New Zealand – Truly a ‘Rock Star’ Economy?

Well, I suppose there are ‘Rock Stars’ and ‘Rock Stars’... so you can take your pick...

Elvis (The King)

Jack Black (The Joker)

Jon Bon Jovi (The ’80s)

Phil Rudd

It only happens once a year...

Pearls of Wisdom From the Not-so-very-distant Past

The other day I stumbled across this article from 1994. Originally published by an Auckland business (Hippo Marketing Limited) long before everybody discovered the Internet and the World Wide Web, the thoughts on the Creative Industries contained therein are as true now as ever. Kim (Hippo) Brady, thank you for these words of wisdom!

Do It Yourself!

Ahh, good old Kiwi ingenuity! That great Do-it-Yourself mentality for which we are renowned. lt’s a truly wonderful thing – or is it?

In today’s competitive economy, with the pressure on everyone to run an increasingly ‘tighter ship’, many organisations have dispensed with their advertising agency or in-house marketing professionals, seeing them as ‘unnecessary expenditure’. After all, newspapers will design an ad for free, radio stations will write a commercial as part of the overall schedule cost and someone in the office could run up a brochure on their PC with the aid of a photocopier and a bottle of twink. So why pay good money to an outside specialist?

The answer lies in that key word – “Specialist”.

Just as your company employs each worker in his or her most productive capacity, your promotional endeavours be approached with an eye for maximum return. Every aspect of a promotion including research, branding, packaging, quality control and final presentation is designed to showcase your saleable commodity to its fullest advantage and any marketing activity should work towards this.

It’s true that, while most media will offer to produce your ad for free, they’re also doing the same for many other companies in any given week, with the result being your ad will look and sound just like many others. You’d hardly instruct your sales team to tell potential customers your product or service is ‘average’, its price ‘about the same as usual’ and its benefits ‘negligible’. Yet poorly produced advertising and promotional literature can communicate all this at a single glance. Or worse, have no impact at all.

There’s a simple truth about advertising, marketing, promotions and PR. They’re time and labour intensive, and when not done right will reflect poorly on the image of your company and the integrity of products or services. The simplest advertising or marketing job entails numerous steps, each involving various individuals who are specialists in their field.

Fortunately, recent years have seen an increase in the number of these talented professionals working in small collectives or a freelance capacity. People like photographers, designers, copywriters, graphic artists and illustrators and related professionals.

If you were to tap into this pool of talent you’d find that you don’t need to spend big bucks to have a job done right. The money simply needs to be spent wisely, in the right areas, allowing you and your staff to get on with what you do best.

‘Foiled’ again!

Curse you, Jim Hickey!

I have a bone to pick with you, Jim.

This was supposed to be a fantastic Labour Weekend. All last week you were assuring us that, unlike Labour weekends of years past, this one was really going to be one out of the box. A massive high-pressure system was headed our way across the Tasman, and given the favourable conditions it was going to anchor over the whole of New Zealand for the whole three day weekend. Bear in mind that due to the vaguaries of the New Zealand Holiday Act three day weekends have been in short supply this year and the last one was in June. So we’re taking a long time between drinks here.

Yes, we know that it’s difficult to get accurate weather forecasts for New Zealand. As NIWA has explained, we’re a long, thin landmass nestled in the ’Roaring 40s’ and conditions can be very unpredictable. The Finn Brothers even sang that we really can have ‘four seasons in one day’. That’s why the guys at the Met Office get you to throw in a few caveats with every forecast, just to cover yourselves. You know, like “Mainly fine apart from occasional showers”, ”Settled conditions, becoming changeable in the afternoon”, that sort of thing. But Jim, you really did it this time. All last week you told us it was going to be fantabulous, amazing, incredible weather over most of the country all weekend. And all right, over much of the country you got it right. But guess where you didn’t?

