Friday, March 29, 2024

Big spend demands value, leaders

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The Government’s borrowing of billions to counter covid-19 disruption should be seen as a chance to rethink and reset business and society and not as a burden on the next generation.
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Waikato farmer Richard Cookson is rapidly tiring of the rhetoric framing the scale of borrowings, given the opportunity it provides for improvements and changes that might otherwise have taken years to occur, if at all.

“This is a really exciting opportunity for generational investment in our grandchildren’s future, to create a society they can be proud to inherit, an opportunity our grandparents never had.”

But that opportunity does come framed around some concern he has about the intense jobs focus in the Budget.

“At this stage that is understandable but you also need to be cautious about the type of jobs focused on. Shooting wallabies, pulling pines and planting pines are fine but we need these jobs to piggy-back to higher-value jobs and outcomes.”

It is a case of turning those base jobs into careers like silviculture, freshwater ecologists and plant breeders, for example.

Internally, linking the environmental jobs spend of $1 billion through rural communities to include farmers who need plantings, nurseries that can supply trees and even iwi who could grow them provides that platform and will hopefully stimulate the next tier up of skilled jobs. 

He can see potential from there to develop more science around the inherent food and health characteristics in the likes of native manuka. 

The investment then makes the leap from restorative ecologic work to the high-value food sector. 

An example of value gain for farmers beyond simple riparian planting could include developing simplified freshwater testing technology that lets them better monitor waterway health.

“So we could achieve this great connectivity between the environment, iwi, farmers and science. 

“But if it is not underpinned by a strategy and a longer-term perspective then this $50b will be wasted, spent and gone and we will be back to what we had.”

What we have, Cookson says, is an agricultural food production system too focused on bottom line return, pushed along by high debt loading across the sector. It is throwing out farmers exhausted by the pressure to deliver returns in increasingly unreliable biological systems.

“I think we all know we need to make some fundamental shifts in the direction we have been going. But unless there is genuine value added we risk only creating more division, not improvement.”

He points to past research that highlights how past pandemics have proved to be social levellers thanks to disease’s general indifference to income, race or creed.

“Right now we have the chance to make investments that hold some of those egalitarian qualities together. If we do not we will be constantly caught up in this space focused on return on investment. That simply will not produce the creativity and motivation to be innovative.”

Should Labour get a clear majority in the election it might have a clearer path for money to be invested without compromising that potential.

Internationally, New Zealanders’ status as the covid conquerors is gaining the country more attention than it is accustomed to. With that comes the chance to leverage our covid status.

“How we achieved this with a team of five million, you could be cynical and say it could be profitable. 

“But beyond that this has given NZ a sense of self-confidence, a sense of national price we need to act on. It may not be there forever. 

“We have this wonderful opportunity to be global role models – how we responded reflected who we are, the value we place on each other, values simply not shared by all countries.” 

He detects that sense of pride also permeating through the farming sector that so capably continued to grow, harvest and process food over the past eight weeks.

“We are probably not completely sure what to do with it. But we should acknowledge that pride and take it forward. It will not be there forever and already drought is eroding that pride and self-confidence.”

He says it has never been more critical that a rural leader be seen to step up to unify farmers’ pride.

“We desperately do need someone to stand up and say they are looking out for us, they have our backs.”

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