Making the most of our assets

When Herald writer Simon Collins embarked on his recent Our Turn tour, his brief was to find lessons from other countries which could help New Zealand become "a better society".

A common theme - controversial here but less so in the countries visited - was the massive investment in biotechnology, both for medicines and food and increasingly for both together (ie nutriceuticals).

But just as important as the economic lessons is that this country needs to make the most of its own unique assets - the people and the lifestyle.

Collins and photographer Paul Estcourt travelled to the United States, Ireland, Singapore, Taiwan, Israel, Australia and Denmark on a project that took six months to plan, research and write.

Collins - a journalist for 25 years - joined the Herald in 1983, serving as Wellington Bureau Chief and then Economics Editor before leaving to launch the former City Voice in Wellington in 1993. He rejoined the Herald last year.

Estcourt has been a newspaper photographer for 35 years, with the Herald since 1971, and has covered every Olympics since 1976.

Says Collins: "For the first time since 'think big', economic activism is back in fashion".

From 1984 until recently, New Zealand's official economic policy was not to have an economic policy - just to "get the fundamentals right" through stable prices and free markets, and then people would be free to create and grow the businesses that would raise our living standards.

It was a wonderful theory. But, as the Our Turn series found last month, no government in other more economically successful countries is as willing to leave the market to work its wonders.

In Singapore and Taiwan, governments have been consistently active in attracting overseas investment, bringing local businesses together in research consortiums, and even investing in the most likely winners.

The Irish government has spent billions over the years to 'buy' jobs from multinationals, adding to the bait with a juicy company tax rate of just 10 per cent.

Governments in Israel and even the United States have kick-started venture capital funds. States and local councils are offering entrepreneurs space in business 'incubators' from Beersheva to Brisbane, from County Kerry to Silicon Valley.

After declining when the Cold War ended in 1989, government research budgets are also growing again almost everywhere, reflecting the importance of research and skilled workers in the new "knowledge-based" sectors.

There is no guarantee that these strategies will work for New Zealand - or even any proof that any particular policy accounts for the success of any particular country, because economics is not a science where you can conduct controlled experiments. Many extraneous variables always cloud the picture.

As New Zealanders, we also need to debate whether we actually want the traffic jams, pollution, stress and environmental degradation that make many richer places arguably less pleasant to live in than New Zealand.

But what Our Turn has shown is that small, relatively peripheral regions can be economically successful if they want to be, and that some of the policies they have followed may have helped. It is now up to us to agree on our own goals, and to find our own way to achieve them.

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