Have we thought of everything? David Kirk has a list of missing items

One of BigCake’s fears is that our economic growth cook book has a lot of important ingredients missing.

Improving the tax system, reducing bureaucracy and cutting red tape, while important, won’t get us to where we want to be.

I’ve blogged before on Philip McCann’s view that fiddling around with these issues, as we’ve done in the past without much success, won’t make much difference to our economic growth prospects.

I’d also filed away a Business Herald interview (Prescription for NZ: Action not talk) with former All Black captain and former CEO of Fairfax Media David Kirk who’s similarly sceptical.

Kirk only nods in the direction of tax cuts, smaller government, privatisation and the other usual economic reform suspects and heads off on an angled run into much more interesting territory, though ultimately I’m not sure it brings us much closer to the goal line.

Kirk is smart and a winner, and he cares about his home country (yeah, I know he’s now an Australian), so when he says we’ve got a problem we should take notice.

He says we’re dreaming if we think we are going to catch Australia without getting radical.

“And those radical things can’t be structural policy things because there’s just not enough leverage in that.”

The “structural policy things” are what Brash banged on about in his 2025 report – cutting government spending, reducing taxes, privatisation and less regulation.

The Herald interview was before the Brash report was made public, so it’s probable that he wasn’t having a bash at Brash.

Anyway he supports these moves, he just feels they are inadequate.

His missing bits include:
• Leadership – “…to cut through this kind of morass of ‘it’s all too hard’ and apathy and disbelief that wealth creation is a good thing to do, it just takes leadership. It takes people out there talking about it, banging away.” Kirk is talking about more than just the politicians here. Those doing the leading need to be “people who are demonstrably balanced human beings that are not flashy people who just want to make money and rip off other people”.

It’s easy to get cynical about the latter comment. BigCake’s initial reaction was ‘that halves the field’, but really it’s crap. With one or two exceptions our leaders are (and have been) good people with good intentions.

• Ambition “We need to be more ambitious for ourselves and for future generations.”
• Love businesses – “…people have to understand the value of private enterprise. No one else makes money – only companies create money – and as a nation we only make money by selling things to other countries.”

• Celebration of entrepreneurs – “…it does take building of a lot of small businesses; and putting in place good opportunities for capital formation, and a lot of them will fail, and it takes an environment where people say, ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter, they had a go’.”
• Skilful business-building capability “Being an entrepreneur gets your business to a certain stage and friends chip in this and that, but you’ve got to build businesses to take on the world.”

• Immigration – Kirk says Australia has benefited enormously from European and Asian migrants. “New Zealand has had less of that. I’m not trying to make any judgment on this, but I think New Zealand has had Asian immigration, and from the Pacific Islands, and I think the ethnic make-up of New Zealand is an issue. Whether there needs to be new ways found to create pathways, to educate, and to create an environment where particularly Polynesian people in New Zealand have got a stake in the entrepreneurial future of the country is an interesting question, and is a question that should be open and people should debate it openly.”

Nothing wrong with this list, but BigCake reckons it still falls short. It’s not really all that radical nor anything we haven’t tried before (Knowledge Wave, Trade and Enterprise, Buy New Zealand, Export Year etc anybody?).

All the same some on the list are hard – changing ones like our lack of ambition and distrust of overt wealth creation really cut against the Kiwi cultural grain.

As I wrote in the post What the hell’s good growth? growth needs to be Kiwi – We must find our own solutions that fit who we are and what we do best.

But that’s not to say we can’t grow up a little on some of our attitudes.