Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Opinion
OPINION:
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is going on her first overseas trip in two years. She will discover that the rest of the world has moved on.
Last week I went to Australia on business - my first overseas trip in more than two years. I was shocked to seehow Australia is surging ahead.
In Melbourne I visited a facility that had been surrounded by farmland but is now surrounded by huge warehouses.
I visited the new rail intermodal terminal at Moorebank, near Sydney. Containers are railed from Port Botany, lifted by robot cranes and transferred by autonomous carriers for distribution around Australia.
I witnessed the construction of Sydney's second international airport by dozens of giant earthmovers. New motorway connections are being built. A huge new industrial park is being laid out.
Australia's building boom is enormous.
I was a student when I made my first trip to Australia. Back then, Sydney's traffic was gridlocked. My taxi trip from the airport took an alarming proportion of my overseas funds. Last week we sped into the inner city through motorway tunnels.
The media headline that greeted me on my return was that Transport Auckland had lowered speed limits. Their answer to gridlock is to lower the speed limit.
Sydney is proof that Auckland's transport woes are solvable.
Our downtowns are ghost towns. Melbourne was alive.
Our business confidence is plunging. Australians are very confident, perhaps because Australia's inflation rate was 3.5 per cent last year. This should puzzle our Prime Minister, given that she believes New Zealand's inflation is imported. Ardern might even realise most of our inflation is home-grown.
She will only be shocked if she gets out of her limo. But I fear she will not stray from the diplomatic circuit. Then she will never see how much ground we have lost. She will not discover that the build time in Australia for a warehouse is half the time that it is in New Zealand. She will not be able ask why Australia can do public-private partnership agreements to build new motorways but in New Zealand they are over budget and over time.
New Zealand is still at the red traffic light setting because our hospitals cannot cope. After two years our hospitals are in worse shape and cannot handle the next flu season. Ardern might use her trip to find out how the rest of the world is able to live with Covid.
The destinations of Ardern's trips - Australia, Asia, the United States and Europe - demonstrate that we are playing catch-up. Australia has free trade agreements with 26 countries. New Zealand has free trade agreements with just 16. An FTA with the US is not even on the agenda for Ardern's trip to America.
In the past two years, while our Prime Minister hibernated in New Zealand, Scott Morrison made eight overseas trips to Asia, the US and Europe. Australia is moving on. Morrison has just announced a free trade agreement with India. Over time, that agreement will make India Australia's third-largest trading partner.
Our trade negotiations with India are stalled and going nowhere. Our Government is calling on our exporters to diversify from our dependence on China but the PM's trips, while welcome, will not open new markets.
Major cities like Melbourne are alive, while in New Zealand, downtowns are ghost towns, says Richard Prebble. Photo / Supplied
During Covid this columnist urged Ardern to travel. Take advantage of her favourable international image. The PM could have secured early vaccine delivery and so prevented last year's lockdowns. The free trade agreement with the EU could have been signed and the UK FTA achieved a year earlier. If Ardern had travelled, we might have even got an FTA with America.
If Ardern was worried about Covid, she could have visited the 10 Covid-free Pacific Islands. A visit to Solomon Islands might have prevented China from being able to militarise the South Pacific.
The reason Ardern would not travel is because it would have illustrated how much our isolation was costing.
When I made my first trip to Australia half a century ago, I was not even tempted to make Australia my future. If I was a graduate today, I would find it irresistible. It is not just the higher standard of living and the fact that renting in Sydney is no more expensive than Auckland; it is the freedom from New Zealand's "woke" culture. The transtasman brain drain is about to become a torrent.
Today, closing the gap with Australia is not even a goal, but it is possible
Australia has some loony politics too. During my visit, the Liberal-led Government issued a Budget where the future is this May. Maybe for the Liberals there is no future past May, when an election must be held.
It would take years, but New Zealand could catch Australia. We know what to do: have sustained higher productivity. We even know how to catch Australia. Dr Don Brash wrote a plan for the Key Government. It is still in mint condition.
- Richard Prebble is a former leader of the Act Party and former member of the Labour Party.
