notions of Māori and what had been imported via pÄkehÄ; and on an international scale, our country has sought trading partners outside the Anglosphere, having been pushed into it by factors outside our control. The loss of the UK as an export market and the damage to New ZealandâUS relations in the 1980s might have seemed anathema at the time, but they pushed this country into new relationships, which now looks prudential.
New Zealanders are welcomed wherever we go, our passports arenât looked down upon, and we still largely enjoy a freedom of movement and safe passage without much hindrance. And itâs a reality that the centre of the global economy has been shifting eastward over the last decade.
We donât need something like TPPA in order to form trading relationships with China, and when I went to India on two occasions, there was a great acceptance of the potential of a trade deal with another cricketing country. In fact, my audiences, whenever I gave a speech, were rather miffed that we hadnât gone to them first. But we only make good negotiators when we deal with our own cultural issues successfully, for how else can we claim to understand others and then do a deal? Deal-making, regardless of what certain American politicians might tell you, comes from understanding the other side, and at our best New Zealanders are good at this. It’s why we need to confront our own racism head-on and to say: this shit needs to stop. In fact, this shit needn’t even be an issue. We’re too small a country not to be working together, and we need knowledge of all the cultures that make up Aotearoa now more than ever.
We are frequently confronted with the need to look at our national character. Perhaps an early sign of it was in the 1970s with the Commonwealth Games in 1974; certainly Iâve noticed New Zealanders begin to find our own identity as a Pacific nation, not a post-colonial Anglosphere satellite. Weâre beginning to discover our national brand. And wherever you were on the flag debate, at least that, too, forced us to consider who we are. The sense I got was that we want change, but we didnât like the designâbut certainly thereâs no real fondness to be tied to Empah. Anti-Americanism over the years suggests that thereâs no real desire, either, to keep importing economic ideas, corrupt governmental practices, and failed health care policies, even if certain political and economic Ă©lites seem drawn to them.
We know where they will lead: greater divisions between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, urban and rural. Those tendencies exist but here is an ideal opportunity to nip them in the bud. History has taught us sensible solutions, more humane solutions, that at least recognize human actors, social responsibility, and kaitiaki. The younger generations have accepted these as they have grown up in a globalized world, and we can see that in their own consumer choices, where they favour responsible companies, those that have a cause. They believe in a form of global citizenship, and want to be treated as suchâand those ideas are present in their politics, too. It is right for people like my friend Simon Anholt to run global polls on matters that influence us all, including the US elections, and realistically it will be our technology and the free sharing of ideas that will help with our progress as a planet. If we seek our own destiny, we at least will be able to show some leadership againâand then weâll really have something to talk about.
When I was in Reefton last month, the first place in New Zealand to get electricity, I noted that it was up to a bunch of mavericks who brought this newfangled technology in. New Zealand suffragettes won their battle first to secure women the vote. And another person called Hillary succeeded where no other had done so before when ‘We knocked the bastard off.’ Kiwi leadership isnât new to us, but in recent years I held a great fear that we had lost our mettle. That did indeed spur me to run for office, among other factors, to say to people: stop listening to foreign companies and foreign-owned media who donât have New Zealand interests at heart. New Zealand has been filled with people who call themselves ordinary but it’s always been thoseâlike Sir Edâwho have shown real leadership, not some political lobbying group in another hemisphere. But you can only be great without following, and itâs high time we stopped following divided nations and recognized that we already have the right stuffâand by that I mean our smarts, our innovation, and our independently minded way of thinking.
Tags: 2016, Aotearoa, business, China, commerce, corruption, CSR, culture, economics, economy, India, innovation, leadership, MÄori, multiculturalism, nation branding, New Zealand, politics, racism, Simon Anholt, Sir Edmund Hillary, social responsibility, trade, USA Posted in branding, business, China, culture, globalization, leadership, New Zealand, politics, social responsibility, USA | No Comments »
09.05.2015
Thatâs another British General Election done and dusted. I havenât followed one this closely since the 1997 campaign, where I was backing John Major.
Shock, horror! Hang on, Jack. Havenât the media all said you are a leftie? Didnât you stand for a left-wing party?
