Fred Frederikse: Mistake offers chance to learn

Fred Frederikse

JIM HOWARD, in his Tuesday Chronicle Opinion contributions, raised some good points: that for economic development to be effective we need to learn from past mistakes; and that the National Party leadership was not receptive to this message when he brought it up at a National Party conference.

The devastating June 2015 flood had barely receded when the Wanganui Chronicle published a Horizons press release signalling that it would stimulate regional economic development by, among other things, increasing the carrying capacity of Whanganui hill country 1.5 per cent.

What were they thinking?

A great deal more than 1.5 per cent of the hill country topsoil had just been swept out to sea.

I experienced the flood at close quarters. The peak of the floodwaters coming down coincided with the peak of a king tide coming up the river almost exactly at our forestry block.

It was a freak coincidence and the result was an impressive 1.5 metres above the previous 1990 flood level, flooding our shed and depositing 200mm of silt over the paddocks. It wasn't just a huge flood; it was more like a liquid slip as the landscape literally started flowing.

Immediately after the flood, Horizons heroically denied that there was a king tide, refused to acknowledge that the Balgownie stopbanks were a waste of money and had actually contributed to flooding in Heads Rd and, to make matters worse, decided that silt could only be dumped back in the river for 14 days. After that a resource consent would be required, which meant that the WDC wasted thousands of dollars moving porridge in Kowhai Park (instead of waiting for it to dry out, as I had).

Horizons is charged with implementing the Government's regional economic development policy in our region. If, as Jim Howard says, the National Party is reluctant to learn from past mistakes, then it has nothing on Horizons.

The National Party/Horizons economic development policy is about picking winners and pushing them, like, for example, driving dairy cows up steeper and steeper slopes.

Picking winners, in other times and places, has worked; but the economic landscape is also littered with expensive, state-directed economic development failures.

As well as picking winners there are other ways to handle economic development. One way is to reduce overheads, and getting rid of Horizons would be a simple way to achieve this.

The other way is harder, but in the long term more productive. That is to enable a creative environment. This doesn't just mean education and upskilling, it also means learning critical thinking, including learning from past mistakes.