“The remaining nine charges having been proven to the standard required by law, the defendant will be convicted.”

Important findings from Judge Harvey (and no, I am not a lawyer):

• It’s now even clearer that writing something on a blog is deemed as publishing, especially if you live in NZ when you do so. That much was already obvious, and it is nice to see it spelled out.
• The Judge was less than clear on assigning blame for comments on the blog, but he did say that Whale Oil  was “the person who enables the posting of content by both himself and others” and so therefore is the publisher. The Judge referred to blog articles though, and not to comments in the decision document. He did say earlier that “However most administrators or supervisors of blog sites must hold some responsibility for the comments that are posted.” This is an interesting area that creates a lot of concern in big media. Reading between the lines, and again not as a lawyer, I’d say that post-comment moderation is ok – either doing as Trade Me does and moderating after it has been flagged by readers or seen by the blog owner. I also see little tolerance from the Judge for leaving up comments that are in breach of the law, especially after being notified. Even WhaleOil readers now have the ability to vote down comments.
• The judge makes it clear that hiding a blog behind a password doesn’t help the cause – it’s still likely to be deemed as publication.
• Writing in text speak or any other language or using pictures or codes won’t help either.
• Linking to offending information is probably the same as publishing it yourself.
• The name we refer to ourselves online is now our ‘nom d’internet‘, a phrase Judge Harvey coined for the decision. Nicely played.

Overall – we have been warned. Whale Oil’s fine is pretty small in the scheme of things, suffering perhaps from a lack of inflation adjustment – with the maximum of just $1000 per case. The judge ruled that $750 per case was payable, plus $130 per case in costs. That’s a lot of money for Slater, but not so much for a media company. I wouldn’t want to test it though.

Judge Harvey also noticed, as I hadn’t, that Whale Oil’s tagline “Whaleoil Beef Hooked” has another meaning when said out loud. A fine legal mind.

However the Judge does give a hint about how to legally release suppressed names:

Off-Shore Publication of Suppressed Names
[78]    There can be no doubt that the internet poses challenges to the effectiveness of suppression orders. The position of a person in New Zealand who posts a name the subject of a non-publication order on the internet is clear for the reasons that I have given. But what of the person (A) who makes a suppressed name available to a person (B) beyond the jurisdiction, and B posts the name on a his or her blog or website in a country other than New Zealand? Without specifically deciding the point, according to the decision of Hammond J in Re X the communication between A in New Zealand and B overseas could fall within the concept of a private conversation between individuals and may therefore would not fall within the scope of s. 140(1). Furthermore, the act of posting to a blog or a website by a person overseas (B) could not in those circumstances be caught by s. 7 of the Crimes Act 1961.

In essence, if Whale Oil sends an email to a site hosted in anther country, and that site’s owner considers that the details are fit for publication, then perhaps that site could publish and not be damned. Whale Oil would simply be having a 1-1 conversation with the author of the site, who resides overseas. However it’s not so easy:

[81] Much may depend upon the state of mind of person A in communicating the information to person B. Such behaviour could well mean that A could fall within the second limb of s. 140(5) evades or attempts to evade any such order. As I have said, this point is not decided and much would depend upon the detailed facts of the case.

Meanwhile the publication clearly reaches (and is targeted towards) New Zealand, and linking to from a locally written blog could be dangerous as the Judge pulls out the notorious DeCSS debacle:

[82] Following from that is the New Zealand based blogger who may embed a link to the off-shore blogsite which contains the suppressed name. One should be cautious in such circumstances that one does not become involved in publishing by way of hypertext link. In the case of Universal City Studios v Reimerdes and Corley34 a Court made an order that the defendant’s website was prohibited from directly providing files which contained the DeCSS code which enabled the circumvention of copy protection algorithms on DVDs. When the defendants posted links on their websites to other sites that provided DeCSS either by way of direct download via the link or by means of an extra few websites, the Court held that utilising this device was a distinction without a difference to offering a direct download. I have no doubt this point or something like it will fall to be decided in this country in some future case.

For those that don’t remember, the internet world responded to this decision with derision, and published the offending code in a multitude of different ways. Indeed the author of DeCSS itself was acquitted in Norwegian court. So no links.

But back to NZ name suppression. What if the author of the overseas site is unknown? What if the site is hosted in multiple places around the world? What if the site that received emails and published names was Wikileaks.org? What if there was a global site called NameSuppression.org, with a nz.NameSupression.Org sub-domain? The owners could be shadowy, the location ever in doubt and the publisher untouchable.