Therein lies a fallacy about left- and right wings. Iâve never completely understood the need to pigeonhole someone into a particular camp, when I would say most people on this planet hold a mix of views from both sides. Now that politicians are not unlike caricaturesâthere has been a ârightwardâ shift where the policies being adopted by some are so outside economic orthodoxy that they look like what their Spitting Image counterparts would have uttered back in the dayâthis holds more true than ever. We know what subscribing to certain partiesâ views fully and completely is like: we risk looking loony, and, if taken too far, we risk becoming loony.
But the spin doctors and advisers arenât in to transparency. They are into their talking heads conveying what they feel the public responds to, hence Mitt Romney, once an advocate of universal health care in his own state, becoming an opponent of it when he ran for president; or, for that matter, Ed Milibandâs insistence on the âbudget responsibility lockâ, to demonstrate that he had a handle on the economy, when Economics 101 told us that austerity isnât a good way to help the economy along and Miliband began sounding like Cameron lite.
My support of Major in the 1997 General Election, which went against the prevailing view at the time, was down to several reasons. Unlike Cameron, Major didnât practise austerity, but he did practise conventional economics with the government going more into deficit through increasing spending during the early 1990sâ recession, knowing the stimulus to be affordable, and knowing it had to be paid back once the economy was healthy again. It is interesting to note Sir Johnâs own goal while campaigning for the Tories in this General Election, when he said at the Tory Reform Group annual dinner, âWe need to acknowledge the fact we have a pretty substantial underclass and there are parts of our country where we have people who have not worked for two generations and whose children do not expect to work.
âHow can it be that in a nation that is the fifth richest nation in the world, that in the United Kingdom we have four of the poorest areas in Europe? I include eastern Europe in that question.â
How indeed. The John Major who was prime minister will have answered that easily, and his own record illustrates just why he avoided such consequences in the 1990s that Cameron was unable to.
The second reason was that I really believed the âclassless societyâ speech, and if you have read his memoirs, or even biographies written about him, then there was a real personal experience woven into that. Critics will point at the fact the speech was written by Antony Jay (Yes, Minister) or the fact that Britain invented To the Manor Born and such sitcoms, but, generally, why should only certain classes have the ability to excel and do their best? Everyone should have that opportunity, and the measures implemented under the Major premiership, while not as far to the left as traditional socialists would have wanted, struck a good balance in my view in an immediate post-Thatcher period. We should always be wary of sudden shifts, whether theyâre swings from the left to the right, or vice versa. A pragmatic approach seemed sensible.
Third, it was precisely that Major was not a Thatcherite, even if Margaret Thatcher might have believed him to be when she made him Chancellor of the Exchequer, a job that he wanted most of his political life. But what we had in his very shrewd opponent in 1997 was Thatcherism, or at least monetarism. As we know from Tony Blairâs and Gordon Brownâs early move in allowing the Bank of England to be free of political control, their belief that this would avoid boom-and-bust cycles was not realized. However, the evidence does show that the freedom has coincided with a period of low interest rates and stable inflation, but equally one can credit the work of the Tories in handing New Labour a booming economy in May of that year. As Major noted at the time, it was rare for a government to lose while the economy was improving, but the Labour campaign, ably assisted by biased media at the time, and the easy pass Blair got from the British establishment despite being very, very vague about his policies, was hard to beat. All he had to do was utter âChangeâ and âItâs about New Labour, new Britain.â It hid, to those of us watching the General Election and the year before it, New Labourâs Thatcherite aims. I am not even that sure what Blair, Brown and Peter Mandelson were doing in the party to begin with.
This might be contrasted with a Tory party weakened through allegations of sleaze (and we know now that no party is any less sleazy than the other, but it depends on when you are caught out) leading Major to fight a campaign largely alone with the occasional publicity boost from the Spice Girls. No matter how specific the PM got, it didnât matter. (Or, as I had told many of my design classes at the time when I was teaching, the Conservativesâ Arial was no match for Labourâs Franklin Gothic, a typeface family that, incidentally, was used by Thatcher in her 1983 election campaign, and by Labour in New Zealand in 1999 and 2002.) It was frustrating to try to discern what Labourâs specific policies were from Down Under, watching the General Election campaign with keen interest. And those lack of specifics worried me from the start, which explains why when I ran for office, I issued a manifesto early in the game. I liked being first, even if the electorate didn’t put me there.
