All the right questions

Diary of the last ten hours

7.20am, but really 8.20am, you can’t fool my body clock

Not to go on and on and on about it but I’m once more onto the maunga, te whānau,  once more onto the maunga, dishing out poison by the cube.

You do a fresh serving on day one and then on days 5 and 14 you do re-ups of that sweet sweet poison and those dirty nasty evil Tui-killing rodents, oh they just scarf it up. 

Look at bait station 4! You had quite the party this long weekend didn't you, you Piwakawaka-marauding enemies of the dawn chorus.

Here, do have a complete fresh helping. Spot you on day 14. Or maybe not, punks.

8.42am but really 9.42am etc

They were talking about the Trans Tasman travel bubble as I left the house and I return to find them still going on and on and on about it and that’s just Pop-Up Leader Judith Collins.

Clearly what got put up on the media planning whiteboard last week was: get us all the credit for this, and it's quite touching really because the more she goes on and on and on about it the more I think of Maggie Simpson and her toy steering wheel.

Will I be hightailing it to Sydney? I really don't think so, it's not all that long to  wait until the vaccinations are all done. We've come this far, I can happily go the rest of the wait. 

I’m glad for friends and family desperate to reunite, and of course the tourist industry is waiting for the pipe to be turned back on. But hold that thought because very shortly I want to talk about commentary that's been running this past few days marking the tenth anniversary of Sir Paul Callaghan getting properly stuck into our economic shibboleths which includes: tourism.

9.52am but really 10.52am etc

So about that seminal Callaghan talk. Various people including Rowan Simpson and Nikki Mandow have been writing and talking about it, asking: ten years on, how well have we done, what kind of progress have we made, do we think?

His talk was a clear eyed and frank truth telling about New Zealand and how it earns a living  and as soon as he gave it everybody was getting him to come and say that again please.

For a time I did the MC work for seminars run by KEA. A couple of months later in the Ilott theater  I got to introduce him to the audience and hear it myself.

I’ve heard many accomplished people give insightful stirring presentations but this was altogether  more. You could see the whole room come alive at the clear expression of some nagging doubts and thoughts:  were our most cherished myths really so valid or solid?

No, he said, they're not, and here’s why, and ran through a list of them: we're not the egalitarian society we like to imagine we are; we’re not clean and green; and in a phrase that would echo more than almost anything else he said:

we are poor because we choose to be poor

I would mention that idea in columns and there would always be someone who would ask, what did I mean by that, because it sounded right but they wanted to know more.

Callaghan laid it out in the clearest terms, and Rowan Simpson summarises it helpfully: we choose to own and work on businesses that require long hours for little output per hour worked.

Callaghan also had clear numbers to substantiate that proposition, and this is where the question of tourism becomes especially pertinent.

He calculated the revenue per employee required to maintain the then current levels of GDP, and came up with $120,000 per job. Then he analysed it by sector. I still remember the  ripple in the room as he put the numbers on the screen:

• Tourism: $80k per job

• Dairy: $350k per job 

The deadly arithmetic of this tells you that more tourism jobs you create, and the more you stoke the engine of tourism, the further you will drag the overall average down.

Poor because we choose to be poor

We need better more productive enterprises, is what he said then, and it's as true today. 

We've had ten years to change things, but instead we pushed the accelerator on tourism and the hurt was even greater than it might have been when we had to close the borders. 

I recommend the work Rowan Simpson’s doing on this at the moment on his - oh yes you better believe it - Substack. 

I also recommend going back to his older stuff if you ever have the slightest inclination to launch a new enterprise. 

He’s asking: how do we build on the ideas Sir Paul Callaghan shared, and update them for our current reality? There’s no pat answer to this. But he’s asking all the right questions.

10.52am

The maiden voyage of Te Huia will have brought  Hamilton commuters north to Auckland by now.

I never saw a train service I didn't like. Plenty of people, perfectly satirised last week by Greater Auckland as Bruce Foldedarms have been mansplaining their better way to do a train service, but this feels like one instance where just getting any damn thing rolling is the best place to start and then by trial error and improvement journey onwards to the perfect bullet train future

If you missed it a few weeks ago and would like to see me go on and on and on about trains, and our future, do by all means click here. 

Midday

A midday puzzle! Hello exceptionally well-informed readers of this newsletter! What do you reckon?

You might also ask: will this get a response? and my response is: promise it will.

I intend  to make tomorrow’s newsletter a bit of a mailbag edition where some of the marvellous responses you've been sending me finally get shared.


2.13pm

Finally reading what Kiri Allan has written on Facebook to explain what she's been through and what she faces with her cancer diagnosis.

Cruel for her, cruel for the many many people who love her; so much to deal with.

If life’s at all fair there will also be a day ahead when it’s behind her.

4.20pm