Flying High!
Weekend freebie edition
Hello! Here’s this weekend’s freebie edition of More Than A Feilding which begins in the customary way with an invitation to become a paying subscriber.
I’d love to be able to give it all away, but sadly New World and the bookshop and Hammer Hardware continue to put their stuff behind a paywall, so I’m forced to follow suit. Trust you understand.
In a moment, this week's free edition,
Flying High!, from last Tuesday,
plus a preview of other recent editions.
But first, the button.
Flying High!
All the way back in the year 19 hundred and 96, the mighty Air New Zealand, piloted by mighty business people, bought itself a great big share of Ansett, pride of the Australian skies.
This is what is known in business as a strategic move.
They were hoping their strategic move would make Air New Zealand even mightier. They were hoping it would make it a trans-Tasman aviation powerhouse.
However, the mighty business people soon discovered that their investment was in fact a bit of a dog.
The Ansett planes were old.
The Ansett operating costs were freaking huge.
And to the mighty businesspeople's surprise, the Australian aviation market was so full of competition that Ansett was getting, to use a technical Aussie broking term, rooted.
This sort of completely unpredictable turnup for the books is known in business as a black swan. When a black swan turns up, you need to throw all your big rocks at it, hard as you can.
So all the highly paid executives started biffing rocks at the swan like nobody's business.
But it did no good at all.
And then, to their very great surprise, there was an unforeseeable business event as well!! A significant downturn in the global aviation industry happened.
Make no mistake, in the world of business the sharpest minds go to work every day to dazzle us with brilliance, held back only by the needless, suffocating, wet blanket-ness of bureaucrats. However, even the most brilliant business brains cannot predict things like a downturn in the market and your investment turning out to be a dog.
And sadly that is what happened to their big strategic move. And the mighty Air New Zealand began to lose financial altitude. And then it lost more altitude.
And then, of all the rotten luck, after the mighty Air New Zealand bought out the rest of Ansett, they found themselves in a ladies and gentlemen this is your captain speaking I'm afraid all four engines have failed fiscal situation.
First Ansett gets grounded due to finding itself in an Ansett being insolvent situation. And next thing you know poor old the mighty Air NZ is also taking a nosedive spiral into the compost.
I mean, who could have predicted any of this?
What was left now for mighty business people to do?The only thing they could do! They had to grit their teeth and go to BloodyWellington.
They had to ask the useless government and its waste-of-space public servants for help.
God. Just stand in their shoes for a moment.
How must it have felt to have to say to the useless government, full of Wellington public servants,
Hey bro can you please help us out?
And:
As you know we're absolute titans of business who don't need wet blanket bureaucrats telling us irrelevant facts and figures and what not to do.
And:
But the thing is we're in an all-four-engines-have-failed situation.
And:
Also, if we go down, your tourism industry goes down too. Be a shame to see that happen.
Now, possibly at this point one of the useless public servants might have cleared his throat and said, actually minister if you look at this spreadsheet and these briefing papers you'll see we mentioned the riskiness of fricken huge operating costs and buying a dog, and whatnot. It’s even in CAPS.
And possibly the Minister may have said, now’s not the time Brian.
But we can only guess.
What we do know is this. The government came through for them; hundreds of millions of rescue dollars, and $885 million for an 80% equity stake in the mighty Air NZ.
So it turns out that even wet blanket public servants all obsessed with what might go wrong can have their uses!
Because if that hadn't happened, there would not have been an Air NZ for Chris Luxon to become the CEO of!
And his genius for turning around profitable airlines and doing mergers and acquisitions that totally did not go wrong, would not have been all over the media.
And it might never have occurred to the National party to say, this guy might be able to stop our revolving leadership door problem.
And if that had never happened, we would not be blessed today with a Prime Minister who understands how very important it is to have a PM who lives and breathes business and who doesn't need to be told what to do by facts-and-figures-obsessed bureaucrats who keep wanting to warn you what might go wrong.
It doesn’t bear thinking about eh.
In tomorrow's edition: A pandemic sneaks into the best little country on the Planet Earth and grounds nearly all the planes. Who could have predicted that? What ever will happen next?
Also in More Than A Feilding this week
Friday
What it’s like to have a reactionary coalition government
Week in review, quiz style
Thursday
Hear more from Shane Jones at Kia Kaha primary school
Thursday school journal
Wednesday
I honestly don’t know you any more
Also Monique says you’re dumb
Monday
More on America
More on Trump
Sunday
Surely it won't happen
Sunday column
A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending, he said.