Whether you agreed with Labour or not, and many would argue that the Blair and Brown years were not stellar, the divisions in their partyâwhich I imagine we will see reemerge in the next few daysâindicate that even within there is a great deal of polarization. The Thatcherites are in there, except they are called Blairites. And while Sir John put his weight behind his party out of loyalty, and from his earlier political years witnessing how âLabour isnât workingâ (the WilsonâCallaghan years must have been formative for him given his age), his comments at the dinner are telling on just where modern Conservative economic policies under George Osborne differed to his own and those of Norman Lamont. If people are suffering, if they arenât getting their shot at the âclassless societyâ, then is the place any good? If the class divide has grown, contrary to Sir Johnâs own views, and weakened Britain as a result of the contraction of economic players in it, then even the ârightâ canât support that. To me, I thought conservatism was letting everyone have a shot, and about solid, national enterprise, and this century hasnât given me much faith that that applies very widely.
Labour might have campaigned on that and on preserving the NHS although having listened to Miliband, I was never totally convinced. Perhaps, I, too, had concerns about Labour vagueness, and until this General Election I had not followed the Shadow Cabinet closely enough to know the thinking and histories behind the players. That area, I will leave to others to comment. In some respects, the caricature comment I made above applies to Labour, too.
Contrasting the Tories this time with the party I knew a bit better through observationâthe two terms of John MajorâI feel they are very different. And, sadly, I draw parallels with the National Party here at home, where people attempt to compare incumbent John Key with Sir Robert Muldoon (1975â84), and I simply cannot see the parallels other than the colour of the branding.
Sir Robert resolutely believed in full employment, the rights of the unemployed, the state ownership of assets, energy independence, and his ability to fight his own battles. Had attack blogs been around then, he wouldnât have needed them. I do not agree with everything about his premiership, and his miscalculation of public opinion over the Gleneagles Agreement and the environment is now part of history. However, his terms are still being misjudged today, with an entire generation happily brainwashed by both the monetarist orthodoxy of the 1980s and a prime-time documentary (The Grim Face of Power) aired after his death (probably to avoid a defamation suit) to belittle his legacy. (The contrasting documentary made many years later, Someone Else’s Country, was buried on a weekend afternoon.) We did not have to wait months for a telephone, nor did we not have cars to buy; yet the belief that the electorate has a collective memory of only five years means we havenât a hope of comprehending fully what happened thirty years ago. But to those of us who pride ourselves on a decent memory, and I believe if we seek public office we must have one, then things were never as bleak as people believe. He was sexist, yet I do not believe him to want to preside over a divided New Zealand, and his own books reveal a desire for unity. Unfortunately, looking at a man born in 1921 through the prism of 2015, plenty of his sayings look anachronistic and passĂ©, but once context is added, the New Zealand we look at today looks more divided.
We, too, have an underclass that has emerged (those begging for change werenât there two decades ago, nor were so many food banks), through economic policies that have weakened our businesses. Both major parties deserve criticism over this. For a country where experts have said we must head toward technology to end our reliance on primary products, other than software patents, we have had a strange record over intellectual property with a prime minister who was against certain copyright amendments before he was for them (and voted accordingly). A New Zealand resident who adopted the same rules over copyrighted materials as Google and Dropbox has been indicted by the US Governmentâthatâs right, I am talking about Kim Dotcom. It’s a reminder that we haven’t done enough for our tech sector, the one which governments have said we should aid, which can help our overall economy.
We are hopelessly behind in how much technology contributes to our economy, and we have done little to support the small- to medium-sized businesses that form the backbone of our economy. Instead, we have been selling them short, welcoming ever-larger multinationals (who usually pay tax in their home country, not ours) and giving them more advantages than our own. Since when has allegiance to these foreign players ever been part of politics on the left or on the right? If we are to support businesses, for instance, we should be negotiating for our own milliard-dollar enterprises to make headway into new markets. Xero et al will thank us for it. Globalization is as much about getting our lot out there so they can pay tax back here. Politicians should be patriotic, but toward our own interests, not someone else’s.
Therein lie my many posts about the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement on my Facebook. It is precisely because I support business that I am against a good part of what has been leaked so far. (I am aware that many trade agreements are negotiated in secret, so there is nothing new there.) It is precisely because I believe in a level playing field for Kiwis that we should be careful at how we liberalize and in what sectors and at what pace we should do it. The curious thing there is that the substantial arguments (obviously against it) have come from the âleftâ, or friends who identify as being left-wing, while some who have identified as being right-wing have bid me an indignant exit from the discussion by attacking the players and not their utterances, and yet somehow the lefties are branded the woolly, emotional wrecks?
