June Newsletter : Wider Perspectives
I’ve been running a couple of global projects recently and it’s really helped to crystallise my beliefs about NZ and why I think we’re just missing the boat.
This is a long-term preoccupation of mine, I hasten to add – I’m not spilling my clients’ beans here at all [not that they sell beans, or legumes of any kind]. My first ever newsletter in 2006 was about talented under-achievers and I’ve devoted a lot of time since then to social and economic development topics.
Personally I guess my horizons lifted even more since my daughter went overseas on her OE in 2006 and decided to stay a while. Then there was that debacle of the Rugby World Cup in 2007. I was over there at the time. In fact a friend had suggested I buy tickets for the final at Stade de France so as not to miss out on such an amazing experience.
Luckily natural frugality and a sense of history prevailed so on the fateful day I was actually in London gritting my teeth and cheering for South Africa. Because there are some places you just can’t go.
That was the tipping point. I decided - no more backing a team that thinks it’s the best but only performs well in the off years. Well OK - not even then.
So anyway – the Black Caps were also doing really appallingly badly at the time so I ditched them as well. And I’ve never liked watching netball – all that screaming – so that was easy to avoid. So there I was, suddenly time-rich and sport-free. Ready for mental stimulation, eager for new challenges.
I have to say that without sport, the opiate, suddenly New Zealand looked like a pale, shabby place. Tired. Like a home you’ve been renting out.
And the new game in town was the American election. I dusted off brain cells that really hadn’t been used since 1984. My media preferences were suddenly American – Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic, Jon Stewart at the Daily Show, Rachel Maddow at MSNBC, Gail Collins and David Brooks and Frank Rich at the New York Times.
Switching into local television every so often I’d see news of murders and child abuse. Switching back to the Internet I’d watch smart TV current affairs and political comedy about issues that actually mattered to me. Where I really felt I was part of the audience.
So maybe it’s just my post-Lord of the Rings malaise, but ladies and gentlemen we seem way too smug and myopic in this country. We are Dunedin in the 60’s and 70’s slowly losing its power and clinging to the idea that it’s all right here.
In world terms we are Hawkes Bay – a great place to bring up kids, unless you’re poor and brown, and a nice place to go when you’re old and almost past it. For the lifestyle.
I’m not saying that the hundreds of thousands of us who live overseas are the best ones. {in fact at the risk of offending almost all my Australian readers – an international researcher involved in tracking New Zealanders in a longitudinal study once told me that “the riff raff go to Australia”]
Logically that doesn’t mean that everyone who goes to Australia is riff raff of course. But I guess if you’re a New Zealander in Australia and you didn’t make that distinction, you should probably draw your own conclusions.
The problem is – to stop our slide to oblivion we really need to attract ambitious people home. Not out of duty or desperation, but because it’s cool and interesting and lucrative. But the more we slide the less they want to come. As I discovered in some economic development work I did a few years ago, only people from Gisborne see Hawkes Bay as a step up the ladder.
The point is that we could really do with having more of us here. Being present matters when you are creating culture and expectations. The people of our international network KEA are lovely and I’m sure individually they probably do put a lot of work our way, but exporting ideas in the form of people is just as much an extractive industry as mining or fishing.
I think we’ve focused too much on rationalisation and not enough on problem solving. We make more and more sophisticated excuses for our demise, but we rarely have a conversation about how to compensate for our deficiencies. Or why it’s important.
It is important. Vital. As the famously expletive-undeleted Richard Mehrtens has said : . “ you can’t save your face and your a#$e at the same time”.
I’d feel a lot more hopeful if we even recognised our insularity as the strategic and financial liability it is, instead of regarding it as part of a set of endearing character traits. It’s not easy to get past the cultural limitations of “ she’ll be right” but we have to because she won’t.
We’re not at the face saving stage. When it comes to the crunch we will need to make like Groove Armada and hustle. As someone I interviewed recently, said “Everyone’s got to try harder now. We’ve all got to improve”.
New Zealand included.
Cheers
Jill
Jill Caldwell is Director of Windshift Communications Ltd. Click Here to contact Jill directly This is a free monthly newsletter provided to direct subscribers only. No further use is made of subscriber information. [Copyright Windshift Communications Ltd 2006]
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". . . In world terms we are Hawkes Bay – a great place to bring up kids, unless you’re poor and brown . . .”
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