“I’m running [New Zealand] as a country and it’s different from a company. But … some of those skills are incredibly transferable.” - Prime Minister, Christopher “Luxe” Luxon
If New Zealand was a business, what sort of business would it be?
Given the current state of the place — high prices for basic items, the constant threat of youth crime, still happily selling smokes — then you’d have to say New Zealand is a rundown dairy. It’s the sort of corner store that smells a bit, has bollards and a strengthened roller-door out the front to deter ram-raiders, and where it’s best to check the best-before dates on the stuff in the fridges.
Fortunately, the place is now under new ownership, and the new joker behind the counter is just the sort of fellow you want running a grotty dairy: a down-to-earth multimillionaire who once managed what was then the 57th-largest airline in the world.
Like everyone else who’s ever run this third-rate corner shop — though according to the peeling signage out front it was “Once the Envy of the World” — the latest owner has big dreams. But first he’s got to do the place up. He reckons the previous owner, a blowhard socialist, had pretty much run the dairy into the ground by being hopeless with money, sticking up prices, putting red tape all over everything and bizarrely planning not to sell cancer sticks any more because they were bad for people.
Unlike the blowhard, the new broom isn’t some mealy-mouthed spendthrift but is instead “relentlessly focused” on making things better for his customers — though he doesn’t like to think of them as customers, more as self-sufficient economic units.
The first thing the new owner says he’s going to turn his mind to is prices. He’s not going to be doing anything silly like dropping them or regulate the price-gouging supermarket duopoly where he buys a lot of his stock. He’s going to let the market sort it out. Much like him, the market knows best.
Then he’s going to do something about all the youth crime in his shop by chasing the little buggers out and sticking them in re-education camps where they’ll learn to call their betters “sir” and keep their thieving hands in their pockets.
Finally, and he knows many of his customers won’t approve, he is going to keep selling the cancer sticks, mainly because he needs the money to do up the dairy. Besides, he’s good mates with the bloke from the wholesalers.
In his first 100 days of running the dairy, the new broom put up a list of things near the till explaining what he and his minority (though far-from-silent) partners were going to do to “turn our dairy around”. It was sort of thing he’d done when he was running the 57th-largest airline, though many of the items on the dairy list seemed to some customers to be dubious things, like stopping work on stuff the previous owner had started but hadn’t bothered finishing, like the plan to stop selling cancer sticks.
Much like Stalin with his five-year plans, the new owner knew it didn’t really matter whether things got better because of the list. Having a plan and ticking off each “action” was the main thing. As everyone knows, 90% of all progress is the appearance of progress.
Now Easter was over — and the remaining five-year-old chocolate rabbits had been reduced to clear — the new owner and his minority (but far-from-silent) partners decided a new plan of 26 more “actions” was needed to get the dairy through to the end of the financial year.
First on the list was giving the more deserving customers, the ones who weren’t dole bludgers, some of their money back. The dairy’s accountant said this was madness, but the new broom knew it would be great PR — and as everyone knows, the final 10% of progress is great PR.
Big fish, small pond
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a “Super Snapper”.
Shane Jones, the Minister for Oceans and Fisheries (and Purple Prose), says he’s all in favour of a new project to breed a super snapper, which is not a crime fighting snapper, but one more resistant to disease and one that can thrive in warmer water.
The Jones Boy says it could be farmed in places like the previously pristine Marlborough Sounds, and it would help “drive more economic growth”, presumably if you’ve got money in it. There’s no news yet on how big the super snapper will be, but if it is anything like the size of the minister’s ego, it should be enormous.
Exciting as a super snapper is, you’d have to think limiting this idea to big fish is small pond thinking.
If New Zealand really wants to drive economic growth, we should be planning to create a whole range of super animals.
Who wouldn’t want to see giant super sheep and super cows in paddocks, and enormous super chickens laying super eggs for export?
Even better, we could fence off a big patch of South Island bush for a new tourist attraction featuring giant super tuatara and super wētā. Fiordland could be the new Jurassic Park. What could possibly go wrong?
