Posts Tagged ‘Don Brash’
Don – it’s not a fixation
I think I’ve mentioned Don Brash more times than any other person in the short time BigCake has been around.
I’m not fixated, targeting him or anything.
One of the principles of BigCake is not to get personal – there’s already enough playing the man rather than the ball going on in New Zealand’s economic debate.
I just think Brash is a good man with ideas that are a mixture of good and bad.
His core motivation is to do the right thing by New Zealand and correctly believes there are no soft options. Allegations that he’s “looking after the rich” and has “no concern for the poor” are inane.
In the 2004 Listener story I mentioned in the previous post (Voice from past calls for new future) writer Jane Clifton says:
Former Prime Minister David Lange, who rates Brash’s integrity and open-mindedness extremely highly, suspects his very strength – his rigorous long-term approach to life – will be fatally compromised by politics’ demand for instant answers.
Lange says: “He’s a bit like Lee Kuan Yew. Don Brash was not a six o’clock news man, not a monthly poll man, not even a triennial election man, but he was looking ahead. He has never promised anything except the long haul, never talked about gain without sacrifice, has talked about putting money aside, not about the Lotto win.”
Classic Lange!
Voice from the past calls for new future
The left-leaning (they’d say “progressive”) Fabian Society, once a big influence on Don Brash (true!), is back on the scene in New Zealand calling for “a wider debate” on economic policy including “a wider range of progressive options and solutions to consider and discuss”.
So the society’s launching a seminar and lecture series this month and next in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch focusing on tax and budget issues.
The ‘there is no alternative’ approach to fiscal matters has stifled debate and is no longer acceptable, the society says.
However, if the lecture series is confined to tax and budget issues it seems to BigCake that there will be a bit of stifling going on.
A core BigCake belief is that it is a narrow interpretation of our economic problems that is holding New Zealand back.
I agree that “the public discourse for many years has been limited to the solutions of the neo-liberal right. They haven’t worked.”
But there are a hell of a lot of more effective and interesting options out there in policy land than “budget and tax issues”.
The Fabian Society sees itself as “a progressive think tank to balance those on the right”.
BigCake, who is getting on a bit, sort of sees the Fabian as quaintly old fashioned (and not necessarily in a bad way in terms of their core values), so it’ll be interesting to see if they will be around longer this time and what real influence they have.
The society has had an off and on existence in New Zealand, though it has been at times a powerful influence.
In a 2004 Listener interview, Don Brash confessed: “Most of my young adult life I voted Labour, and I took a Fabian socialist kind of view, that the government had an obligation to help disadvantaged people, and the only way to do that was by writing out cheques, redistributing wealth, the whole socialist thing.”
I think the Fabians were also exerted a powerful influence on former PM David Lange.
Famous British members include George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells.
In the UK the Fabians are affiliated with the Labour Party and all Labour Prime Ministers have been members.
Not sure whether New Zealand Society has similar ties. Their website doesn’t say.
Innovation – well sort of
Innovation maybe the single most important talent that will get us out of our economic growth quagmire, though we are not as crash hot at it now as we like to think we are.
But BigCake worries (based on the work of two Government taskforces) that we once again maybe taking a blinkered view of growth opportunities, this time in innovation.
As mentioned earlier (What the hell’s ‘good economic growth’?) any increase in the size of our economic cake has to be smart.
Applying innovation to New Zealand’s natural resources – frozen meat, aerial topdressing, the herring-bone milking sheds – helped make (and for a long while keep) New Zealand as one of the world’s wealthiest countries.
Disconcertingly we may not now be as good at innovation as we imagine we are.
An Innovation Index produced by IBM and the University of Auckland shows our overall innovation record has flatlined for the past decade, rising 13% between 1998 and 2000, then levelling off and dropping in 2008, no doubt recession induced.
Ummm, that’s what happen when you, in the words of think tank the New Zealand Institute, don’t make “as much effort as other small countries that are seeking advantage from innovation”.
BTW – the usual advice for companies in recessions is to increase their innovation spend. It may hurt, but will pay off latter.
Anyway, the Government has recognised the importance of innovation to economic growth, and that dread word productivity, by indicating it will make science and innovation a “priority” for new spending in this year’s Budget. Remember most of the public sector will be (in fact are) on starvation rations.
But there appears to have been a couple of gaps in thinking about the innovation issue when ministers commissioned taskforce reports into lifting our economic performance.
First up, Brash’s 2025 taskforce report only makes passing mention of innovation, mostly along the lines of: “What markets do best is to encourage innovation…”
Surprisingly the report does give a plug for Government intervention in the venture capital market – one of the big drivers of business innovation – through taxpayer investment in the NZ Venture Investment Fund.
The other oversight is raised by commercial lawyer Andrew Simmonds in an innovation perspective on the Capital Market Development Taskforce’s report.
He says the taskforce’s focus was “unduly narrow in two important areas”:
1) the report concentrates on the publicly funded elements of the innovation sector (universities and crown research institutes) and overlooks the large and vibrant private innovation sector and
2) the taskforce put “too much emphasis on growing innovation companies with NZ capital… In many situations, NZ innovation companies will be better served by offshore capital…”
This is a touchy area, but Simmonds is right and New Zealanders need to get over their reflexive attitude that overseas investment in our companies is bad.
It maybe so, but most of the time not, particularly for our exporters.
It’ll often come down to a choice between having a small New Zealand company that exclusively finances itself locally, or the opportunity for the Kiwi company to grow into a business of truly international scale.
This is not just about money. What international investors bring to the party include access to offshore markets, management experience and local knowledge in offshore markets.
Do we want 100 percent of a biscuit or half of a cake?