Are we the Lucky Country?
19 February 2011
The solo mother from Ashburton who makes her living driving a dump truck in a West Australia coal mine could have talked as eloquently as Julia Gillard this week about the special relationship between Australia and New Zealand.
It’s thanks to this that she, the truck driver, earns $130,000 a year. Leaving New Zealand three years ago with nothing after the break up of her marriage she now owns one investment property in Ashburton and is planning to buy a second.
The Australian Prime Minister’s visit to New Zealand this week was wrapped in the usual ANZAC spirit of mateship but it couldn’t help but kick a bit of Aussie dust in our eyes. We may have a special relationship but increasingly it is not an equal one.
In economic terms New Zealand has become a branch office of AustraliaCorp. In human terms we are an incubator. In the past 3 years 75,000 kiwis have crossed the ditch to join the 400,000 or so already living in the Lucky Country. We breed ‘em, grow ‘em, educate ‘em and lose ‘em to the Aussie dream. To Julia Gillard that must look like a pretty special relationship.
An Aussie jobs fair in Auckland last weekend saw thousands of people queuing up to make the shift. Their reason for wanting to go was, with a few variations, due to one thing - money. The National government’s promise to close the wage gap has blown up in its face, with Australian wages now 25-30% higher than New Zealand.
The wage gap is driven by a huge difference in productivity between Australia and New Zealand. Productivity is not measured in how hard we work. By international standards kiwis work harder than most, and probably harder than Australians.
Productivity is a measure of how much wealth is created by our labour. In 2010 each person in New Zealand generated $27,000 of wealth (as measured by Gross Domestic Product per capita). Each Australian generated $40,000. In simple terms, the wage gap follows the wealth gap.
New Zealand has been discussing productivity all my adult life. As early as I can remember we’ve been exhorted to add value to the things we produce. There’s more money to be earned by turning wool into carpets and logs into furniture. Electronic goods and sometimes knowledge itself commands an even greater premium.
While this may generally be true, the growing wealth gap spanning the Tasman is not because Australia is brainier than us, or better governed, or simply bigger. Much of it is purely luck. The Ashburton woman driving the dump truck is more productive than a Methven shearer not because she’s adding value to the coal she’s carting, but because the price of coal has gone ballistic on the back of Chinese demand. Lucky Country indeed.
A recent study by the Legatum Institute hammers home the message we see in countless surveys. On its Prosperity Index Australia is the 8th wealthiest country in the world while we languish at 17th.
But the Legatum survey does something interesting. Reflecting the dim awakening in the minds of economists that GDP-based criteria are no longer enough to describe a country’s well-being, they include measures like governance (New Zealand ranks 4th in the world), personal freedom (3rd), social capital (3rd) and education (1st). In all these fields New Zealand outranks Australia. When all measures are taken into account Australia ranks 4th in the world on Legatum’s Prosperity Index and New Zealand 5th.
The solo mum from Ashburton says she will come home in about five years, once she has made her fortune. We notice many who leave our shores do not return, but if it’s the money that draws them away it is the quality of life that draws them back.
Monday, February 21, 2011
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Ban the burger, can the coke
5th February 2011
Placing a ban on undesirable behaviour is without doubt the least effective way of stopping it. Consider the Roman Empire’s ban on Christianity (which backfired spectacularly) or the Chinese government’s ban on freedom of speech.
A ban can sometimes reduce the behaviour; enforced vigorously it may even appear to have wiped it out. But as long as the desire remains to perform the activity, imbibe the substance or conjure the impure thought the behaviour will evade or outlast the most punitive sanctions.
Nowhere is this more true than in the behaviour of teenagers. The most enduring achievement of Western Civilisation over the past 70 years may be the raising of successively more wilful generations of teens whose apparent purpose in life is to harm themselves.
So you have to roll your eyes when a recent study claiming New Zealand secondary schools are hedged with dairies and takeaway bars peddling a wave of junk food to vulnerable students is met with calls to ban such products from all outlets near schools.
While I struggle with the image created by the report of waves of students streaming out of afternoon school straight to the pie warmers and coke cabinets of surrounding food bars, and the equally ludicrous response of a ban, we do have a growing problem of obesity and associated health issues among the young, and I don’t doubt we have teens hooked on sugar and fat just as others are hooked on nicotine and alcohol.
Accepting that a ban on pies and fries will not remove the desire to eat them (and forgetting for a moment, as the authors of the study clearly have, that most teenagers can eat vast quantities of fat and sugar with nothing more serious than a few pimples) let’s imagine a response that strikes to the root of the problem – that to most kids junk food is irresistible.
Very simply, we must convince our youth of a simple proposition: junk food is bad.
Totalitarian regimes throughout history have devoted armies to manipulating social behaviour, but for a really effective strategy we need look no further than the principles of dog training, and the training of one dog in particular – Jess.