It can’t be long before this occurs, and then what shall we do in New Zealand? Block the site as the Australians tried to do with Wikileaks? Go after anyone that links to the site?

It’s an interesting conundrum. Judge Harvey has set the stage well.

1. Simple. Paying tax is an administrative burden, and compliance takes time and money. A great tax system will be very simple to understand, have no room for lawyers and accountants to attack loopholes and will make compliance a breeze. While we are a laudable 9th in the World Bank’s Doing Business paying taxes indicator table, the rest of the world is moving fast and we can do a lot better.
2. Fair. We are a society that puts fairness high up on our values, and a good tax system will not give or take more from one particular class of individual or entity. What I mean by this, because people have different interpretations of “fair”, is that those that earn the most should pay the most, and that it should be in proportion to their income. It also means that it should not be possible to manipulate the system to pay less than your fair share.
3. Caring. We are a society that has a rich social welfare tradition, and the system must care for those that do not or can not work. I simply do not want to live in a place where we tolerate people living in the streets. Let’s keep our minimum income and never abandon people.
4. Sustainable. The incentives in the system should lean towards sustainable use of resources, be it land or other forms of wealth. That means it must recognise that often assets are owned for non-economic reasons, or that we will tolerate a lower economic return so that we can gaze out over a beautiful view or get home before 5pm.
5. Investment neutral. The Government has the right to some of my income, but should not be dabbling in picking investment products. A good tax system will recognise that investment requires a balanced portfolio across a wide range of countries, assets and sectors and not skew investment to overweight in one area. Moreover any tax paid should only be on realised returns, and should be on an overall portfolio basis, with losses carried forward.
6. Automatic. The more we can make the system just work without intervention, the easier it will be for everyone. The goal is that every individual and company automatically pays tax or gets refunds as they go.
7. Elegant. As the ultimate test of good design is beauty, so I’ll be looking for a certain elegance with a new tax system. The elements above will contribute, but the whole will simply feel right.

What else is there?

There are a few potential topics to cover – including why NZ is a good place to be right now, what businesses can do to manage through the recession and the Social Innovation camp next steps. We’ll see what happens on the day.

For new and newer readers I’ve just put up a page of posts that I like from the last couple of years.

Posts I like.

Here are some good recent ones

Blame directors for failure, CEOs for success

2 shots were fired Self restraint is good

Let’s stop MPs drinking and lawmaking Seriously

Two McKinsey pieces on education – do read them

Well done Green cabs – now how about that website Great comments

Brass Monkey 2009 – a photolog The annual winter bike rally

There are almost 200 billion pieces of mail delivered to the (and Wolfram Alpha couldn’t deal with any of this) 111 million USA households each year. That’s an average of almost 1,800 each, or 5.7 items a day* or 34 a week (with 6 day delivery). I recall it was around 24 in 1999, so times have been strangely kind to the USPS.

Here’s the problem – 5.3 of those 5.7 letters each day are “unwanted”, and the only 0.5 are not. I’m including bills in the unwanted, as nobody really likes getting them. Moreover in the USA in particular, bills are used as just another way to deliver you junk mail.

Meanwhile the average household is getting about 1 personal letter a month, and  1 card or invite a week – though many of those cards will also be junk.

<update – the legend is wrong – red is not wanted etc.>

It’s really hard to define the size of the junk market in the USA, or anywhere, as companies for some reason get really defensive about their mail being classified as ‘junk’ or ‘unsolicited’. Also in the USA the junk mailers get around ‘no junk’ signs by personally addressing much all of their materials – those are the catalogs, direct letters and so forth in the graphic above. Moreover it is often difficult to distinguish junk (‘get a pre-approved credit card’) from bills (‘Here’s your credit card bill – with a pre approved offer!’) – and sometimes that is deliberate, so you will open the junk.

Sadly, no matter what you call it, it is all just so much wasted paper (the occasional beautifully crafted wedding invitation aside.) What is particularly strange are the 15 Billion catalogs sent out each year. That’s a whole lot of paper in the internet age.

We all belong to the internet age – paying bills online (usually automatically), sending and reading thousands of emails, twitters, blog posts and so forth each year and reading our news online. We only use snail mail (the name says it all) when we deliberately want a slower and more classy process, such as for those elegant wedding invites.

I last sent a personal letter when I was in Pakistan. In 1998. Or was it Europe in 1996? Either way – it’s long past the time when the mail was something I cared about.

Yet we still have the Pavlovian instinct, much like when a phone rings, of checking the mail when it arrives. I often do as well, but what could be in my mail box of any importance?

