I didn’t get a chance to read Colin James’s Fairfax papers column A need for new thinking beyond the “recovery” until after I posted my own Outlook: a lost decade? yesterday, but it covers similar issues, though from a different perspective. Following on from his column last week, James defines the “three great forces” that will shape “the new business-as-usual”:
One is the rearrangement of economic power, with the rise of east Asia and especially relative late-comer China and India coming along . . .
The second great force is digital technology and its globalising power which is jarring the global economy’s tectonics. It both flattens the world and pushes up powerful new peaks which increasingly will be in the arc from Tokyo to Mumbai. New Zealand is an outlier.
The third great force is under-45s’ expectation that goods and services, including “public” services, are customised to individual needs and wants.
None of these forces is new. But the great crash has pulled back the curtains. (Read more)
He also provides this interesting sneak-preview:
As a Treasury discussion paper for the savings working group next week will show, a net savings gain of around $5 billion is needed just to hold our towering net debt to the world to 90 per cent of GDP. Ideally, if we are to ride tidal waves generated by the economic tectonics, that 90 per cent must fall.
And in his Otago Daily Times column this week, Changing democracy: doing it to the politicians, James looks at the OpenLabourNZ event this week and the shifts it is aiming to address.
Rod Oram’s business commentator slot on National Radio this week was on South Canterbury Finance, although unfortunately he was speaking just ahead of the big announcement.
Probably of more enduring interest, therefore, is his Star-Times column Time to think, work smarter, where he has another look at Auckland’s challenges:
We know lots about what needs to be done but less about how to do it. As a result, the region is famous among urban planners worldwide for the quality of its myriad strategies – and infamous for its lack of execution because of the fragmentation of local government and combative relations with central government.
The Royal Commission on Auckland governance delivered excellent analysis of these failures and proposed many carefully integrated remedies. One of the most crucial was a spatial plan. This would enable the Auckland Council to bring together the economic, infrastructure, environmental, landscape and social factors that shape the region, with long-term strategies for making the most of them. In essence, the spatial plan would help the region work out the very complex issues of how, where and when to grow and how to plan and invest for that.
The government quickly endorsed the proposal for “one plan for Auckland”. But it dropped many other Royal Commission recommendations that were essential to making the spatial plan work well. (Read more)
There are no new articles from Brian Easton this week.
Tags: Auckland, Colin James, Rod Oram, savings
