KEY ASSUMPTIONS

I joined 150 other locals to listen to Opposition Leader John Key at the Community Centre last Friday and found it most interesting. I have known John from business circles before and found him to be intelligent, practical and down to earth in his approach, so I was keen to see how he was as a politician in front of an audience.

Those same aspects of his character came across in his address, which included possibly the most coherent assessment that I have heard of the Kyoto Protocol and its impact on NZ’s economy. He skirted neatly around the extremist views of some in the audience and dwelt on the vexed issue of NZ’s continuing under performance as an economy, giving the overall impression of a leader who will be much more of a challenge to the proven, strong leadership skills of our PM than the hapless Brash ever did.

John Key’s main points about our economy were that in spite of continued good world wide trading conditions we have still slipped down the rankings and were losing too many good citizens to the better wages on offer in Australia, and that there had been insufficient investment in infrastructure, coupled with too much growth of our central bureaucracy in remote Wellington.

As a merchant banker he explained that he is used to looking at companies and deciding whether to invest in them or sell, and investors looked for under performing assets that they could buy and then change the management to get growth and value from them. If NZ was a company he felt that although under performing, it had a lot to offer but it needed a change in management and that is obviously what his party is setting out to convince people before the next election.

That seemed like a good analogy to me, then I thought about the Far North and the same thing applies in a smaller scale. In spite of our climate, beaches, nice towns and attractive lifestyle we also are under performing as an economy losing out to Coromandel, Bay of Plenty, Taranaki and so on in the competition for resources, people and opportunities.

We also have failed to attract the right people including retaining our own bright young ones, failed to invest enough in infrastructure such as sewerage and roading, and lastly we have spent too much on a remote bloated bureaucracy at Kaikohe.

We get our chance to change the management this coming October at the local body elections. I think we should!