Ahh.. its that time of the year when everyone is hanging out for a Christmas break.

Summer in the Southern hemisphere is a grand time and even with the “not so positive” news about an extra ray of sunshine goes a long way.

After the elections in NZ it is time to get busy. Got plenty of deadlines on so thought I’d try a quick and simple poll to see what you all thought?

Feel free to write in your own answer or leave a comment as well.

This is a new service from PollDaddy. Each visitor gets only one vote.

We have used the flash version as it looks better.

You may need to visit the site to see the poll if using RSS.

These results may change slightly but here are the almost definitive results in percentage terms and equivalent seats. The official table for this is over here and the seats should stay the same but may be small changes in the total numbers over the next day or so.

Another useful source to view is the 49th New Zealand Parliament on wikipedia which is being updated even as I write this.

The government looks like it will include National, Act and United Future at the very least (65 seats) with some potential to include a role for the Maori Party which has 5 seats of their own.

This is another historic moment as we have seen two giant political figures step out and one Halloween monster step back in.

Winston Peters NZ First didn’t make the 5% party threshold and he has conceded defeat and is out of Parliament after nearly 30 years.

Helen Clark after being PM for 9 years has announced she is stepping down from the Labour Party leadership after conceding defeat to John Key and the National Party. I hope Helen gets full credit for her work she has has been a great leader.

The Halloween monster is of course Roger Douglas of Act who gets a seat. All the cartoonists and satirists will be very pleased about that especially after his fire & brimstone speech earlier in the evening. It was like the time-warp from the Rocky Horror without the fun music. Rogernomics revisited is too hardline for most voters and is definitely not helpful for Key.

To be fair - Rogers demeanour may have had something to do with being asked for comments on Winston Peters stepping down by TV3. Peters entered Parliament in 1978 after defeating Roger’s brother Malcolm Douglas on a legal appeal /recount for the Hunua seat.

Consequently the smart move is to counterbalance Act (5 seats) with the Maori Party (5 seats) and continue to insist on a more centrist rather than right wing government.

John Key is sending all the right signals. It also appears that the convention in the National Party is for the leader to appoint Cabinet Ministers in a much more direct way.

If Key acts decisively to get rid of the dead wood in his front bench then he has a hope of repositioning the National Party as a more long term centre right option. To do this he needs to dump Lockwood Smith, Murray McCully, Nick Smith and Maurice Williamson at the very least.

The idealogues in Act - especially Douglas needs to be kept at bay as well. To help with this task there are a number of new National Party MP’s that have been elected. Tim Groser as Trade Minister will be a huge asset for example. Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga in Maungakiekie also looks to be an excellent new MP.

Auckland Central has changed from being safe Labour to being a National Party seat. The Green Party vote very well there (15.4% of party votes) but even so the sitting Labour MP (Tizard) seemed complacent and arrogant to many former supporters.

Tizard is number 38 on the Labour list probably because she was expected to win the electorate vote. I don’t know the exact calculations but it seems like she is gone if the list counts down after the electorate seats and only 22 from the list make it in.

I did hear some sugestion that failing to get Tizard in was a failure of tactical voting in Auckland Central because too many Greens (3,695) voted for the Green candidate who could never win. There were plenty of grumbles from existing Labour Party voters unhappy with Tizard and her personal vote was clearly down.

In Mt Albert the Green Party got 10.4% of the Party vote including mine.  Overall though the Greens got around 6.5% of the party vote. It is less surprising that the Green Party polls much higher in the city seats but most polling had them at 8-9% so this is down but they do get at least 2 more seats in parliament.

In my view the Greens benefited from the social desirability bias especially in the city seats. It is more acceptable to say you are intending to vote Green even if you don’t follow through on the day.

NZ First had the flip-side of this effect. It was very uncool to say you intended to vote NZ First and so the polls had them at 2% but on the day they got 4.2% which meant that they under polled.

It is possible if more people had realised that NZ First actual support was at 4.2% then some voters might have helped get them over the 5% threshold. In essence NZ voters have to consider whether their preferred party will get more than 5% otherwise those party votes are wasted.

The other factor for the Greens would have been the credit crisis and perhaps more short term thinking along the lines of how can we afford the ideals of climate change and the like. Despite the good showing by the Greeens we now have the Act Party with increased influence and they are extremely cautious on climate change to say the least.

Perhaps the best result from this election is the elimination of uncertainty in the political system.

We have a result that is as definitive as it can be under MMP. Given the uncertain economic climate it is going to be tough making unpopular decisions in government but Key is making all the right noises.

As an ex money market trader this might even prove to be a bonus on the banking side of things.

If they can also get some support from the Maori Party then perhaps they will have a buffer for the road ahead and be able to keep some of the dead wood away from the rudder.

The NZ Election is November 8 which is tomorrow.  Labour needs the Greens and The Maori Party to make the numbers work and even then it probably won’t be enough. Official results from 7pm NZ time on 8th Nov.

Russell Brown has made a partial assessment of Labours very real progress in government over here.