As I wrote last year, âAll I want are facts, not emotional, ideological arguments. On the evidence for me, things are leaning toward the anti side. I come from the standpoint of the market being a man-made construct and people are not numbers.
â⊠[T]here are cases going on with tobacco companies where they are using IP to argue that plain packs are contrary to trade agreements. So where do you draw the line with public health versus a foreign enterprise profiting? Iâd like to see healthy people not taxing the system, and plain packs were a foreseeable development IMO for a tobacco manufacturer. [I know this is an argument that is typically trotted out, but I use it since there is at least one case out there.] A wise tobacco company would have acquired businesses in other fields (as some have done), just as Coca-Cola, seeing the tide turn against sodas, have bought up water, energy drink and juice businesses. Itâs wise investing, and itâs progress.
âThere is nothing wrong with the notion of a trade tribunal but what has been emerging from the leaks are ones where corporations can be compensated for loss of profits based on, say, plain packaging. If a government is democratically elected to implement such a policy, and corporations have always understood investments to be subject to the laws of the land (including the risk of divestment in some), then should their rights trump that of the citizens? This is the danger here, and this is the heart of the sovereignty argument.
âAnother example is with software patents, which our country has voted to do away with. Itâs been shown that that would spur innovation.
âThe tendency is that TPPA is against these moves, although given the secrecy we do not know for sure. But reading other IP provisions it does not take a big leap of the imagination.
â⊠Do I believe in global free trade? Absolutely. But I also believe in making sure that people have the means the buy the stuff I sell, and to me this treaty (based on what has been leaked) does not ensure that. I also believe in social responsibility and that citizens have their basics looked after so they can participate in commerce. I am pro-innovation, especially in smaller enterprises where some great stuff is taking place, and we have reasonably robust IP laws already and conventions that govern them. Iâm not saying I have a complete alternative that replaces it, but some of the work we have done at the Medinge Group touches on these issues.â
One argument in favour is: if we are not party to this, then does this mean we will get shut out of it? Iâm not entirely sure we will in that we are already one of the freest markets in the world, although I welcome arguments and past examples. In the areas I know well, the absence of a free-trade agreement with the US, for instance, have never hampered our firm exporting there, but I realize for our primary producers there have been obstacles. But do such agreements mean unimpeded access when itâs so easy, even under WTO, to erect non-tariff barriers? And why should corporationsâ rights trump citizensâ, as opponents are quick to point out?
âAt the end of the day,â to borrow a phrase, all human systems are imperfect. And the market is just as human as any other. My belief is that your own citizens, and their welfare, must be placed first, and we should support our own people and our own businesses. The political caricatures that certain parties have now rendered into human form donât necessarily appear to understand this, certainly not by their actions. This is at the crux of the arguments that I saw from Labour supporters in the UK General Election, and to some extent from those who opposed National and ACT in our one last year. Labour’s loss here, too, in my view, can be placed on a leader who himself came across as unsubstantial on TV as his opponents; and his refusal to resign can be contrasted to the behaviour of Miliband and Nick Clegg yesterday. He could have always pulled a Nigel Farage.
The sooner we get away from notions of âleftâ and ârightâ and work out for ourselves where weâd like our country and our world to head, we will start working together without these false divisions. I might add that âbeing Asianâ in this country is yet another false division. No wonder most people are sick of politics, politicians and âpolitics as usualâ, because most of us cannot be bothered pigeonholing ourselves. We just want to do whatâs decent and honourable and have the chance to get on with it.
Tags: 1980s, 1990s, 1997, 2015, Bank of England, campaigning, Conservatives, copyright, copyright law, David Cameron, economics, Ed Miliband, election, England, free trade, free-trade agreement, General Election, George Osborne, globalization, Gordon Brown, history, intellectual property, John Key, John Major, Keynesian economics, Kim Dotcom, Labour, London, Margaret Thatcher, media, monetarism, National Party, New Zealand, Norman Lamont, patent law, Peter Mandelson, politics, Rogernomics, Sir Robert Muldoon, spin doctoring, technology, Thatcherism, Tony Blair, TPPA, trade, transparency, UK Posted in business, globalization, media, New Zealand, politics, technology, UK | No Comments »
17.06.2014
My forced Facebook sabbatical came to an end in the late morning. So what did I think of it all?