Sure, as the old saying goes, “you can’t beat Wellington on a good day”. That’s absolutely true. But Wellington didn't even get ONE good day on this Labour-Weekend-to-beat-all-Labour-Weekends. Saturday was overcast and drab. It was worse than that on Sunday, Jim. And it didn't get any better on Monday. Maybe the sun was shining in other parts of the country but it sure as hell wasn’t shining in one part of the country for the whole three days. In fact if only brightened up this afternoon. And that fact even made the Six O’Clock News Hour!

We’re understanding folk here in Wellington, Jim. We understand that some factors are simply beyond your control and you can’t always get it right. We understand that you’re a ’Naki boy at heart who has been forced to work in the Big Smoke up north. Do yourself a favour, next time you think you see a fantabulous long weekend coming up, play it safe and leave yourself a little wriggle room. Who knows, we may all be pleasantly surprised!

NZ Leads the World... again!

Yes, this month it happened. As of 1st July 2010 Godzone becomes a world leader... again. We are one of the first, if not the first country to have a fully-functional, albeit very watered-down ETS.

For those that I have lost already, an ETS is an Emissions Trading Scheme. And, to quickly recap on an earlier article in this blog, an Emissions Trading Scheme is a means of penalising those that emit so-called ‘greenhouse gases’ that are, apparently, making the Earth warmer. Just how the Earth is supposed to be getting warmer I have no idea, if I look out the window into a Wellington winter I can see little evidence of it, but apparently it’s happening. Somewhere.

So, like other countries, New Zealand has to make a contribution to combat this. We produce something like 0.2% of global emissions, so if we slap a levy on anybody that drives a car, uses electric power, hops on a plane or lights a fire that should take care of that part of the problem. We also need to do something about all the agricultural ruminants out there but the Agricultural Belch Tax part of the equation (also mistakenly called the ‘fart tax’) doesn’t come into effect until around 2015.

So by 2015 a whole heap of money will be siphoned out of the local economy and sent... where exactly?

Apparently it’s going to be used to buy ‘Carbon Credits’. A Carbon Credit is an intangible thing. You can’t see it or feel it. It makes no noise and the average person wouldn’t know one if he fell over it in the street. I have no idea who sells them, though I know he’s going to become very rich. And apparently if you buy one of these things you’re saving the world.

They say some joker from the Beehive called Nick Smith is busy right now working on a ‘charm offensive’ that may explain the ETS better than I can. Call me a cynic, but somehow I doubt it.

It’s St. Paddy’s again...

Well, it was yesterday anyway. And true to form, thousands of people discovered that they had green blood and spent the day rolling in and out of pubs wearing funny little green felt bowler hats, drinking green lager and Guinness and looking for Huilis to gatecrash.

What is it about St. Patrick’s Day that gets normally apathetic Kiwis going like this? Our National Day, Waitangi Day, is spent at the beach at a family barbecue or watching the cricket on TV (unless you’re one of the small mob or protesters who travel up to Waitangi every year to protest). Anzac Day, the day New Zealand discovered itself as a nation on the battlefields of Gallipoli, is a day when some of the population go to the Dawn Parade Service while the rest of us roll over and go back to sleep for another few hours. But St. Paddy’s gets bigger and bigger. In fact it has become for the Publican what St. Valentine’s Day is for Florists.

The main reason for this, of course, is the party. The Irish have a reputation for being a crowd of party animals. This is also celebrated by the Maori, who never like to be left out of such things, who now recognise St. Patrick’s day as a great opportunity for TWO party cultures to come together. It just gets bigger and bigger. In fact, there's a new movement, rapidly gathering strength, who would like to see the day added to New Zealand’s rather meagre selection of National Public Holidays. One downside of that is that if this were to actually happen, St. Paddy’s Day Revellers would probably get hit with a Public Holiday Surcharge.

The other downside is that if the workplace skiving that happens on March 17th was suddenly legitimised as a Public Holiday, it wouldn’t be half as much fun.