Labour’s real achievements — net government debt reduced from 20 billion to two billion before the current crisis; unemployment down to levels many people didn’t think possible; a huge drop in the number of welfare beneficiaries, especially per capita; real wage growth; GDP growth that outstripped the OECD for years; a historic turnaround of trends in poverty; the repair of a public sector that was in dire straits by the end of the 90s; a serious attempt to address our savings problem via KiwiSaver and the Superannuation Fund; and a degree of stability that we now all take for granted — outweigh any counterfactual.

In 20 years’ time, those achievements will be regarded as prodigious and defining of an era. The fact that Helen Clark signed a painting for charity, or that her car once went really fast with a police escort on an open road; or the absurd mythology constructed around the departure of an under-performing police commissioner; none of these will be thought of as anything important.

It’s a measure of success that a string of key initiatives are now part of the landscape: National has had no choice but to accept and embrace Working for Families and the Super Fund if it wants to be in government. It has been obliged to promise that it will not sell Kiwibank or anything else“.

…I would say that telecommunications reform has been this government’s most impressive legislative achievement.”

Hopefully votes will remember the gains not the lack lustre campaigns from both of the main parties.

I’m personally hoping that the Greens take some votes off National.  At present it looks like the Greens get most of their recent support from former Labour party voters and hopefully they will get to 9-10% (might get them 11 or 12 seats.)  See election % seat calculator here.

Best guess is Nats coalition with 64 seats and Labour with 58. Even if the projected gap is less than 6 seats because the Greens and the Maori Party get a few more seats we are in for a new PM.

The sad thing about a National win is the absolute lack of talent on their front bench. The whole of the National campaign has focussed on John Key and away from the regular bumbles of the old hacks in that party. Lets hope John ignores the dead wood if he wins.

Key has presented a more centrist position than I believe most of his party would like. Odds are if they win the gloves come off and the real policies push more to the right. This is especially true now that the Act Party are in the National mix. (I note that Act are expected to get 3 seats - perhaps they only get 2 ?)

It is a very long shot for Labour unless there is a major last minute change. If the Maori Party wins more seats than expected then the numbers needed to form a coalition go up due to overhangs.

If I am correct the graph image below has been updated almost in real time up to7 Nov.

Fuller details are on the Wikipedia page by Mark Payne I’m picking this approach is better than any of the single polls.

Marks notes below.

“Refusals are generally excluded from the party vote percentages, while question wording and the treatment of “don’t know” responses and those not intending to vote may vary between survey firms.”

“Summary of poll results up to 7 November 2008 for all political parties that have exceeded the 5.0% MMP threshold. Lines give the mean estimated by a Loess smoother, with shaded grey areas showing the corresponding 95% confidence interval for the estimate. Figures to the right show the estimate from the smoothing line at the date of the most recent poll, with 95% confidence interval.”

Seats allocation will be close to this calculation from Curia

Update:4:23pm - new Roy Morgan Poll has gaps somewhat closed. NZ First support looks strangely high and the wildcard award goes to the Epsom seat where Labour Party voters are being encouraged to vote for National in order to beat Rodney. Although Rodney is probably safe. Ironically word is that Key who lives in Epsom electorate will be voting for Rodney although he is probably obliged to vote in his actual Helensville seat.

Of course the real question is given that we are over polled how many people will react based on the polls. A kind of Heisenberg effect on polls. The idea of a  social desirability bias or some other counter balancing factor may well influence voters on the actual day. MIght only be relevant for uncool causes like NZFirst.

For example the low showing of NZ First in the polls may actually help them get more votes in Tauranga where Winston could win at electorate level. In uncertain times we may even have voters who go for the status quo as that is more predicatable.

Perhaps the side effect most difficult to measure is the tradeoffs between Labour / Greens and National/Act.  Some voters might think that the Greens polling at a range of 10-11.5% is too high and must be taking too many votes off the main party so they might switch their vote at the last minute.

I’m personally hoping that we have a better idea of how MMP and coalitions work so that the Greens can poll as high as possible and use their influence where they see fit.

Hopefully by next week we will have a new Government elected and we can all get on with our lives.

Like many I have been keeping an eye on the Google chart below

2008 Election Results scroll down to the live graph/s

At the moment - late afternoon its lookimng very good for Obama with 207 247! 324!* out of the 270 EV’s that he needs. *In the space of 15mins the number jumped from 207 to 324 in favour of Obama. Looks like a done deal. Note: BY 5pm NZ time most of the US networks have called Obama as the new President.

I’m interested in what an Obama victory might mean for NZ and Australia ?

Obama and foreign policy generally?     (besides this list)

What do you think?

Looks like a night to watch the polls and hope the NZ elctions on the 8th will be half as interesting.

Version two of Swan Dive or Belly Flop? over at the NZX  Blog offers a glimmer of hope that at least some people are thinking about what is needed by way of ACTIONS rather than the pork barrel.