Well – the only things that matter to me at the moment in that box are The Independent and The Economist, which as newspapers have a time element to them. (I should also get the NBR but they make it a bit hard.)

Everything else can wait. I’d prefer to do bills in batches (I usually wait until the 3rd letter then overpay for a few months) as it is more efficient, and junk gets binned. (Powershop wins awards here – no paper is involved in the purchase of electricity)

So why do we as a society insist on a service to deliver our mail every day? Can’t we reduce it to once every 2 or 3 days, or even once a week?

Businesses can perhaps have more frequent deliveries, but they can pay for it, and besides – this will prod them into going fully online.

How about we offer a dual service – one service that will get me The Economist yeserday (e.g. by print on demand and hand delivery) instead of Monday/Tuesday and that will  deliver the Independent to me before I wake up on Thursday and another service that delivers letters once a week?

We can take the savings, and use them to contribute somehow to the roll out and maintenance of decent broadband infrastucture. We could even give the ownership of that broadband infrastructure to the NZ Post, just like it used to be.

The first shows the effect that the USA’s poor schools have had on their economy – and was just released. It finds the economic loss in the order of US$2,400 billion to $4,200 billion of GDP in 2008 alone. That’s more than enough to compensate for the current economic crisis.

It’s a tough number to get to though, as it means that the US schooling system would need to be the best in the world, whereas in fact is is close to the worst in the Western world. Their top schools are astonishingly good, but their average and below average schools are appalling.

NZ fares better than the USA, but there is a lot we can learn from this report. It wouldn’t be too hard for the local McKinsey office of the NZ Institute to generate the economic loss numbers for New Zeaand – how about it?

The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools

Poor school systems mean the students have poor grades, which mean that a lower proportion go to university, the average income is lower and they are more likely to have low civic engagement and criminal records. That’s summarized nicely in a page, as is a McKinsey team’s wont:

Somewhat frightening are the differences in scores relating to being black and/or low income – things which are also correlated. I wonder what the sme chart looks like in other countries.

While the most recent report stays well away from asking why the education is so poor, the report from 2007 does so – and it is fascinating reading as well.

How the world's best-performing schools systems come out on top

The summary is simple – get great people, help them become great teachers and support them with an equitable excellent system:

The difference a great teacher can make is immense – lifes are changed:

The end of the document has this wonderful check-sheet to determine whether you have an excellent education system or not. The gaps are pretty clear:

I would like to see this on every headmaster’s wall, along with everybody in the Ministry of Education, every member of a school board and all teacher of teachers:

In closing my recent favorite question to ask teachers is “how often are you reviewed by your peers?” The answer is usually close to “never”, and that is sad. It is very hard to improve if you are not getting continuous feedback related to normal situations.

I strongly feel we need to get to the stage where peer teachers can wander into and out of each others classes, sitting quietly at the back (say) without the students changing behaviour, and then giving and receiving 1-1 feedback after the class. This means the teachers need more time in the day, which in turn means more teachers.

We need to also better reward great teachers, those who work in lower decile schools and tough areas,  bringing back the student and society’s respect for teachers. It’s a tough job, and the teachers themselves (in the form of their union) are often against performance pay.

However I have yet to meet a teacher that would not welcome the feedback from peers, while the pay for the people to whom we entrust our children’s future is a national shame. Teaching is a calling, and we should not be doing it for pay, but I really think we owe it to them to allow them to live a decent life.

The Center’s Internet and Deomcracy blog has a recent post on “How to blog anonymously“, and explains why anonymous speech is important:

Like 18th century phampleteers (or even the writers of the Federalist papers), anonymous bloggers are empowered by their aliases to challenge taboos, censors and government power.

…The internet is the last bulwark against totalitarian control because of its fluid and democratic character. That is why anonymous blogging is so important. Difficult to trace or gag, it is the kind of speech most likely to impact an increasingly interconnected and web-dependent world.

However – it’s a dangerous game this blogging:

Of course, be extremely careful. Use these tools at your discretion. Reporters Without Borders has a comprehensive list of jailed cyber-dissidents.

The GlobalVoices site has the guide to blogging anonymously,which comes with a chilling caevet:

These directions do nothing to prevent you from being linked through other technical means, like keystroke logging (the installation of a program on your computer to record your keystrokes) or traditional surveillance (watching the screen of your computer using a camera or telescope). The truth is, most people get linked to their writing through non-technical means: they write something that leaves clues to their identity, or they share their identity with someone who turns out not to be trustworthy. I can’t help you on those fronts except to tell you to be careful and smart.

