New Zealand’s future
Our place in an Asia-Pacific centric future.
Traditionally, New Zealand is seen as a little country at the bottom of the world, that also somehow manages to be the first to scale to the highest of heights globally; Rutherford, Hillary and increasingly new tech business builders like Drury. New Zealand is a people whose pursuits have and continue to impress on the global stage. Yet, in a Pacific centric future, it will be New Zealand’s natural land, river and sea wealth, ease of doing business, educational prowess and unpopulated lifestyle that will become the object of the globes desire.
Educating our Indonesian Neighbour
Younger populations make for economic growth markets. Indonesia’s population is the fourth biggest in the world and will have grown by another 24.4 million more people by the end of this decade.As much as we bemoan the New Zealand education system, it consistently ranks on top of the world and is valued by growth economies. Indonesia is under-served by New Zealand learning organisations with only 691 students studying here in 2011. New Zealand companies such as Cognition Education are already leveraging our education superiority by exporting that knowledge to Qatar, Oman and Abu Dhabi. New Zealand has an opportunity to fulfil that growing need in Indonesia too where 30% of the population is under the age of 15.
Commuting Digitally
Until you’ve crammed on the Northern Line in Clapham Common for your commute to Bank in London, you don’t know what a morning rush hour is. Over one million people arrive in the City Square Mile with 96,000 of them squeezing in on the Bank tube at morning rush hour. It gets so hot, that your shirt can be soaked through before you even swipe your security card for work. Unsurprisingly, it was voted the most hated tube station by Metro Magazine.
Tubes matter, when life satisfaction is directly related to your nearest tube stations connectedness to your work and friends. By 2016, Bank tube will have reached capacity. Subway transport into Manhattan has already reached capacity at 112,790 passengers. Since most peak period train passengers are on their way to jobs, overcrowding causes a stressful commute that can reduce the productivity of these workers. This has cost implications for firms located in any CBD whether it be Manhattan, London or Mumbai.
Our unpopulated lifestyle, doesn’t stop us from commuting digitally, where global companies could call on New Zealand’s army of digital commuters for high tech resourcing. I work with clients in the US and the UK on a regular basis using EveryTimeZone to make the difference imperceptible from their local teleworkers. Round-the-clock customer service support for multi-country ecommerce sites or social media support services are just two areas of opportunity for kiwis.
The Coming Flight to Food Quality
The food future will continue along a two tiered model where processed or artificial foods continue to provide cheaper options on a per calorie basis than naturally grown foods. That trend will accelerate with the genetic modification of crops driving the price down further of staple products like rice, oats, beans, seeds and breads. Whether you see genetic modification as a brave way to feed a planet on the way to 10 billion people, or a potential shortcut to the collapse of our foodchain, I believe that neither outcome should affect New Zealand’s natural foodbowl to any great degree.
Our opportunity is to feed the people of the world that demand natural or organic food options where security of source can be traced and guaranteed back to New Zealand. This is a marked change from our past as a commodity food supplier to the Commonwealth motherland. Our biggest challenge is understanding how to play in a quality driven marketplace that premium prices a unique natural food value proposition instead of what we’ve known historically. That is, a commodity driven supplier relationship with countries that will eventually chop us off, because of the increasingly unsustainable economics of the very land we grow on. If it costs $22,317 per hectare to dairy here, yet a tenth of that in Argentina, could that be a place for Fonterra 2.0? Chile seems to have it over Argentina in terms of political stability, either way the one advantage we receive by choosing a lower land cost environment to build our dairy industy, is it preserves our natural land and clean river wealth at home.
Escape to New Zealand - The Global Warming Hedge
Although it sounds unlikely, I doubt the wealthiest of the world haven’t thought of New Zealand as a country to evacuate to in the event of climate changes so extreme that living in their home country became impossible. A more likely scenario, is one where quality of life reduces by enough in one or more key areas to force a move on them. New Zealand already offers Investor Plus residence visas for people with $10 million to add to the New Zealand economy. There were 987,300 individuals with that kind of moolah in 2011. We could easily absorb that kind of population into ours. If just 10% made the shift, New Zealand would have attracted 1 trillion dollars in investment and play host to some of the brightest minds in the world who value here for all the reasons that makes New Zealand part of a Pacific centric future:
☑ Natural land, river and sea wealth.
☑ Ease of doing business.
☑ Educational prowess.
☑ Unpopulated lifestyle.
Living on an Aussie Drop of Water
Australia has plenty of iron ore, aluminium, copper and gold and increasingly are discovering rare earth metals such as Yttrium, Europium, Terbium and Dysprosium critical to the production of high tech products. What Australia doesn’t have is water in great quantity or quality. Australia is the driest inhabited continent in the world. A 2008 survey put 20 of the 23 rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin in poor or very poor quality. That basin contains 30,000 wetlands, 2 million people and agricultural production worth $15 billion. There are herculian efforts going on in Australia by government to rectify the situation since the Murray River stopped flowing to the sea in 2002. Any global environment changes will make hard fought changes there even more difficult to sustain. There are 483,000 kiwis in Australia that may decide to return to New Zealand for similar reasons to the worlds wealthy if lack of water security degrades their quality of life too.
The Success and Failure Catalysts
There are generally two kinds of outlooks on life when it comes to decision making. There are people who look for opportunities to move towards success and people who look for opportunities to move away from failure. These are very different forces. In a global context, New Zealand will benefit from both outlooks over the coming decades. This isn’t something that will happen overnight or in five years, but I do believe New Zealand has all the fundamental attributes that will attract those moving towards success and escaping failure (particularly climate failure) at home. If we are smart, kiwis will take the long view and accelerate our progress on moving up the food quality chain, commuting digitally and exporting our world class education.