To quote Mark Weldon’s intro

“In terms of policy it has new ideas (e.g., lower corporate tax rate and the elimination of imputation, practical suggestions to improve public-private sector cohesion), significant refinements on previous ideas (e.g. refined proposals on provisional tax and depreciation), new analysis (e.g. on NZSF directing funds into the NZ economy in larger chunks, SOE performance, KiwiCo).

Some of these were entirely “externally” generated via feedback, especially on this blog. All benefited from such feedback. “

If you haven’t already go and download the updated discussion paper and have your input. The NZ Election is far too important to leave it to the politicians.  Have your say.

RE: the US Elections the History is Now discussion has a record number of comments and commenters so far. Media that enable online extensions are the big winners today.

One of the fascinating aspects is the role of micro blogs like twitter. Gives a clue to the various windshifts as you see them happen in a way that almost nothing else can.

I suspect many of us outside the US just can’t understand how a dinosaur and a clown were ever expected to go against perhaps the best Presidential candidate since the 60’s.

Even Thomas Friedman has noted that a vote for the Repulicans this time would have been rewarding incompetence.  He goes on to make quite a few other claims in this opinion piece from the NY Times.

‘In this election, the American public rejected these narrow notions of the common good,” argued Sandel. “Most people now accept that unfettered markets don’t serve the public good.

Markets generate abundance, but they can also breed excessive insecurity and risk. Even before the financial meltdown, we’ve seen a massive shift of risk from corporations to the individual.

Obama will have to reinvent government as an instrument of the common good — to regulate markets, to protect citizens against the risks of unemployment and ill health, to invest in energy independence.”

But a new politics of the common good can’t be only about government and markets. “It must also be about a new patriotism — about what it means to be a citizen,” said Sandel. “This is the deepest chord Obama’s campaign evoked.

The biggest applause line in his stump speech was the one that said every American will have a chance to go to college provided he or she performs a period of national service — in the military, in the Peace Corps or in the community.

Obama’s campaign tapped a dormant civic idealism, a hunger among Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves, a yearning to be citizens again.”

Roll on the 8th of November for NZ elections.

In case you missed the Obama acceptance speech - here it is (18m)

Change has come to America.. and the world.

Footnote: There was an interview with Player should popup George McGovern on Radio NZ this morning speaking with Kathryn Ryan.

Long-time Democratic Party stalwart who lost the 1972 presidential election to Richard Nixon. (duration: 15m43s)

McGovern mentions that Obama has the 3 I’s - Intelligence, Integrity and Imagination and compares him to Lincoln. They also talk about the huge sense of history and challenges that are being faced now.

I for one feel better about having a visionary in the White House. I believe he doesn’t actually get there till January but the next few months will hopefully see some detailed plans and the begining of some of those promises being realised.

Back in early 2007 a book called 8 Tribes was published. It was described then by the publishers as a

“snapshot of contemporary New Zealand (that) explores our unspoken class system and the hidden social boundaries that separate us from each other”

In January 2007 I wrote about this concept of social and cultural archetypes in a post called Tribal Demographics which might be helpful background.

With an election due on November 8th for New Zealand - my best guess is that the extended metaphors around the 8 Tribes idea will give a better indication of voting preferences and eventual outcomes than most of the poll indications to date.

And over here for more polls. Or for a graph go here. Why 123 seats? - overhang potential.

BTW readers from anywhere would find local equivalents of these tribes. The labels would be different but much broader than the -too generic to be useful- urban city vs rural country dichotomies that might have worked 50 years ago.

Note: to US based readers - Flight of the Conchords are (almost certainly) members of the Cuba St tribe

As I recall part of the difficulty in the last election was that the National Party leader at the time Don Brash acted and spoke as if he was always talking to the North Shore and Remuera tribes.

Unfortunately for him the election was won not by a single political party but by a coalition of those mostly affiliated to the Grey Lynn tribe.

Consequently I would expect conversations among members of the Grey Lynn tribe to offer some interesting insights into voting intentions.

• The questions are - What Can We Learn from 8Tribes thinking for the Election?

And -

• Have our politicians learned anything about communicating with the 8 or 9 different tribal groups described in the book?

As a member of the Grey Lynn tribe myself I do think that Labour is missing an opportunity to speak fluently to each tribe and losing votes to the Greens and the Maori Party as a result.

In fact the PM - Helen Clark is apparently trying to convince us that tactical voting for the Greens is a bad idea. I note that those directions came from a meeting mostly attended by members of the Papatoetoe tribe who might take such guidance on-board.

I’d guess that members of the Grey Lynn tribe will still vote Green and probably in greater numbers which is an example of how the same message can have two very different results. Even worse it is seen as patently self serving and wrong by many who would usually vote Labour.

Language is full of dialects and meaningful quirks. “Divided by a common language” was a description I believe George Bernard Shaw used to describe UK and US cultures at one very obvious level.

On a macro level we often see the use of coded words and expressions which are meant to cross reference and signal particular meanings best understood by the party faithful and often described as dog-whistle politics.