The bold part is important. The surveillance measures that are increasingly coming in are not that important to the either “criminals” or “freedom fighters”. Decent police work is much more effective at finding out about bad things happening, which is why societies should make sure their police, court systems and bureaucracies are corruption free and focused on the highest risks. New Zealand always scores very highly on these stakes.

Anyway – to cut a long story short, if you don’t want the ISP’s in NZ (or anywhere) to be able to see what you are doing, then use Tor, proxy servers, gmail and wordpress, writing your posts offline in say notepad and secure erasing everything along the way. You may not be really avoiding any real threat to your personal freedom in New Zealand, but you will be helping people that have real issues.

It’s a draconian move to go undercover, but there are some topics and writers which lend themselves to being anonymous. Consider though the words of GlobalVoices:

A final thought on anonymity: If you don’t really need to be anonymous, don’t be. If your name is associated with your words, people are likely to take your words seriously. But some people are going to need to be anonymous, and that’s why this guide exists. Just please don’t use these techniques unless you really need to.

S92 was nothing. The Telecommunications (Intercept Capability) Act, coming into full force on April 5, will let the Police, SIS and the GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau) execute search warrants on internet service providers to grab users’ data

Right now the law applies to voice calls, and April 5th sees that extended to everything passing over your ISP. That means email, VOIP calls, blogging, torrenting, facebook personal messages, intra-company communications, emails to your lawyer – and so on.

As the NBR helpfully points out, the spy base at Waihopai “has been able to tap internet communications systems for years” and from ISPANZ President Jamie Baddeley we hear

“some Ispanz members have already engaged already in legal interception. The police have been very pragmatic. I don’t think it’s a big issue.”

So nothing has changed really. Wire tapping can only be in place with a court order, it seems that this is happening already and that is how it should be. We just have to, as a society, make sure that the overall number of cases is low, and that tapping isn’t retrospective or go on for too long. Find the bad thing that you got the court order for then make an arrest, find nothing (or something else only) then turn it off.

But, along with section s92 of the NZ copyright act, the Australian Government’s somewhat clueless efforts to censor their internet and the NZ libel laws, we have an increasing chilling effect on our online behaviour, and expensive unwieldy compliance for our ISPs.

The ISPs are struggling merely to get us connected, let alone at a decent speed. Now they are being asked to police content, place surveillance capability in line and (in Australia) censor. All this adds cost and complexity, and ultimately degrades the service that we get in our homes and businesses.

Keith Locke from Green Party has the last word

“No one is denying we may catch a few more criminals through these powers, but there is a huge downside for us. The big downside has two aspects. One is our privacy, and the other is how these powers could be misused by agencies of the government.”

However the comments have unveiled a cars versus buses versus trains versus whatever war.

Let me copy my comment on the thread:

To me it is simple – a decent sized city (any city really) needs multiple modes of transport, and Auckland is currently a public transport joke.

The aim should be to make the retail cost of each transport option include the full cost or benefit of it’s economic externalities.

• That means driving a car should incorporate the cost of smog, congestion and road building/maintenance.
• Travelers on a bus should receive some of that car congestion subsidy – after all they are taking cars off the road.
• Train riders should receive more, as they are using even less road space and resources per person.

And that’s why trains make economic sense – they work when you add the numbers up correctly.

When we add the true cost of carbon emissions to the equations then things will really start to pay off – for trains and for us all.

Meanwhile car drivers already pay a lot of tax for emissions and so forth via fuel tax, but they do not pay for the congestion cost. It’s a real cost – increased fuel consumption and wasted time spent in traffic for thousands of people.

But we can only start charging for congestion when we have a viable alternative transport system.

So yes – bring in more trains and other mass transit options, and especially bring in more transport to more areas.

Job Summit – Top Twenty
Core Workplace and Employment Issues

1. Retain and Upskill – the nine day fortnight
Retain jobs by reducing wage costs while firms earnings are down. Retain jobs short and long term by upskilling workers. Possible focus on a nine day fortnight or maximum 6 week block release.

–> The nine day fortnight (or less) is a personal favorite, and one I’ve advocated before for both employees and employers. Why not make it even more flexible – down to even 6 day fortnights? The extra free time can be filled by entrepreneurial activities for those so inclined.
–> Sadly the move seems to be for Government to pay for the day off, which seems a bit rough. Why not just reduce the pay?
–> “Upskilling workers” is a motherhood statement, and comes with a very real cost. External training can run to the thousands per person day, and even internal training comes with logistical costs. Meanwhile you are paying workers to be trained.
–> Giving unpaid time off to go to universities and polytechs  is a potential winner, though many people do this already without taking the time out.
For all of these the concern is that those that earn less money are unable to afford the unpaid time away from work.