One of my Tweets last night was: âI hope [it is temporary], though I have found people out for 7â12 days now. Now itâs Monday I hope they have got over their hangovers!â At the time I thought: this Facebook is probably not a 24-hour operation. These guys are probably off for the weekend, and they work part-time. We might see them on Monday morning, US time, or whenever they come back from Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Bill Cosby Day, or whatever it is they celebrate over there. Oh, itâs California, so they are probably stoned.
Sixty-nine hours werenât quite enough to break my habits, though they were beginning to change. No more was I looking up Facebook in bed before I go to the office, or having a quick gander at night. But on the desktop, I left one tab open, which would always draw me there to have a glance at what friends were up to.
The timing was a bit exceptional: we had the top 23 pages for the Miss Universe New Zealand 2014 finalists to launch. Had it not been for that, I wonder if I would have bothered with Facebook at all. I had queries to field, direct messages to respond to.
The direct messaging is obviously separate from the rest of Facebook, as it was the one thing that hadnât failed. But everything else was worsening: initially losing liking, commenting and posting, then losing the fan pages I administered. Friends could not see my wall, while a few who could see it tried to like things and were given errors. Aside from a few exceptions, no one seemed to think this was out of the ordinary and worth chatting to me about. Not that I mind this: they could all get in touch with me via other media. But this signals that it is OK to get an error when liking something, and shrug it off as temporary, because we believed Facebook when it told us to try again in a few minutes. Never mind that in Facebookland, âa fewâ means 4,000. We have low expectations of these dot coms.
So when people joke about how these things always tend to happen to me, I wonder. Iâve always maintained they happen to us all. Maybe the difference is I donât believe these buggers when they tell me that things will be back in a few minutes, because invariably they donât. So I put an entry in to Get Satisfaction, or on this blog, so others donât feel they are alone.
And if I had found the limits of the siteâbecause I believe on Vox I did in 2009, when exactly the same thing happened, and the techs had no way outâthen Facebook should know about this.
Facebook was, through all of this, useless. It had closed down its Known Issues on Facebook page, which seemed foolhardy, because this certainly was a known issue with the increasing number of Tweets about it. There were no acknowledgements, and most of the time, feeding anything into its report forms resulted in errors. Sometimes I got a blank screen. Its own help pages told you to do things that were impossible. If it were any other firm, people would be crying bloody murder or wanting their money back. (And I am technically a customer, through my mayoral campaign last year.)
A few other accounts came back, for the people I interacted with on Twitter and Get Satisfaction in the same predicament.
So what now? I might Facebook less. The 69 hours were a good reminder. One of the things I had watched during the sabbatical was the following video via Johnnie Moore, where Douglas Rushkoff speaks about how these big innovators arenât really adding value, only capital. He gives the example of Twitter:
The company that was going to be the maker of things now has to be the site where he aggregates the other makers of things ⊠so that you can show multi-billion-dollar returns instead of the hundred millions that you were doing ⊠You know, for Twitter, I just saw yesterday, they’re failing! Only $43 million last quarter! Isn’t that awful? Oh my God! Only $43 million, which is, I mean, how many employees do they have? I think that would be enough but their market cap is so outlandishly huge, so much money has gotten stuck in there, that they’re gonna be stuck looking for a new way to somehow milk more money out of an otherwise great tool and they’re gonna kill it. They have toâthey have to, âcause they need that home run.
Can we expect there to be greater innovation in such an environment, for any of these platforms? If we arenât feeling the same buzz we once did with these sites, thereâs a good reason, and the above is part of the problem. They arenât creating value any more, only market cap and stock, or, as Rushkoff says, âstatic capital.â
This is what [Thomas] Piketty was really writing about ⊠Capital has the ability to actually create profit, so all these companies, all this development, are really just different versions gaming the system rather than rewiring the system, rebooting it, which is the opportunity here.
I spent part of the last few days looking at the PDF proofs for Lucire Arabia, where at least I know I am part of making something that is creating value and, through its content, helping people. While my original motive for being on Facebook et al was promotional, for my businesses, I have to question if that was the best use of my time, and for creating value. Facebook organized my friends, as Google organized the webânow that those are done, there is the next step.