However such “whistling” is often described as being a negative thing whereas a wider understanding of 8 Tribes social meaning and context would be a more positive approach, in my view.

Perhaps some kind of misguided dog whistling is why 3 very senior National party candidates have made such obvious political blunders; Lockwood Smith and Maurice Williamson in particular.

On the other hand - despite Smith and Williamson both having been Cabinet Ministers they do tend to come across as prize dicks /dorks on occasion.

I would note that politicians have long been experts at working and reading crowds and I’d say their comments were meant for those crowds but not for the wider media.

When their partly intuitive and highly tuned crowd decoders kick in they can often be brilliant in that exact context; but the when the sound bites get broadcast we are often left scratching our heads to explain why they spoke in a particular way.

I therefore find it hard to believe Smith (MP for 24! years) and Williamson (MP for 21 years!) are idiots and make silly mistakes on the election trail. However, others are not so sure.

If John Key is hoping to become leader he needs to actively demote both of them for their foolish comments - unless of course they are just saying in public what the National Party believes in private.

Besides the 8 Tribes idea there is a wealth of research on cultural imprinting that all politicians (and marketers) should be aware of. For example - Rapaille’s cultural anthropology work deserves much more of a review than I have time for below.

Dr. Clotaire Rapaille wrote* in his ChangeThis Manifesto Know the Codes in July 2006 (17 pages Creative Commons - free to download) about how to discover and understand similar social territory. (And in published book The Culture Code )

“The Culture Code is the unconscious meaning we apply to any given thing—a car, a type of food, a relationship, even a country—via the culture in which we are raised.”

* A fascinating aside on Rapailles Influences from the well known - De Tocqueville, Freud and Jung to the lesser known Bettelheim, Laborit, Lorenz and Ruth Benedict.

Read more about Rapailles Influences here.

In July ‘07 there was a feature article on the 8 Tribes by Gena Tuffery over at Idealog magazine called Tribal Counsel. As Gena noted then:-

“Reaction to this new form of social shorthand was strong and varied—which perhaps proves the book’s argument. Although the eight suburbs used to identify the tribes aren’t indicative of literal location, some Kiwis I canvassed feel penned in by the geographical descriptors.

They protest that to be labelled a representative of the ‘achieving’ North Shore, ‘intellectual’ Grey Lynn, ‘staunch’ Balclutha, ‘entitled’ Remuera, ‘free-spirited’ Raglan, ‘unpretentious’ Papatoetoe or ‘community-minded’ Otara is no more character-revealing than, say, being dubbed Dopey or Sneezy.”

Gena spoke with Chris Brown of Sputnik and Jill Caldwell of  Windshift who co-authored that book. Caldwell* is still using the insights and approach gained from the 8 Tribes research to look at trends and group behavious such as July 08 Newsletter : The Tribes as Consumers Jill writes (newsletter)

“At higher income levels, we found an urban intellectual Grey Lynn tribe who, though having no strong economic need to do so, have embraced a plain vanilla Papatoetoe / Balclutha frugality as a kind of moral imperative - though with a dispensation for overseas travel to places of culture.

The cut-backs the Grey Lynn tribe make are designed to save money AND resources – saving power at home for example, reading the labels, watching the consumer shows on TV for tips, taking the bus to work.

There’s concern for how other people are coping and the ever-present Grey Lynn guilt at their own relative fortune.”

Ongoing research project for 8 Tribes

Back when I first looked at the 8 Tribes concept  there was quite an (offline) side debate about how this didn’t really reference the Polynesian dimension in New Zealand on a more tacit basis. The idea that race, culture and language are independent has been well accepted for many years now. (Franz Boas)

The cultural bias of the observers needs to be taken into account and the sketch of the Otara tribe doesn’t really capture what I believe is happening within NZ culture.

I’m not sure that the 8 Tribes book successfully addressed the dimensions of race very well but I’ll raise that for your comments and inputs. (Go here for comments including 2 from the original authors.)

What makes the upcoming election very significant is a new found sense of wider Nationhood including acknowledgment of Tikanga Maori in the wider population. We have seen nothing less than a Maori led cultural renaissance only hinted at by reflecting on how the tribal archetypes might combine.

For example the confluence of Cuba St and Grey Lynn has created a wider market for cultural production and appreciation. This was noted in a chapter on trends at the end of the book but perhaps it has accelerated since then.

The rise of the Maori Party and a wealth of articulate urban Maori / Polynesian leaders across a wide spectrum means that the Labour Party will just have to hope they can negotiate successfully with the Maori Party.  I’m thinking more Tiki Taane or Selina Tusitala Marsh* than John Tamihere here.

Although the Maori Party should dump the nut jobs like Turia who is clearly sucking up to the National Party.

No one really wants a rerun of Winston Peters cynical behaviour in pointless coalitions. He should get zero votes but inexplicably some people still like him. The Maori Party should have learned from that.

* David Eggleton wrote “Poems, as the zen koan has it, can communicate before they are understood.” (Unlike most politicians?)

