Lamenting Kiwi short-termism
Is five million amagic number for New Zealand to stay vibrant, or is there another number?
Do we want, for example, to be a country that has one dominant city and then some small satellite ones?
Or do we want to have several similarly-sized large cities?
How do we provide the best for our population as we grow, and how do we provide the conditions to get the most from the skills and talents of our population?
And then there is the economy. A constant challenge for New Zealand has been that the domestic market is so small, so we are reliant on exports for our prosperity.
This means we operate in an international trading environment where we have very little control, such as in the case of a Us-china trade war.
And because of skills shortages, we don’t always add the value we could to the goods we export.
Why can’t New Zealand have more specialised engineering, or expensive furniture design and production, or more high-value food product industries?
In New Zealand, we don’t seem to have an inclination or institutions to have the big conversations about what we want to be as a country in the future, not just next year, or in three years, but in the decades to come.
Great minds might be thinking about these things, but it isn’t necessarily apparent at the street level.
A three-year political cycle doesn’t help us, but we manage to have bipartisan support on key foreign policy and other issues.
Change is going to happen, and is happening. The question is: do we want to be a passive recipient of change, or do we want to be active in shaping our role and future?
I know what I would prefer.