Mission that’s not impossible
The New Zealand Initiative has a boldness challenge.
Small countries like ours have some advantages, such as sometimes acting quickly and decisively on policy and strategy.
They also have disadvantages, such as a dearth of independent economic, social and policy analysis. Orthodoxy rules, which usually means the government of the day picks the advice that best suits its political agenda.
Worse, combining speed with orthodoxy creates great risk for government and business. They can charge ahead with insufficient regard for big shifts going on in the world.
We’ve never solved this dilemma. The Business Roundtable was a strong source of advice from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. It greatly influenced successive governments and was widely backed by business.
It became the new orthodoxy, but one seriously out of step with large segments of society. Worse, it failed to evolve with the world. By the mid-1990s it was still pushing its hard right, pure market, small government ideology.
By the new millennium the Roundtable had made itself irrelevant. It had advice to give on the likes of e-commerce and new international business models for small, highly entrepreneurial NZ companies.
We had to wait until the establishment of the New Zealand Institute in 2004 to begin to get analysis on New Zealand’s best options for this new world economy. David Skilling and his successor Rick Boven produced a wealth of research and advice.
However, government and business were too cautious to break out of their status quo and run with the Institute’s insights.
By 2012, the business community had a problem. Roger Kerr, the man who had driven the Roundtable with fierce determination from its inception, had died the previous year and the organisation’s narrowly ideological business supporters had dwindled to a few. The Institute’s more broad-minded corporate supporters were losing their enthusiasm too.
In a rare rapprochement, the two groups combined to create the New Zealand Initiative in 2012. It hired Oliver Hartwich, a German who began his career as a policy researcher in the UK in 2004.
The choice of ‘‘initiative’’ as the new organisation’s operative word in its name was telling. Two dictionary definitions are ‘‘the ability to assess and initiate things independently’’ and ‘‘the power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do’’
To mark its fifth anniversary, the Initiative has just published its Manifesto 2017, laying out its policy advice to all parties.
Some characteristics are common to its views on local government, housing and education: a very strong belief in local entrepreneurship by councils, companies and schools; strong competition between highly local organisations; and the success this formula has brought to German and Swiss communities competing with their domestic counterparts.
Some of the Initiative’s policy
Government and business were too cautious to break out of their status quo and run with the Institute’s insights.
recommendations make great sense, such as central government granting local councils new forms of revenue generation. Our government finance is the third most centralised in the OECD, which denies councils the opportunity to invest properly in their communities.
While the Initiative does quality work, that output is far too narrowly focused and inadequately adapted to New Zealand. Moreover, it offers solutions to particular issues in the three sectors. It does not offer a coherent view on how the sectors might progress comprehensively.
Nor does it do research on global business and economic trends and what they mean to New Zealand, the analysis that made the Institute’s insights so useful.
Its biggest weakness though, is its complete lack of work on worldchanging challenges such as climate change, and the profound technology shifts in agriculture, energy and other sectors driving the transition to low carbon, more sustainable economies.
Nor does it offer any insight on how New Zealand might best respond to the fast changing nature of societies, politics and government underway in some countries.
If the Initiative could articulate a strategy for its own rapid development, hopefully it would gather greater support from business and wider society. Then it could fulfil the bold mission its name promises.