2. Intra-national migration achieved
Creation of a seasonal work marketplace that will remove barriers (information, infrastructure, qualifications/skills) between employers and seasonal workers.
–> This makes no sense to me. Isn’t there a decent private enterprise system for matching jobs and potential employees? Trade Me and Seek seem to be pretty good. Who would create and run this rather unnecessary extra marketplace – the Government?. Aren’t seasonal workers able to get jobs anyway? And what about the working holiday tourists – will they still be able to partially finance their journeys?

Skills and Transition
3. Keeping people in education and creating jobs through education and training
Expand group training programmes, review current apprenticeships models with a view to sustaining and expanding levels of training and introduce a training requirement as part of government procurement processes. Support summer employment for students, facilitating retraining and promoting the importance and value of education.

–> What are group training programs? They sound like they cost money (see 1:).
–> There has to be some room for improving the apprenticeship system, perhaps with decent Government subsidies for employers? The idea of paying very small amounts in exchange for training is fundamentally a good one. However I’m concerned that some trades which were wildly popular in recent times with the mining and housing led boom will have oversupply of workers going forward. The market will clear, but sometimes it takes time.
–> A training requirement as part of a Government procurement process would discriminate against some firms, especially smaller firms. As I said above training is expensive and smaller firms will find it especially hard, while all firms will find compliance bureaucratic.

Remove barriers and increase enablers/incentives to ensure that the education and training system is well-placed to meet current needs and opportunities including a specific focus on Maori/Pasifika people.

–> What are the barriers? You want to lower entry requirements? How wil tertiary institutions cope with this? Won’t this decrease the experience for those that can qualify? I had always thought we were pretty good on this front, and very good when it comes to reaching out to all cultural groups. This feels like a land grab, and we’ve had years of working on this already.

–> What I would like to see is the return of (the tiny) payments to study. I used to get $80 per week to go to university in Palmerston North, but then I’m living in the past.

4. Improve matching of supply and demand for training
Improve identification and matching of clearly identifiable job opportunities in the short and medium term by industry groups to direct future education and training priorities.

–> more training. Please – we get the story, but really, it is not generating income i nthe short term. Who would do this? What is wrong with allowing market forces to determine what training gets used? – individuals will choose training that gets them a job. Meanwhile there is plenty of information about in training courses – try Google, or maybe someone can do a quick start up for $5000.

5. Redundancy and transition support programme
Improve support for people about to be made redundant or who are unemployed to help them transition to new work opportunities and training including:
-Particular focus on those most vulnerable
- Income assistance
-Collaboration
-Enhanced industry partnerships
-Auditing, integrating and streamlining
-Improving information and access to services

–> Good – we need to make sure the safety net is there when people fall. We also need to make sure we don’t create thousands of consultants or push people into fields that are politically popular but not sustainable in the log term.
–> However those bullets raise more questions than they answer – what does “collaboration” mean? What does “Auditing, integrating and streamlining” mean? Surely we are pretty good at this stuff these days? This feels like layers of bureaucracy to me.

Maori Economy, Local and Regional Government
6. Enhanced utilisation of iwi assets
Creating new employment in the primary production sector by bringing Maori land and water based assets into higher value export focused productive use.  This may involve accessing existing business support, legislative/regulatory review and active facilitation of intra-Maori partnerships.

–> This wasn’t (like a few of the top 20) in the group break out output, and it is certainly interesting. It does sound a bit like planting trees, farms, tourism and factories on Iwi land – a business-first solution with obvious issues. It’s a good idea, but we have to remember that Iwi are in charge of their own resources and while outsiders can encourage and offer to invest, it is up to the Iwi to determine their own future.

Investing in projects that support Maori kinship -based infrastructure, including iwi-led housing projects, innovative approaches to existing state housing stock, and marae development.

->This new idea could be really interesting, a good use for infrastrucutre spending.  It is hard to tell whether government funds is the idea or not. This coulkd be lousy or fantastic, with the devils are in the details.

7. Government systems
Ensure that government services to Maori deliver effective results.

–> motherhood, apple pie and useless as an action. What does this really mean? What have we been working on since 1984?