St. Patrick, by all accounts, was evidently a Roman by the name of Patricius, based in Britannia towards the end of the Roman occupation. He seems to have been a fairly stoic individual who had a calling to travel to a small island off the West Coast inhabited by the Picts (whose main claim to fame was the love of a good fight, the worship of Pagan Idols and a certain fondness for blue body paint), preach the good word to these heathen, and get rid of all the snakes. I doubt if he even had time for a pint at the local before he shot off.

I wonder what he would have made of it all?

Written on a Sunday afternoon...

Reflection on Sunday afternoons, as described by the late Douglas Adams

Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged is a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would be the first to admit, but it keeps him busy. Keeps him on the move. For Wowbagger is one of the Universe’s very small number of immortal beings.

Most of those who are born to immortality instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger is not one of their number. Indeed, he has come to hate them, and refers to them as ‘the load of serene bastards’.

He had his immortality inadvertently thrust upon him after an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, although many people have ended up looking very silly, or very dead or, more often than not, both, trying.

To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody. But even the attractions of immortality can pass, in the end it was Sunday afternoons he just couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you know you’ve taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, or that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the ‘Long Dark Teatime of the Soul’.

So things began to pall for him. The smug smiles he used to wear at other people’s funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everybody in it in particular.

And it was at this point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this:

He would insult the Universe.

That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in Alphabetical Order.

When people protested to him, as they sometimes did, that the plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a steely look and say, “A man can dream, can’t he?”

Exams

It’s that time of the year again... more words of wisdom from Mr John Clarke, AKA Fred Dagg...

I suppose there are some of you out there working up to sitting exams of one sort or another and I’d just like to say that all my sympathies go with you, in fact I even had to sit an exam myself once. I didn’t do particularly well because I had a bit of a headache - the night before I’d been rubbing a bit of brandy into my brain to settle the nerves a bit and I think it might have got away on me.

I thought the questions were very difficult, actually it was a maths exam and I never was very smart with numbers. In fact I wasn’t even supposed to be doing the maths exam, but I’d fronted up on the wrong day and once I was through the door they wouldn’t let me out for a few hours.

The first question was all about calculating the compound interest travelling at the speed of light past three men who took four days to mow a lawn of six acres. Well, as you can understand, I didn’t see the answer leaping off the paper and hitting me between the eyes, so I sat back and delivered my old favourite, an essay on what I did in the holidays. Then I got down on the floor and snuck off home. I got four percent for that exam. They said I’d got the answer wrong, but they gave me a couple of points for my reasoning, which was interesting because when I sat the English exam I wrote the same essay and got three percent.

So it’s really just a matter of luck, so keep at it and try to avoid getting headaches of the kind I mentioned before.

Super City or Super Lemon?

I’m consistently amused by all the goings-on north of the Bombay Hills.

The latest Super City fracas is the most current entertainment. Actually I think it’s a great idea. We have a long history of over-representation and over-government (we still have far too many clowns in the big house in Wellington, most of whom are there not to represent their constituents but simply to make up the numbers and follow the party line). But as far as Local Bodies go, why do we need seven local bodies to make up Greater Auckland – and while I’m at it, with roughly a third the population of Greater Auckland why does the Greater Wellington region need six local bodies to look after our needs and wishes?

Now I’d be the first to say that this needs to be done right. You can’t have some Super-Mayor calling the shots for his cronies at the expense of everybody else. And I am concerned that this is exactly what would happen if the current Mayor of Jafaville, Banksy, got his hands on the wheel. Banksy, who is definitely of the opinion that being Mayor of Auckland City means that he is the Greater Power, seems to think that he has the automatic right to be Mayor of Auckland Super City. And sorry Banksy mate, I don’t think that’s necessarily the best call. It’s undemocratic, for a start. And democracy at Local Body level definitely matters.