I left Voxâor rather, Vox left me when the site died and I was no longer able to postâand put more time elsewhere, namely into my first mayoral election campaign. I knew I was creating an opportunity to help people, and the upshot of that is the free wifi system we have in Wellington today (ironically probably very heavily used to update Facebook). It meant more than a means to Facebook and Instagram: the bigger picture was to signal to the tech sector that Wellington is open for business, and that we arenât being left behind in an industry that can create frictionless exports and intellectual capital.
We arenât quite there again in 2014, as Facebook is back, but it may be worth contemplating just where Iâm creating value for business and society when itâs not election year. This year, I don’t have a book plannedâbut it may have to be something where a good bunch of people are going to get some benefit.
Tags: Aotearoa, California, capital, capitalism, Douglas Rushkoff, economics, Facebook, Jack Yan, Lucire, Lucire Arabia, market capital, mayoralty, New Zealand, politics, Silicon Valley, social media, social networking, Thomas Piketty, USA, value, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in business, internet, New Zealand, politics, publishing, technology, USA, Wellington | 2 Comments »
22.08.2013
I have been posting these on the videos’ page as they became public, but maybe I should have added them to this blog, too, for those of you following on RSS. The multilingual one seems to have had a lot of hits. They have been directed by Isaac Cleland, with Khadeeja Dean on sound. Lawrance Simpson was DOP on the first one below.
This one was important to me, as I sent in a submission on the local alcohol policy, leaning more in favour of the hospitality industry’s submissions while acknowledging the need to reduce harm.
Highlights from that submission: ‘The hours feel very limiting as the harm has not come from the opening hours of on-licensed venues, but from pre-loading. Most venues are responsible and safe based on my own custom. A blanket 7 a.m.âÂ5 a.m. with council officers using their discretion on venues failing to meet the highest standards, then restricting them back to 3 a.m. would be a better approach, while acknowledging the changes at the national level.’
âI remain unsure whether harm will be decreased. I have listened to the police and hospital submissions, and I have great sympathy for them. However, if we know pre-loading and drinking education to be the greatest issues, restricting on-licence hours will not help. If it forces people to drink more at home rather than frequent the city, then that doesn’t actually decrease harm: it makes harm harder to police because it is shifted to the suburbs. It adds to the cost of health services because of travel time and the inability for those harmed to get immediate help.’
âThere are some good aspects in its response to the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012âand it was right for Council to respond. The arguments on density and proximity are a good response to some residents’ concerns.’
Finally: ‘My belief is that the root cause of a lot of our drinking culture comes from socioeconomic conditions and, especially with the young, a sense of disengagement and a pessimism about their futures. While it is not the purpose of the strategy, it is something that we must address as a city.’
Judging Miromoda for the fourth (I believe) time, this time at Pipitea Marae. It must have been the first time the te Reo portion of my address was longer than the English. I need to disclose that I am not fluent but I try to make a decent stab at it at every opportunity, for the obvious reason that it is the native language of this country.
Another beautifully shot and edited video from Isaac, this one has proved a bit of a hit on Facebook and has almost had as many views as my dĂ©but 2013 campaign video that was released in April. I decided not to do SwedishâI can speak a littleâand Taishanese, since they might be a bit too niche. The idea: if we need someone to push Wellington globally to help our businesses growâand we accept that the innovative, high-tech and creative ones doâthen doesn’t it make sense to not only elect someone with first-hand experience of those sectors, but can open doors readily, too, especially as the global economy shifts east?
Tags: advocacy, Aotearoa, business, campaign, campaigning, Chinese, creativity, culture, economics, export, fashion, fashion design, French, global economy, globalism, globalization, high-tech, innovation, Isaac Cleland, Jack Yan, Khadeeja Dean, language, Lawrance Simpson, Lucire, macroeconomics, MÄori, marketing, mayoralty, Miromoda, multilingualism, New Zealand, politics, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in business, China, culture, internet, leadership, marketing, New Zealand, politics, technology, Wellington | 1 Comment »
06.06.2013

My friend and colleague William Shepherd directed me to a piece at Quartz by Michele Acuto and Parag Khanna, on how cities are driving globalization more than nationsâa theme I touched upon on this blog in March 2010. As he said, I had called it three years ago, though admittedly Acuto and Khanna have fleshed things out far better.