It’s a stretch but perhaps the 8 Tribes analogy is best understood as a diffuse form of poetry in motion?

I have just been referred to a very funny poem by Selina Tusitala Marsh that communicates more succinctly to the electorate than anything coming out of the major parties. (Will see if we can get a copy and/or link.)

Update: Here is that poem by  Dr Selina Tusitala Marsh, as a response to the comments made my Lockwood Smith last week. It was posted on the AEN (Aotearoa Ethnic Network) Special thanks to a clued up reader.

‘Mr Locksmith loses the key on the eve of the big party’

Herow!
My name Fong or Wong…you chuse
my Engrand not bery  gud
but my hands dey quick
dey smal an fast
can sew your suit
can pick your fruit
can do many quick, fast fing
oh!  I gotta go
I gotta show my kiwi-mate
how to use da toilet
he from Samoa
he only got da flushing one

Mr Locksmith, he show me
how to dig da big hole
out back by da peach tree
we go see him now
he show us how to
squat and drop

Selina Tusitala Marsh

The emergence of the Ponsonby -proto tribe was noted as a trend that I would say has accelerated and it should not be ignored by the politicians. It should be no surprise that the Green Party has growing support among all tribes but especially Grey Lynn.

The political parties that communicate better with these 8 or 9 tribes will be the ones that do best in the upcoming election. Voters are much smarter than the sound bite signals we mostly hear.

Perhaps the best thing about the 8 Tribes concept is that it gives us a vocabulary  for discussing these ideas and articulating new ones. It also helps us uncover our deeper intentions and motivations and to decode our own cultural patterns and conditioning.

Thanks to Chris Brown and Jill Caldwell for the book which you can still buy. I should also make it clear that the analysis and opinions here are mine. Feel free to comment.

FYI - I did the 8 Tribes Diagnostic test in Jan 07 with the following results. Mostly Grey Lynn with Cuba St almost as high.

If you enjoyed reading this you may also like these earlier posts..

• Real change means more than a Heisenberg T-Shirt | 06
  
• Tribal Demographics | 07

Over the weekend there were a growing number of policy debates around the impacts and implications of proposed changes to government investment strategy.

At Public Address Russell Brown writes

“Labour’s guarantee scheme was excoriated along with National’s risky new plan for the Super Fund in a not-online NBR lead story on Friday, under Rob Hosking’s byline. Unfortunately, the latter can’t be so easily fixed.

The story pointed out that by 2025 the 40% of the fund that National wants to force into local investment will by be $43.6 billion: bigger than the entire market cap of the NZX-50 plus the expected value of Fonterra were it to be floated and quotes a string of specialists pouring scorn on the policy. Ben Thomas thrashes the policy in his column, which concludes with an unnamed economist declaring “this is becoming a scary election.”

Ben proposes that Labour should respond by running ads featuring Dancing Cossacks. That would be kind of meta, wouldn’t it?”

In my view assaulting the policy misses the more significant point- which is that debating these ideas is the really important thing.

The actual mechanics of implementation and the policy issues are important but so is the wider context.

The relative size of the current equity markets and the impact that more local investment might have is also not rocket science. It seems plain silly to argue that if more investment funding was available locally that the equity markets would stay the same because they would also grow considerably as well.

There are of course alternative investments a fund can make. In Australia the Future Fund kept a very high percentage of cash in the local banking system. I’m not sure how 45% can be described as more than half so that part must be a typo.

(That must also indirectly have benefited NZ where 4 of the 5 big banks are Australian owned.)

“While the Future Fund, a government vehicle established to pay public servant retirement liabilities, has only invested 10 per cent in Australian shares, about 55 per cent of all superannuation funds are in the sharemarket, according to Rainmaker Information.

More than half of the Future Fund’s $63 billion is sitting in cash with Australia’s banks, and domestic subsidiaries of foreign banks. The Commonwealth Bank holds the most, with $7.8 billion, followed by Westpac, National Australia Bank, and ANZ.

The fund gave them a welcome and relatively cheap source of money as the cost of borrowing overseas has soared.”

Here is a much broader assessment of the current political and economic context in NZ - from Vincent Heeringa

“Picture this: an election is upon us. We’ve just completed two quarters of negative growth, the government is a patchwork of parties built upon a bizarre deal with Winston Peters, the Prime Minister finds herself less popular than her opponent, and it feels like the whole country has run dry on ideas, and out of patience. Oh, and we’ve just bombed out of the World Cup at the hands of the French.”

The twist here is that described 1999. If we are revisiting the past what else has happened in the meantime.

Read the full feature over here. The list is not comfortable reading but we do need to think about scoring the present government on their progress or lack of it and what that might mean going forward.

On a more positive note:

“The New Zealand Institute, in some excellent research on savings, listed the benefits of increased household savings: a larger pool of domestic capital will help companies grow, lift productivity and reduce the cost of capital; moderate exchange rate fluctuations; create a more supportive home base; and help New Zealand retain ownership of its companies.

