NZ’s ‘trusted’ reputation is one of our greatest assets
Iwas talking to an old mate from Colorado last week. Colorado is one of the more rural states in the United States, with a land mass of 270,000 square kilometres and a population of 5.5 million. Virtually the same as Aotearoa on both metrics.
One of his family has just gone down with Covid-19 and she’s not the first. Currently, 516,000 Colorado folk have had the virus and 6438 have died from it.
She’s a fangirl of New Zealand and the fact that only 2622 people have had Covid-19 and just 26 have died from it.
She’s also dumbfounded by the fact that last year, when the New Zealand Government asked people to stop working and stay home for six weeks, virtually the whole population just did exactly that.
‘‘Here in the US, the Government knows that no-one trusts them and nobody would obey them if they told them to stay home,’’ he told me. ‘‘It’s staggering that that many New Zealanders trust their Government that much.’’
She’s not wrong about the trust thing. Although we love to bitch, moan and complain, 80 per cent of
New Zealanders trust the public service.
Across a range of international indices, New Zealand ranks as a world leader in trust and confidence in government. By contrast only 45 per cent of OECD citizens trusted their national government in 2019, and that trust has dropped further since Covid.
New Zealand is first equal in the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, second in the International Civil Service Effectiveness Index and third in the 2020 World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report. We’re also recognised globally as the easiest country to do business in.
So not only do New Zealanders trust their Government, foreigners do too. It was this idea of trust in brand New Zealand, along with some world-leading intellectual property, that led to a little Crownowned
company being set up back in 2014. I know a bit about it, as I was the person who set it up. Fortunately, I was followed by some smarter folks who made it work.
New Zealand Government to Government (NZ G2G) sells New Zealand’s reputation along with its specialist intellectual property to foreign Governments. Effectively it generates a commercial return on money historically invested into various government agencies. It’s an audacious idea that seemed destined not to work. But work it has.
It was operated as a joint venture between New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and there was the perception that it could get stifled by bureaucrats and diplomats. But it didn’t.
In fact it’s shown some pretty good growth. Six years after its inception, G2G announced this week it had completed brokering 95 deals across 21 companies, bringing in export revenue of more than $53 million.
That’s a tidy chunk of change. But it’s only the beginning. Singapore and Ireland have operated similar ventures for the past decade and bring in hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue a year.
But it’s more than just revenue. It’s also strengthened diplomatic ties with countries and given some pretty useful professional development to our government workers.
The services and capability we sell have changed over this period. Today the three big areas are sustainable food systems, government effectiveness and innovation and education.
The Middle East and Southeast Asia are still the core markets, but there are outliers as well.
There’s a five-year horticultural redevelopment programme in northern India, agribusiness modernisation in Sri Lanka and rodent control in Australia.
The world watched how New Zealand handled itself during Covid-19 and seemed to be saying: ‘‘I don’t know exactly what they’ve got, but we should have it as well.’’
There seems to be a growing awareness that New Zealand is good for the world, and that can only be a good thing. Now if only a few more government agencies were keen to sell it.
Which brings us back to trust. Each year Colmar Brunton surveys New Zealanders to rank 58 public service agencies across four pillars – social responsibility, leadership, fairness and trust. Last week it released the 2021 results and the six most trusted agencies were Fire and Emergency, Callaghan Innovation, Civil Defence, Customs, DOC and MetService.
Sounds like the next wave of potential G2G deals to me.