8. Urgently develop and implement new sources of bond funding
Aggregate local government debt to gain access to debt funding at lower than current interest rates. Also, prioritise New Zealand investment plan across central/local government, that ensures a job creation focus, incentives for expenditure, quality spend that best positions New Zealand for medium to long term and avoids competition for capacity and capability.

-> Will aggregation help – or is it that local government finances are the issue here? Aggregating (mortgage) debt to get higher credit ratings and lower interest rates is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place, while spreads for NZ and local government will be high regardless.
–> If aggregation is a good thing, then why has nobody in the private sector done it already?.
–> Prioritising local government investment is done by local government, and I am not so sure how much extra they have in their pockets.
–> I’m concerned about any statement that has the words “avoids competition” – tending to think that competition is a good thing resulting in cheaper, higher quality results.

9. Reduce regulatory compliance costs and impediments
Adopt a permissive approach to increase the range of permitted activities in e.g.  building and housing, food safety. Enable local government to determine appropriate level of consultation.  Seek a moratorium on drinking water and air quality standards. Improve practice in council processing of regulatory consents.

–> This is the anti-environment clause, and the again the devil will be in the details of this. While I do not doubt that regulation has gone a bit far and is certainly cumbersome, the idea of reducing our water, food or environment quality for a quick buck is one that will fail in the public domain. Food safety in particular is everything for NZ’s economy – we cannot afford to compromise.

Helping firms survive
10. Big projects fast track
Establish a taskforce(s) to report directly to a relevant minister to anticipate and actively manage approval and regulatory processes for major and/or complex processes.

–> I do like this idea – make it quick and easy for big projects to be approved – or not approved.
–> Muldoon called this Think Big, but this looks to be more of “enable private sector to Think Big” which makes sense.
–> This overlaps with #14

11. Rule-making freeze
Cabinet directive issued to government agencies/regulators to stop all rule and regulation making or extension, unless specifically approved by the minister.  Reduce all enforcement activity to focus on minimum acceptable standards (rather than ‘nice to haves’) and the overall immediate interest for New Zealand.

–> Easy, but will it make a difference? Rules will be made as new information comes to light.
–>How about a “Relentless Rule Removal” campaign – much like the Great Qango hunt in earlier times?  That’s something I could buy in to.

12. Boosting tourist traffic co-fund
Establish a government/private co-funded $60 million fund to support initiatives to increase visitor numbers targeting 1% global market share, through short and long haul promotional activity, domestic tourism promotion and targeted infrastructure development.
–> an interesting idea but $60m is pissing in the ocean for such a big industry. Pushing on airports to reduce landing fees, fast-tracking Australia/NZ domestic travel status and so on would be more effective. We are actually pretty good on a lot of this stuff already.

Business Investment
13. Accelerate energy, environmental and water initiatives for employment and productivity improvements
–> That’s a good idea. It overlaps with #9, #10 and #14 – between big projects and training this list has some recurring themes.

14. Streamline regulatory approval processes for major projects
Accelerate transmission grid investment by increasing threshold for Electricity Commission consideration of electricity projects to $50 million. Allow longer wheel-based trucks and heavier loading. Establish taskforces reporting to a minister for vetting major infrastructure investment proposals and ensuring regulatory processes are quickly and consistently completed.

–> Another good idea, which oddly seems a bit specific for electricity. I really like the taskforce based approach to large investment approval, together with aggressive timetables for decisions but aggressive reaching out to stakeholders.

–> what about the smaller stuff – making it easy for individuals and small businesses to sell back to the grid. Let a thousand generators blossom
–> what about smart metering. Great for infrastructure (we can make them here – and by we I mean Textmate could, and with no ongoing telco costs), but even better to help us each use less power.

15. Access to working capital delivered via an extension of the Export Credit Office
Extend the Export Credit Office to also apply to domestic firms that need cash flow funding for completion of confirmed contract orders.

-> This is a big one as the ECO does extend a lot of credit to Exporters. Extending it to domestic circumstances does seem pretty hard as we are now essentially creating another bank.
–> What about extending the mandate (and backing) of Kiwibank to aggressively target SME’s instead?
–> Why just contracts? What is a contract? How do you assess counterparty risk? Why not on accounts receivable as well? Why not for importers as well?

16. Level the playing field to NZ firms for local and central government procurement
Revise procurement guidelines to ensure they do not bias against local providers by stipulating a specified firm size or track record.

–> Yes, this is good. The track record one is amusingly and frustratingly Catch-22 – you can only supply if you have supplied before. The GETS system does need some work to be fair to smaller providers. Even the application process to view tenders is convoluted, seeming more to push you away than let you in.