If KiwiSaver can make inroads into this extensive list—and I think it will—the scheme could be the single most positive policy Labour introduced in the past nine years.”

There is a treasury estimate of Government spending For the year ending July showing a range from 36-41% of GDP.

Depending upon one’s personal viewpoint you might say those levels are too high but in view of an uncertain outlook for the global economy it could also be argued that the government should use its spending power in a smart way.

Regardless of the ideologies being wheeled out, it is still of value to see some of the policy ideas being debated more fully.

And those thinking that PPP are the way to go might want to view this assessment by RiskMetrics on the Australian experience in that area.  Beware of overly complex fee models and double dipping.

Thanks to Paul Williams for spotting the article.

Two years and 5 days ago I started this blog to be able to store up a bit of a reference library of ideas and experiences for customers, friends and myself.

It has snowballed to be much more than that. Thanks to the readers in the US, Australia, NZ and UK especially but every week brings new surprises.  Great ideas are being recognised and debated in this and many other blogs around the world. Thanks for stopping by today.

Currently in talks with others on how to deepen the political and economic debate for improved outcomes for NZ and the global economy.  Stay tuned for ideas on how this might be focussed and shaped.

The first post was welcome to a BlogVenture where I included a quote by Charles Kettering

“The only difference between a problem and a solution is that people understand the solution.”- by Charles Kettering.

87 posts (90+ comments Thanks Mark, David and everyone who coments) and roughly 100,000 words later I think I’m getting the hang of the questions.

I also work on about 50 other websites and so this blog gets a bit low on airtime from me while I juggle other blogs and client projects.

On the whole though - the plan has been to post a more thoughtful piece at least once a month and preferably once a week and so 87 posts in 102 weeks is about 80%+ of the time that has worked.

I need to update my list of top 10 posts - but it has been very gratifying to get feedback - much of it not published from hundreds of correspondent and thousands of readers worldwide.

I was really challenged by Seth Godin a few months back who wrote something to the effect that bad times still create opportunities for us to articulate a differnt future. We don’t need to be frozen in the headlights.

Marketers spend a lot of time describing a future and making it real.

I am an optimist and I know that there are some smart thinkers out there. Blogging offers a way to get past the shallowness of public debate on some of these areas.

As a reader you can help me and other bloggers by challenging us with questions and feedback.

If you are a blogger you can also do the same and write your contributions on your sites and other public spaces such as the NZX one.

As voters and members of the community we deserve a better, smarter outcomes for our children and our families. A dash of humour doesn’t hurt either.

As it happens I’m going to meet some other bloggers today in person for the first time. Expecting it to be fun and looking forward to some sharp moments. (Step away from the keyboard… your lunch has arrived etc.)

You may have seen this already from Jack Black. Light hearted but captures the long term perspectives very well.

Or if you prefer to explore paradigms and game changing rather than just shuffling the deckchairs- Here is a quote from John R. Ehrenfeld writing in ChangeThis - 2503beyondsustain Creative Commons - (so download and recycle)

The Problem with Our Solutions
“As a society, we are addicted to solving our problems through a reductionist frame. When
we confront problems in the world, we chop them into small pieces and give each piece to a
specialist familiar with that chunk.

Over time, as we have done this more and more, society’s competence to address the complex, messy problems we confront has diminished. Unsustainability is just such a messy problem.

Sustainability is a holistic concept that takes an equally holistic stance to attain. Reductionist solutions will not suffice.”

The full manifesto is available from ChangeThis

Following on from yesterday it seems that some of the ideas in the draft strategy for coming out of the crisis stronger -Download Full Document here have got a bit more traction with National.

*Later in the day - John Key announced that he would be looking for the NZ Super Fund to invest 40% of its total in NZ rather than the 23% it does currently.  As John Armstrong notes -(16th Oct NZHerald)

“Cue the balalaika music. Cue the dancing cossacks. Let’s electioneer like it’s 1975 in reverse.”

such a move in the recent past for the National Party would have been seen as pure communism.

1975 was the first election I remember taking an interest in. I was still at school and not able to vote and the whole election campaign with a Prime Minister called Piggy Muldoon was straight out of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Completely bizarre. Hopefully 33 years later the voting public is a bit smarter than in 1975.

The policy of re-weighting Super Investment from 23% to 40% within NZ is in fact one of the ideas in the draft paper referred to above from the NZX / NZ Institute release.

The real difficulty here is that such a policy change fits more naturally with Labour than the National Party and there is no reason why they couldn’t adopt the same view and neutralise any gains from the policy.

I would have said in an election you want to differentiate your policies and people not just adopt the other teams policies and pretend this is your idea. I may have missed it - but it would also be polite for My Key to give a hat tip to David Skillings and Mark Weldon. (Correction: the hat tip has been made.)

On Page 14 “Re-directing taxpayer funded savings institutions”

“The government owns financial institutions that control in excess of $30 billion of financial assets (NZ Super Fund, EQC, ACC etc). These assets exist to fund specific liabilities, and are managed according to orthodox investment and portfolio allocation criteria.

