Dependence on dairying leaves NZ struggling

We all celebrate anniversaries. Tracy Holmes celebrates hers with her donated liver.

Next week, the Hamilton woman marks 30 years since her liver transplant. She was the first Kiwi to undergo the pioneering surgery.

She was a sick 11-year old growing up in deepest Southland; her liver comes from a girl a similar age who died in a car crash in Britain. The two could barely have been further apart.

It started when Holmes was 18 months old and diagnosed at Southland Hospital with Alpha-1 Antitrypsin deficiency disease, meaning a crucial enzyme was missing from her liver.

Both her parents were carriers of the disease but never showed symptoms. The chances of her parents meeting and having a child born with the disease were one in 3 million.

Her older sister Shelley was born with no health problems.

The first 10 years of Holmes’ life were spent in and out of hospital and her parents were told she would die without a transplant.

One of her specialists at Dunedin Hospital, Professor Gil Barbezat, had just travelled to the United Kingdom and visited Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge where they had started transplants on children.

The maths dictates the backlog will get worse, despite a slow rise in transplants over the years.

Dialysis is estimated to cost more than $150 million nationally each year – about $60,000 per patient.

Notwithstanding the immeasurable difference to quality and length of life, this change on transplants could save the health system millions of dollars.

But the truth is it won’t make a dent in New Zealand’s low donation rates.

The Health Ministry is expected to provide advice to Health Minister Jonathan Coleman next month

Barbezat arranged for the transplant to take place in the UK.

A nationwide appeal spearheaded by the Otautau Lions raised $165,000 to cover the procedure in May, 1986.

Holmes arrived back in New Zealand just after her 11th birthday – but three weeks later she fell ill again. Her doctors never figured out why the new liver was rejected.

She was sent back to the UK and put on a waiting list for another liver. On October 3, 1986 she received her second transplant.

This time she spent several months in the UK as doctors monitored her condition.

She does not know who the on how to lift deceased-donor rates – that’s where real gains may be made.

But why are we only just getting on to this?

For years now, the organ waiting list has been growing at a faster rate than people are donating. Ordinary Kiwis who give an organ – usually to a family member – have found themselves on the equivalent of the sickness benefit.

Health officials have said donor numbers are so low it’s not possible to estimate how many more people would come forward, but surely this bill will make a difference. donor was – only that she was a child of a similar age who had died in a car accident.

Holmes is now 41, there is little to show she is a transplant recipient, apart from a daily cocktail of antirejection drugs. She has no health problems and gets sick only as much as the next person.

Holmes says: ‘‘sometimes I forget I had a liver transplant.’’

Holmes has become an advocate for organ donation, often asking people she meets if they are donors.

She is living proof, she says, that someone who receives an organ donation can go on to live a wonderful life.

Bishop has been a hardworking champion of this bill since he took it over. It was initially submitted in the name of Michael Woodhouse more than seven years ago.

The Government could have simply carried out the necessary consultation and legislated for the change well before now, but perhaps the pool of potential voters this would affect was too small. Of course, that would be true of the previous Labour Government too, which also refused move on it.

Thanks to years of inaction, we’re playing catch-up – and quite a few will die waiting. As an economy, New Zealand seems to have done everything right. We’re safe and secure, well-regulated, and our businesses aren’t overly taxed. Low wages keep our exports competitively priced.

So why are times so lean? Kiwis are working longer hours for less money than people in similar countries.

Economists call this the New Zealand paradox. Despite ticking all the boxes, our economy is not performing nearly as well as it should.

And our standard of living is suffering because of it. According to the OECD, we should be about 40 per cent richer than we actually are.

It hasn’t always been like this. In the 60s and 70s, New Zealand topped just about every quality of life index in the world. What on earth has happened?

At the start of the 1990s, we were in a pretty similar position to Denmark. Our populations and quality of life were similar. They farmed pigs, we farmed sheep.

But since then our economies have parted ways. We thought our golden ticket was dairying. Denmark moved into skilled industries like technology and pharmaceuticals, and has bolted away from us in terms of economic growth.

Geography has definitely played a part. Denmark is connected to Europe, while we’re marooned out in the South Pacific. But I don’t think it’s the whole story.

I’m no expert on this stuff, but I’ve spent the better part of a year talking to people who are, and it seems to me that we rely too much on commodities.

Dairy, our biggest export, is a classic example. We pump out 21 million litres of milk each year, which accounts for nearly a third of our total export earnings. The issue is that most of that milk leaves our shores as milk powder. We aren’t adding value to it by processing it into products such as infant formula.

Now that milk-solid prices have slumped, it’s high time Fonterra followed the global dairy industry’s big players into those value-added markets.

The other problem with our primary industries is there’s a limit on how much they can grow. You can fit only so many cows in a paddock.

We need to look beyond milk and fish and trees and tourism, and start trying to nurture Kiwi businesses working in science and technology.

Fisher & Paykel Healthcare is the textbook example of a Kiwi business excelling in this area, but it’s far from the only one. Take PikPok Games, a Wellington games company. Their most popular game, Into the Dead, has been downloaded around 50 million times.

Companies like PikPok are exciting because their potential for global sales is huge. Unlike dairying, they We need to nurture businesses working in science and technology. can make money without having to increase their costs; you can only sell a litre of milk once, but you can sell a game as many times as you want. Our tech companies are creating high-paying jobs.

But if we want to succeed in the tech industry, we need to ensure Kiwis have the required know-how. That’s where we’re letting ourselves down.

The Ministry of Education has just made coding part of the New Zealand curriculum, which is an enormously positive move. However, I have some real concerns around how we fund scientific research in this country.

Our Government’s annual investment in research and development is just half a per cent of GDP, which is around half of what other successful small countries – places like Finland or Israel – spend. To be fair, there has been an increase in funding over the past several years, but it’s still not keeping up with the demand, and so we run the risk of losing our best scientists to other countries where the funding is better.

I’m also not convinced we’re funding the right kind of research. The discoveries that will produce those major gear-shifts in our economy will come from ‘‘blue sky’’ research, where the scientists get to choose what they investigate. This is a fundamental necessity if we’re going to turn the economic tide.

That’s because successful Kiwi businesses – from Fisher & Paykel to Karen Walker – tend to have one thing in common. That is an ability to find little niches in the world market.

We Kiwis are a smart people who can come up with innovative and cool things. We just need to back ourselves to do that more.

The Hard Stuff With Nigel Latta: The economy airs Tuesday at 8.30pm on TV ONE.