Firm Funding
17. Super-charged debt market
Possibilities include streamlining reporting and disclosure requirements, long term bond issues, involvement by a wider range of organisations such as local government.
–> Yes – I’m all for better disclosure and the like.
–> Are we large enough to support a debt market like this? Who will rate the bonds – the discredited agencies?
–> Who makes the market? Who does this really benefit?

18. Government/bank equity investment fund
Develop an equity growth fund to allow large institutional investors access to quality investments in the SME sector that are currently unavailable to them.
–> This has potential, though the language is a little scary. Those large institutional investors have always been able to invest in SMEs if they want to – but they seem unable to do so. Meanwhile SMEs find it hard to get funds to grow – banks may lend on balance sheet items but not on P&L prospects and business plans, and that credit will tighten through the year.
–> But the details matter. Who will run the the funds? How do we adapt lending criteria to adjust for SME’s? Are we talking equity as well as debt? Most of all, what people will be involved?
–> And a related question – How many sustainable jobs have the VIFs created through their investments? By sustainable I mean that the firms are profitable and no longer need to be supported by investors.

19. Commitment by banks to providing capital to NZ firms
Banks and Government co-fund partnership for preferred equity, financed by bank and government equity, leveraged with debt funding.
–> Sure , but as long as the Government has equity in the deal and or the banks. This is what the banks should be doing on their own, and again the devils are in the finer details.

20. Banks to significantly invest in financial literacy
Investing in educational initiatives to improve the financial literacy of their customers with a focus on SME businesses

–> This is a bit too stable door for me, but always good. Are banks not doing this already? If not then why not? Being the trusted advisor on all things business is after all a great way to identify and close on opportunities.

Overall an interesting top 20, with maybe a few goers in there but a few losers as well. There are overlaps, and gaps, but it is a good continuation from the group outputs, tightening up some of the ideas, dropping many of them and substituting some good new ones. But it’s still pretty raw, and there is a long way to go from here to tangible actions.

So what does Government and industry do with this all? and what else will emerge from the individuals that were there?

Both Bill English and John Key gave speeches at the conclusion of the event, and there has more output after the event. Nowhere in these two posts, for example, have we seen the NZ bicycle track idea (something that I’ve seen kicked around for a while – including at FOO) but somehow it emerged as one of the lead stories.

So next up let’s look at the subsequent output in another post. In a day or four.

I believe a summit was a good idea – the depression looms, and that also the focus on jobs was right   – as it is in job losses where we feel the biggest impact of a depression. Loss of investment value, scaling down spending or even bankruptcy are all sustainable if you retain employment. Losing your job and being unable to find another can lead to loss of home, increase in crime and other social problems and personal depression. So yes – making sure we all have jobs is good.

Bill English, amongst others, mentioned that 80% of NZ’s GDP was represented amongst the participants, which is a pretty amazing statistic. It’s not so amazing that the people were there, it’s amazing that just 200 people could represent that much of the economy. It says a lot about our lack of diversification, but also about our tiny population. There were a fair smattering of current and ex consultants, (McKinsey was well represented) and a few folk I have met, and even one I have worked for (Joan Withers). I don’t see a lot of the dot com crowd there though, aside from Rod Drury. Maybe that is a liberal versus conservative thing, perhaps it is a generational thing or more likely there were no (aside from Rod) people that could represent the entire industry.

All in all it appears that the day went well, with people across sectors working together in a common goal. Well done.

So here are three quick posts on the day. I can only write about what I read and see on video – being there would give a lot more.

Following some kick of speeches, the attendees broke off into groups and later into sub groups. So let’s first look at  the groups, the aims for each group and what they each proposed for “Big” “Near Term and High Priority” actions.

Group 1: Core workplace & core employment issues (Rob Fyfe, Helen Kelly)

AIM: Identify workplace solutions that are in the long-term best interests of NZ by identifying specific potentially time-dated measures and agreements that are ‘right’ for these conditions.

Big, Near Term Actions

1. Retain jobs by reducing wage costs while firms’ earnings are down and long term by using this opportunity to upskill workers.
2. Creation of a seasonal work marketplace that will remove barriers between employers and seasonal workers.

Group 2: Workers – Skills and transition (Stephen Tindall, Joan Withers)

AIM: Concrete actions, not frameworks or taskforces, that utilize existing assets, and capabilities –public, private and NGO – including educational, to assist in re/upskilling labour and minimizing transition time and costs.