Jess (now deceased) was our much loved Labrador/Pointer bitch. When Jess was still a young dog we rented a house on a farm and Jess discovered the joys of unauthorised mustering. We realised if we wanted to come between Jess and a bullet from the farmer she had to learn a crucial lesson – sheep is bad.
So Sylvia took to walking Jess down the long gravel drive every morning, hemmed on both sides with paddocks filled with sheep. She walked Jess at heel on a tight lead and discreetly carried a short stick behind her back. She chose the early morning so she could observe Jess’s behaviour by watching her shadow and not draw Jess’s attention to the behaviour modification strategy.
Every time Sylvia noticed Jess’s shadow turning to look at the sheep she gave her a sharp tap on the backside with the stick. Jess never noticed the stick and after a while she came to associate sheep with a sore bum. The strategy improved if Sylvia accompanied the tap on the backside with a deep growl – the message for Jess being that an interest in sheep was displeasing to the head of the pack (i.e. Sylvia).
After a few months of this Jess’s behaviour was transformed. She walked down the drive looking neither left nor right and with no more interest in harassing sheep than in reading the evening paper. If occasionally she glanced at a sheep from the corner of her eye she quickly corrected herself, with a very guilty expression.
I say let’s apply the same strategy to our kids. From a very young age we should walk them daily up East Street and down West Street with a short stick and a deep growl if they so much as glance towards Makkers or KFC. By the age of 5 all desire for junk food will be eliminated. Even if the school gate is corralled with pie carts and burger barrows they will walk past looking neither left nor right. Civilisation will be saved and we can congratulate ourselves on our cunning. Simple.
5th February 2011
Placing a ban on undesirable behaviour is without doubt the least effective way of stopping it. Consider the Roman Empire’s ban on Christianity (which backfired spectacularly) or the Chinese government’s ban on freedom of speech.
A ban can sometimes reduce the behaviour; enforced vigorously it may even appear to have wiped it out. But as long as the desire remains to perform the activity, imbibe the substance or conjure the impure thought the behaviour will evade or outlast the most punitive sanctions.
Nowhere is this more true than in the behaviour of teenagers. The most enduring achievement of Western Civilisation over the past 70 years may be the raising of successively more wilful generations of teens whose apparent purpose in life is to harm themselves.
So you have to roll your eyes when a recent study claiming New Zealand secondary schools are hedged with dairies and takeaway bars peddling a wave of junk food to vulnerable students is met with calls to ban such products from all outlets near schools.
While I struggle with the image created by the report of waves of students streaming out of afternoon school straight to the pie warmers and coke cabinets of surrounding food bars, and the equally ludicrous response of a ban, we do have a growing problem of obesity and associated health issues among the young, and I don’t doubt we have teens hooked on sugar and fat just as others are hooked on nicotine and alcohol.
Accepting that a ban on pies and fries will not remove the desire to eat them (and forgetting for a moment, as the authors of the study clearly have, that most teenagers can eat vast quantities of fat and sugar with nothing more serious than a few pimples) let’s imagine a response that strikes to the root of the problem – that to most kids junk food is irresistible.
Very simply, we must convince our youth of a simple proposition: junk food is bad.
Totalitarian regimes throughout history have devoted armies to manipulating social behaviour, but for a really effective strategy we need look no further than the principles of dog training, and the training of one dog in particular – Jess.
Jess (now deceased) was our much loved Labrador/Pointer bitch. When Jess was still a young dog we rented a house on a farm and Jess discovered the joys of unauthorised mustering. We realised if we wanted to come between Jess and a bullet from the farmer she had to learn a crucial lesson – sheep is bad.
So Sylvia took to walking Jess down the long gravel drive every morning, hemmed on both sides with paddocks filled with sheep. She walked Jess at heel on a tight lead and discreetly carried a short stick behind her back. She chose the early morning so she could observe Jess’s behaviour by watching her shadow and not draw Jess’s attention to the behaviour modification strategy.
Every time Sylvia noticed Jess’s shadow turning to look at the sheep she gave her a sharp tap on the backside with the stick. Jess never noticed the stick and after a while she came to associate sheep with a sore bum. The strategy improved if Sylvia accompanied the tap on the backside with a deep growl – the message for Jess being that an interest in sheep was displeasing to the head of the pack (i.e. Sylvia).
After a few months of this Jess’s behaviour was transformed. She walked down the drive looking neither left nor right and with no more interest in harassing sheep than in reading the evening paper. If occasionally she glanced at a sheep from the corner of her eye she quickly corrected herself, with a very guilty expression.
I say let’s apply the same strategy to our kids. From a very young age we should walk them daily up East Street and down West Street with a short stick and a deep growl if they so much as glance towards Makkers or KFC. By the age of 5 all desire for junk food will be eliminated. Even if the school gate is corralled with pie carts and burger barrows they will walk past looking neither left nor right. Civilisation will be saved and we can congratulate ourselves on our cunning. Simple.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)