However, the current crisis creates a case for examining whether these assets are being invested in a way that maximises the national interest.

Given that New Zealand firms will find it more difficult to access credit for investment, directing these financial institutions to place a specified proportion in New Zealand investments seems appropriate.” (my italics)

Along with the earlier recommendations on adopting a KiwiCo investment vehicle such as Temasek in Singapore and Khazanah in Malaysia a re-weighting of Government sector institutions towards NZ companies would seem to be at least partly the inspiration for Mr Keys’s policy announcement.

What do you think?

My view is that Labour and Mr Cullen in particular should say this is a good idea and that Labour would definitely look at the re-weighting of local investment from 23% to 40% and is they want to go one better they could expand the scope from Kiwisaver to include the EQC & ACC and noted above.

“Finance Minister Michael Cullen this week hinted he, too, was interested in getting the fund to invest more in New Zealand.

But yesterday, he said there was no way Labour would change the law so a minister could tell the fund what to do.” from Super Plan: meddling or a Good Idea

There are always ways to influence investment policies and I would have said risk management needs and urgent review given the global meltdown on equity markets.  The second part of this is that redirecting EQC and ACC may be part of the answer as well.

My concern is that most larger NZ businesses are owned offshore anyway. It must be a concern and part of the macro-direction for NZX to encourage more local listings.

The other hidden factor in this equation is that the NZ Equity market is very thin and misses a fair number of substantial $100m+ businesses that are either family owned or owned by unlisted funds; and almost completely invisible to the investing public / NZX.

Note: Update On 22 Oct Lance Wiggs did this analysis which puts a different spin on many of the suggestions.

Following on from the NZ Institute / NZX draft document from Economy on the edge: Swan dive or belly flop? Or as another Jason commented - How can we take this to the next level?

A draft strategy for coming out of the crisis stronger -Download Full Document here is a closer look at one section; but first some other comments on the wider political environment in NZ.

The global credit crunch is an opportunity for politicians everywhere to show real leadership and especially in NZ where we have some unique challenges.

NZ has a general election on November the 8th and we have two politicians (Clark & Key) in the hot seat. So far the big wins go in favour of the Prime Minister who is clearly relishing the chance to step up.

That other candidate. The one who used to be a successful derivatives trader at Merrill Lynch and SHOULD know more about this type of crisis appears to be alternately smug and clueless.

Could it be that the very paradigm Mr Key was clearly successful in - might be his Achilles heel in this election campaign? Being good at abstract structured finance might not be such a good qualification for leading the real economy? (*See note at bottom though)

It is not just me who thinks so either: Over at Hard News / Public Address Russell Brown writes

“I’ve been telling anyone who asks that National is 75-25 odds on to form a government. I think it’s evident that those odds shifted Labour’s way on Friday: it’s just not clear how much.

And not just because of the polls per se: the 3News report on the poll results was more damning than the numbers themselves, which must be weighed against the thumping lead that messrs Colmar and Brunton gave National two nights later.

It was the look. Key was interviewed sitting down and, as is sometimes case when he’s nervous, his diction started to go off the rails (”the issues that matters to New Zealanders”). He looked a bit spooked. Clark, by contrast, was standing, smiling and enunciating every word like she meant it.”

The Deposit Guarantee Scheme announced over the weekend by the Reserve Bank will help but it highlighted the difference in vision between the two parties.

At this point I should disclose that I am a Green Party voter and while I am more sympathetic towards Labour than National this is a time for a bi-partisan approach.BTW I’m picking that the Greens will get 7-9% of the vote this election and the Maori Party will do much better.

Dr Pita Sharples is altogether a much more savvy politician and very capable thinker than Tariana Turia who always used to take 1 step forward and 2 steps back.

If Labour and National in particular (as the largest parties) work together on a smarter economic future for NZ then we can filter out some of the less important factors to pick a winner on the day.

Although my guess is both parties will need to form a minority governement leaving the Greens and the Maori Party with the balance of power.

Returning to the Draft Document here Perhaps some of you had a read over the weekend - on page 11 of 18 - italics and emphasis are mine

The focus of the proposed solutions on the real economy is deliberate, and reflects the particular nature of New Zealand’s exposure to the global crisis.

Unlike many other developed economies, our immediate exposure is to the impact of the credit crunch on the real economy rather than the liquidity and solvency of the banking sector.

The proposed New Zealand response is therefore fundamentally different to the measures recommended in other countries.

100% tax depreciation on capital investment
Given New Zealand already faces deep productivity issues, a reduction in capital investment when capital is scarce is a real risk to our medium term competitiveness. Firms are already cutting capital investment. Without any incentives to accelerate such investment, any delay will in turn delay the timing and strength of the economic recovery. The opportunity is to accelerate that process, and thereby strengthen our new champions.

We propose that for the next 24 months (through to 31 December 2010) capital investment and IT spending be allowed a 100% depreciation write-off for tax purposes.