It’s not just the fact that cities elicit less pluralistic feelings among the populationâWellingtonians felt pretty strongly when PM John Key made his comment that our city was ‘dying’âbut there are practical reasons for cities to lead the way.
First, we can’t afford to wait for central government to take the lead on a lot of policies. When it comes to economic development, cities should be able to mobilize a lot more quickly. The idea is that cities are leaner, flatter and more responsive to change. The reality is that some are mired in bureaucracy, and if voters agree that that has to change, then I would love to see that reflected in this year’s local body elections. Based on what I’ve seen, you won’t find the agent for change within politics, howeverâthey have had more than enough opportunity to voice this very view. This has to come from outside politics, from people who understand what cities are truly capable of, especially when they engage and realize their potential.
Acuto and Khanna cite several examples where cities have had to go above and beyond what their national governments have provided, in the areas of security, climate change and academia. Even stock exchanges are merging between cities:
Stock exchange mergers testify to this changing geography of influence: the popularized link between New York and Frankfurt via the 2011 talks on the NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Boerse merger only hinted at a wider trend that, in the past two years alone, has seen negotiations between Londonâs and Torontoâs stock exchanges, and similar discussions between Sydney and Singapore, Chicago and Sao Paulo, Dubai and Mumbai or the ShenzhenâHong KongâShanghai triangle, all of which indicate how global finance networks are being redrawn through emerging global cities.
In my discussions with MBIE, the New Zealand Government has been aware of this trend, but other than the discussions about regional reform, very little of it has surfaced in Wellington. Yet the government has a focus on Auckland, and Christchurch will be state of the art once its rebuilding is completed. We have a perfect opportunity to use our inherent agility, if only we had our eyes on the prize, and moved forward rather than played politics, stuck with “think local, act local” thinking.
Secondly, cities should find the task of marketing themselves less confusing. A nation-branding exercise, for example, hits a snag early on. When I quizzed Wally Olins about this many years ago, he identified a very obvious problem: which government department pays for it? Is this the province of tourism, internal affairs, foreign affairs, trade, or something else? A city should be able to establish sufficient channels of communications between its organizations and trust in oneâin Wellington’s case, tourismâto handle it. If these channels are broken, again, it’s going to take some new blood and real change to fix them and inspire a spirit of cooperation. There’s a pressing enough need to do so, with a vision that can be readily shared. We need to think differently in the 2010s.
Thirdly, cities can foster offshore relationships more effectively. New Zealand, as a country, has not done as well as it should in promoting itself in various Asian cities, for instance. In one major city, I have had feedback that New Zealand stands out for the wrong reasons, in not having its chief diplomat join other countries in celebrating a particular national holiday. We seem to be on auto-pilot, not being as active as we should. Yet, as Acuto and Khanna point out, almost all global economic activity is being driven by 400 cities. Wellington, especially, should be able to take the initiative and head to the world’s major cities, promoting ourselves and ensuring that the innovators and enterprises here can hook up with others. We can establish trade and cultural links more quickly if we go to the source. Many cities and provinces even have their own economic offices, so they expect such approaches: they want to work at the city level.
And if we head offshore to promote our own, then we should expect that foreign direct investment can flow more effectively inward, too, having established that relationship.
This all makes sense if you consider how democratization has changed the world we live in. On so many things already, we cut out the middle man: in printing, we no longer need to go to typesetters or plate-makers; online publishing has meant our words can go to the public on blogs; social media have allowed us greater access to companies and politicians. Air travel is more affordable than it was 30 years ago. Cities have the resources to engage with citizens and learn about their needs. Offshore relationships can be maintained between trips using Skype and other digital resources. The nation-state will remain relevant for some time, but cities can deliver more relevant, more specialized and more customized programmes in a more timely fashion. Now, do we have the courage to declare that we no longer want “politics as usual” this year?
Tags: 2013, Aotearoa, city branding, collaboration, culture, democratization, destination branding, economic growth, economics, economy, export, foreign direct investment, globalism, globalization, innovation, international trade, internationalization, Jack Yan, macroeconomics, mayoralty, nation branding, New Zealand, policy, politics, technology, trade, Wellington, Whanganui-a-Tara Posted in branding, business, culture, globalization, internet, leadership, marketing, New Zealand, politics, technology, Wellington | 1 Comment »
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