The Hillary Symposium

From the programme: Nick Marsh is the Managing Director of Next Corporation. Nick studied at Nottingham, and Leeds in the United Kingdom, and received his PhD in Cross Cultural Industrial Psychology from Bath University. He was a member of the founding team of the Management
School at Auckland University and Director of the Auck.MBA. He has published many articles & business books, including:

1. Theory K-Case Studies of Excellence in NZ Management;
2. The All Star Company- People, Performance and Profit;
3. Strategic Foresight- The Power of Standing in the Future.

He has been involved in many Strategic Foresight Projects, the largest of which was the New Zealand National Foresight Project in the late 1990’s which was a precursor to the National Innovation Strategy. During that time, he has worked with government and local government bodies, private and public companies, and NGOs in Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Europe. Nick has originated many new thinking tools in strategy and change management.

We’ve been around the planet at this symposium, and he wants to come back to Christchurch. There are many in the room familiar with the idea of city-state, and this is the idea we’ve had to come back to: this city-state, the idea that we have to govern a particular place in a responsible way.

He’s also going to talk briefly about the Denmark story.

This is a way of thinking about Christchurch and Canterbury. We’re not just talking about the CBD; we’re talking about the fringe, the urban-facing hinterland, and the rural-facing hinterland (too far to commute to the city). It looks like concentric circles.

This is true for all cities: Hamilton and the Waikato, Melbourne and Victoria — it’s this idea of city-state. When you look at knowledge workers who might want to leave the UK, do they want to live in Auckland, Christchurch, Portland? They’re looking at boutique cities with great lifestyles. We’re competing for those people or for their investment with a number of places. We’re not talking about carbon here — we’re talking about the whole idea of competitive city-states.

The supercity in Auckland was designed on the basis of competing with Melbourne, with Vancouver, etc. There is nowhere on the planet that has adopted the Auckland single-city model, so it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. Hamish talked about Mom & Pop; how do we make decisions around the kitchen table when it comes to fundamental things, like do we live in Fendalton or Nelson? We look at four factors:

• Livability: How attractive is it for me and my family to live here? Mobility, crime, safety, boy racers, schools, ambience, how does it look? He got to Christchurch yesterday; it was a sunny day and the city looks magnificent.
• Workability: How attractive is it for me and my family to find work here?
• Investability: How attractive is it for me to invest there? Buy a house, make a commercial investment?
• Visitability: What kind of attractions does it have? What would draw people to enjoy themselves here?

Imagine this:

Canterbury: The Carbon-Positive Region

There’s a surprising number of severe skeptics about climate change. The NIWA data shows Canterbury going up by 1.8 degrees centigrade, becoming a lot drier and a lot windier, and it’s a pretty juvenile attitude to think that’s a good thing. So we’re just going to take a trip around the world to somewhere else, thanks to Google Earth.

The Canterbury region has exactly the same landmass as somewhere else in the world: Denmark. Denmark’s got a few more people than Canterbury: 5.2 million — and they’ve done something rather interesting.
The Danish Tipping Point

• Oil crisis 1973: OPEC price rises — an economy dependent on oil
• National security — burning platform — we have to decrease our dependency
• Appetite for government to act — incentives, taxes, regulations — for the good of all
• Shift to renewables — wind is all we’ve got.

This was before climate change was even particularly a conversation. One of the things we’ve done disastrously here in New Zealand is that the climate issue has become politicised. It has to be a national consensus, otherwise it’s very very difficult to have a consistent policy.

In Denmark, they put in incentives, frameworks, etc, but said, ‘Don’t change them every time the government changes.’ At the time, all Denmark had was wind, and New Zealand was the leader in wind technology, so they acquired the technology off us because nobody here was interested in wind.

They’ve grown their economy 40% since then, but they haven’t increased their energy demand. Total greenhouse emissions have declined. They’ve changed the mix, so renewables represent a significantly higher proportion and oil is significantly smaller. The country collectively decided to do this. Economists rank Denmark as the best place in the world to do business. They’ve got a higher GDP and lower unemployment than anyone else. They’re collecting NZD25 billion in environmental energy taxes but it’s a virtuous circle; they plow it back in to the green technology.

They’re world leaders in water consulting; the demands for their services are enormous. Carbon positive agriculture — they’re dealing with the exact same things as we are, and they’re doing extremely well.

Green ICT, energy efficient housing… they didn’t have any of this before the national security imperative of removing their dependence on oil. And we need to find this here, in the region. If we can’t do it here where we live and where we care, we won’t have the incentive to do it anywhere.

Our economy has fantastic skills in R&D, IT, food science, etc. There’s a hell of a mix here, this could seriously be a growth area for Canterbury. That’s the challenge that’s there, and when you think about the Denmark situation, the thing they have that we don’t have is a sense of national urgency.