For firms to invest meaningfully in capital, they either have to have been well managed with strong cash flows, or still have access to credit or equity.

We can therefore expect that the firms that take advantage of this tax window will be the ones who will drive the economy forward, and around whom the economy should recalibrate.

As someone who works on the edges of IT sector I understand how much effective capital spending and capability improvements can have in this area.

Build flexibility and smarts into your business system using IT as an asset and platform. I spend most of my time unlocking IT capabilities so that marketing and sales can deliver the results we expect.

Happy to provide more services in this space as well so I agree with the direction as long as we all utilise the existing and new systems rather than thinking we just have to buy a license which never gets us very far.

I’d be interested in what you think about this as a policy direction. But even more important read the full document and go over to the main NZX blog to add your feedback and ideas.

*National has adopted one of the ideas in the draft strategy at least in spirit if not directly. A small win for Mr Key. Go here to keep reading.

On Thursday / Friday I wrote a long piece trying to make more sense of the credit crisis. Well that post snowballed and I kept making updates. This means some of the regular visitors may have missed parts.

For that reason I have cut the post into 2 sections - here is Part 2 which is more focussed on NZ and Australia.

All markets are not the same and that is an opportunity.

The velocity of change is a bit scary but just as we now learn of bad news early there are also pockets of recovery in markets that are more stable.

It is a tough time for banking regulators. If they act in haste it looks bad for confidence but if there is a big time lag the uncertainty can delay lots of business decisions.

“Governor Alan Bollard yesterday ruled out an early review of the official cash rate, saying the New Zealand financial system was working satisfactorily and moves to help it over the past year had been “sufficient at this stage”. Bollard on 10 Oct

“Westpac economist Dominick Stephens supported Dr Bollard’s decision.

He said interest rates were being cut not only because of the economic situation, but also to shore up confidence.

“In New Zealand there is no crisis of confidence in our banking system, therefore why go early?”

There are linked institutions for sure and we are facing down a black swan here, so there is a magnitude of linked risk that is hard to unravel but partly because we are all affected in some way I remain positive that a problem shared can be solved.

And hopefully we can all think about how to build a stonger morer sustainable economy with a lower risk profile. I must say that I like the list of positive actions from NZX chief Mark Weldon titles below go there to read the full version at NZX and David Skilling of the New Zealand Institute.

We need insightful leadership and the risk in NZ is that the general election fudges the short term for vote catching when we should be taking a longer term view.

“Political parties were not adequately discussing it and were instead playing “tick tack” over small amounts of money to taxpayers that will only fund consumption.” Source:NZX

Ironically the impression is that Labour hasn’t done too badly over the past 3 terms and National are struggling to differentiate themselves despite John Key having been a big cheese at Merrill Lynch. Weldon was also famously at McKinsey and is a qualified economist in the hot seat so his (and Davids”) suggestions make the RB and other look a bit sleepy.

Also congratulations to NZX who have finally got a blog on WordPress as well so that is even better.

1. Defer all provisional tax payments for next 24 months.
2. 100 per cent depreciation of capital investment.
3. Bring talented Kiwis home.
4. Attract new firms to New Zealand.
5. Retain the R&;D tax credit, to ensure that R&D investment is made in New Zealand.
6. Converting KiwiSaver, currently a voluntary scheme, into a compulsory retirement savings plan.

From Economy on the edge: Swan dive or belly flop? A draft strategy for coming out of the crisis stronger -Download Full Document

Note: I should make it clear that I am not a qualified economist - however I do read very widely on the topic and John Ralston Saul, George Soros, Nassim Talib, Hazel Henderson, Paul Ormerod, Lester Thurow, Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith and many others have made it very clear that deep change is needed.

If you enjoyed reading this you may also care to check out these other posts

• John Ralston Saul in Wellington
• Thinking Global (JR Saul)
• Seen Any Black Swans Lately? Noticed a few people searching for manifesto Few & Far Between (download and read) which has been made available by www.ChangeThis
• Banks Falling Like Dominos - Thanks Raf.

Update: Oct 11 - Dave McClure is based in Silicon Valley where it is always tough - but you need to be positive to get through. Among other thinks he references the litany against fear…

• Fear is the Mind Killer of the Silicon Valley Entrepreneur (we must be Muad’Dib, not Clark Kent):- Dave McClure - make a lot of very good points - caution -this post uses very forceful language which might get stopped by your firewall - but its passion and essence is right on.
  

  “while i don’t profess to understand credit or capital markets, i do know that internet startups cost less money than ever to get started. and unless i missed something, there are more people online now than ever, spending more money online than ever.

  and i doubt any of these trends will likely reverse in the long-term — lower costs, more people online, more e-commerce. doesn’t that seem like a pretty good environment for building new online businesses?”

And special thanks to Noric for listening to some of these ideas and making better sense of them.

Finally - today is the start of year 3 for this blog. More about that later in the week but somehow I have posted close to 100, 000 words over the past 2 years and getting a second wind now.