The aim of this game is to normalise enterprise culture across all households and whanau. We have set ourselves ambitious goals - more jobs, better-paid jobs, a lift in regional performance overall, and greater career opportunities and pathways so that the region will have the skills needed to fill these new jobs.
While we recognise our traditional regional strengths in premium primary produce and enjoy a well-known and enviable lifestyle, REDS sees the need to lift our performance to ensure we prosper in uncertain times.
Our aim is to maintain and even grow our exports in horticulture and viticulture, using our excellent port and other infrastructure, identifying new markets and delivering innovative products.
And we will be attentive to the visitor economy, attracting more visitors, especially international visitors, and ensuring that all our visitors have a memorable experience in Hawke's Bay.
But we will also need to grow new industries that pay high wages if we are to retain talent and attract new talent from outside the region.
Like all regions, we need the influx of new ideas and new thinking in order to maintain our traditional high levels of innovation. Hence we will be actively supporting entrepreneurs and startups, and we will be identifying and supporting high-growth businesses.
It is businesses growing quickly and in a sustained way that will give the region the high jobs dividend to which we aspire.
New Zealand as a whole is on the cusp of a much more fulsome embrace of the digital economy, with new investments and the clever use of technology platforms to grow new national and international markets. We have to make sure that Hawke's Bay does not miss out on this emerging opportunity.
If we are clever, we will create new enterprises in the digital economy that will grow wages dramatically, create previously unheard of opportunities for our young people, encourage innovation and develop a creative cultural hub that will, in turn, attract more capital investment and talent. Other New Zealand regions are doing this, and we can't afford to be left behind.
How will REDS help us do all this? One of the pillars of REDs is to better link resources to opportunities so that this is done in a far less fragmented way than in the past. Matariki contains a targeted and well-resourced action plan that will help deliver on this.
Many good things are already happening in Hawke's Bay. There are transformative projects in the pipeline, large agencies have considerable capital works programmes coming on stream, new and indeed exotic businesses like RocketLab are coming to Hawke's Bay, the Ruataniwha water storage project has the potential to lift agriculture to a whole new level, with greater certainty for producers and new opportunities for value-add.
Plus, the emergence of focused and economically savvy post-Treaty governance entities will provide major new resources to the region generally and not just to Maori communities.
Present conditions are buoyant. There are strong housing sales in the region and a new optimism in the air. We have climbed up the national economic league table - but we need to cement this position and not rely on declining positions from other regions. We need to not only maintain this momentum but grow new areas of excellence.
The Government has been strongly supportive of the REDS approach and is to be commended for two things in particular - for resourcing key action plan items with considerable new funding to the region, and for allowing us to build our own strategic direction. The partnership with Government has been critical to the success of the process.
2017 promises to be a great year with a solid strategy, a clear action plan and newly focused institutions. We will keep the community fully informed of developments as they take shape, and we aim to set about giving effect to our vision and objectives from day one.
The hard work starts NOW!
¦Wayne Jack is chair of the Regional Economic Development Strategy (REDS) Governance Group and is also chief executive of Napier City Council.