We have Local Body elections every three years. And while I feel it’s important that I vote (I mean, these clowns are going to be spending my money for the next three years) nine times out of ten, try as I may, I don’t have a clue who, or what, I’m voting for and how it’s going to affect my life. Having to vote for up to twenty Councillers, District Health Board Members, Greater Wellington Regional Council Members doesn’t mean anything to most of us. They may live down the road, have 2.5 children and a pet iguana but what are they going to do once in office? There again they also say you have to be fairly warped to run for Local Government in the first place. Of course we have a lot of that going on in Central Government as well, half the clowns there we never hear of until Election Year cones around and then the ones with the high profiles or the ones that are not going to sneak in the back door on the party list all put their hands up, so we could do with a bit of rationalization in that area as well.

Ideally centralising Local Body affairs would cut out a lot of dead wood, not to mention cutting costs through elimination of duplication of resources. And hopefully with fewer, higher-profile candidates, we might get to know a bit more about them and what they really stand for. In the best of worlds they might actually be accountable to their constituents, of course this is probably hoping too much.

But what has really intrigued me about Auckland’s progression to Super City is this business about Maori Seats. It took the MP for Local Government Rodney 'Perkbuster' Hide threatening to throw his toys out of the sandpit to force the National Party’s hand to say, even at this early stage in proceedings, that it’s not going to happen. And now the Dr. Pita Sharples of the Maori Party is up in arms. “No special Maori seats on the council? That’s not democratic!”

Now excuse me Dr. Sharples. But this is democracy in its purest form. It’s not as if we’re saying that Maori can’t stand for the Super Council. In fact, what we are saying is that if a Maori candidate comes forward is the best person for the job everybody will vote for him (or her). You won’t need to be on the Maori roll, or stand as the token Maori candidate! And that, Dr. Sharples, is what democracy is really about!

Give it back!

While it’s long been suspected that our politicians have only their own best interests at heart, this new spirit of ‘openness and transparency’ over Parliamentary expenses has been a shock to us all.

For the first time NZ taxpayers can see some of the costs associated with the traditional ‘rorting the system’ that has gone on since time immemorial in Parliament. No wonder Deputy Prime Minister Bill ‘We must all tighten our belts’ English has moved to repay just over half of the $24,000 that taxpayers have paid him to live in his own Wellington home for the last six months! While this action was taken after days of English asserting that his expense claims were completely legal, in the middle of a global economic downturn there were much more important things that a Finance Minister should be worried about, with redundancies and cost cutting across all sectors of the economy (including Government departments, but apparently excluding the Government itself) this was a really bad look. However other MPs from all political patries are ‘hanging tough’. They continue to live in taxpayer-funded Ministerial residences or claiming accommodation expenses while renting out their Wellington properties, sometimes to other MPs (who, of course, get an accommodation subsidy)! It all looks like an incredibly cosy, taxpayer-funded money-go-round

ACT MP Sir Roger Douglas is the toughest nut to crack. Originally touted as one of Parliament’s ‘Perk Busters’, ‘Roger the Dodger’ has attempted to justify the use of taxpayer subsidies for travel expenses associated with a trip he took, together with his wife, to England to see his grandchildren. He justifies the expense claim by pointing out that as a result of his time spent serving the public as a politician he is legally entitled to ‘Roger’ the public to the tune of a 90% subsidy of international travel expenses. While it may be legal, in the present economic climate it is certainly not moral. When even backbench MPs earn at least three times the average annual wage, plus expenses and a gold-plated, taxpayer-subsidised superannuation scheme, there is certainly no need for politicians to expect the taxpayer to stump up for their holidays as well. At the present time many taxpayers can only dream about overseas holidays, a fact which has definitely depressed the local travel industry!

Which brings us to the Philip Field affair. Once a promising young MP from the Pacific Islands, Field has just been found guilty of accepting bribes and of corruption. He got a Taiwanese tiler, along with other Asian tradespeople, to work on his properties in Auckland and Samoa on the understanding that he would use his influence to get them New Zealand residency. He could get up to six year’s imprisonment, however under the current regime his wife is still entitled to all his perks as an Ex-MP.

It’s time all Politicians, of all political persuasion, got their snouts out of the public trough and smelt the coffee! Which is why I think the Tom Scott cartoon shows the hypocrisy associated with politics so well! (Is it any wonder we loathe them?)