Big, Near Term Actions

1. Keep people in training
2. Improve matching of supply and demand for training
3. Flexibility, enablers and incentives in education and training to build skills and create and keep jobs
4. Improve support to help people cope with redundancy or unemployment

Group 3: Maori Economy, Local and Regional government (Ngatata Love and Lawrence Yule)

AIM: Minimize school-leaver unemployment. Define actions that will allow rapid deployment of Maori, and local and regional government assets into greater productive use.
Increase certainty and speed up regulatory functions to bring forward private sector investment.

Big, Near Term Actions

1. Integrated Approach to Māori Secondary and Tertiary Education
2. Integrated delivery of education and training in senior secondary and tertiary sectors, through existing Māori and other education providers.  Involves linking education and training to support the Māori asset base, and emerging sectors; and relaxing funding and regulatory barriers (eg, remove capping of Student Achievement Component funding to enable demand driven response; relaxing movements between secondary and tertiary; enabling use of alternative delivery sites such as marae.

1. Councils agree to roll out good practice and streamline consenting processes
2. Councils commit to bringing forward infrastructure development
3. Mayors commit to broaden the scope of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs

Group 4: Helping firms Survive (John Bongard)

AIM: Implementable, targeted near-term actions that make a meaningful difference to identified industries.

Big, Near Term Actions

1. Cabinet Directive issued to government agencies/regulators that “now is not the time to be introducing new or extended rules, standards or processes that create additional compliance costs for firms
2. A fund for initiatives to encourage more tourists to New Zealand, both long and short haul
3. Actively manage regulatory approval process for complex and/or major projects (over $25M)

Group 5: Business Investment (Wayne Boyd, John Shewan)

AIM: Create a package of policies and options that give business the confidence and rationale to not delay capex, and identify some specific new business opportunities that will see new, productive jobs created. In this area we expect to see some ‘upside risk’ as well as ‘downside mitigation’ from the policies.

Big, Near Term Actions

1. Reform regulatory approval processes for major infrastructure projects
2. Target and attract offshore investment and entrepreneurial migrants (e.g. wealthy investors, foreign students)
3. Improve SME access to working capital

Group 6: Firm Funding (Rob Cameron)

AIM: Honest assessment of the role and goals of the bank sectors, with clear understanding of how the bank sector and government will work together for the best interests of the NZ economy on both firm and consumer sides – during this period. Identify solutions that ensure NZ is ‘core’ to the use of Australian banks’ use of funds, and will see bank funding at acceptable price and volume levels. Improve the set (range, speed, cost) of non-bank funding options for firms.

Big, Near Term Actions

1. Stimulating the development of New Zealand’s debt markets
2. Equity growth fund for SMEs
3. Bank and Government transition fund
4. Statement of commitment from banks to continue to meet the demand for credit

Quick Feedback

Some groups did well, while others came back with motherhood statements. Frankly this is all a bit too raw to over-analyse and thankfully a this work has been crystallized into a “top 20″ – which I shall walk through next.

It’s really important in these sorts of session to take notes/actions well – usually you’d assign a consultant to each one. You can tell a lot from the outputs – some of them have bullets that are clearly inadequate, while others encapsulate tangible actions well. Well written actions are not everything, but they do make sure that everyone in the room has common understanding and agreement.

It is a bit pedantic, but very few of these these are actually written as actions, and none of these are written as actions that clearly describe what needs to be done, by who, by when and why. For example  “Equity growth fund for SME’s” can be interpreted in many different ways. My vision may be very different from yours, and I imagine that even within the room there could have been different ideas. I use this example as it is rectified somewhat by the top 20 list, it a powerful idea and clearly the result of some discussion. However it’s also indicative of how difficult it is to come up with crisp answers in short sessions, and with large numbers of opinionated participants.

I’ll pick on the local Government/Maori actions next, they were the only group requiring two separate Powerpoint packs to present their answers, and the Maori one (for example) addressed the question of unemployment by a long-winded answer which boils down to “training”. Unfortunately it takes a lot more than trained people to create jobs – as anyone in the Philippines will tell you. Fortunately better ideas did emerge in the top 20.

The Workplace Training group one didn’t really answer their question’s call for “Concrete actions” – how can we, for example, “keep people in training” or “Improve matching of supply and demand for training”, and who will be responsible for it?

The 4th Group – helping big firms survive – did very well  – coming up with 3 actions that could reasonably easily be written up with a workplan.

The last two groups are shovelling around big dollars, and we can anticipate some debate on their proposals – and debate is good. None of their proposals come across well in bullets, but the top 20 has more.

So next let’s look at the top 20.