| Our city governance has something to answer for. The compliance cost, red tape, filth, violence and traffic congestion is embarrassing! People want a safe, clean environment first. They want to just do their business, live well without always having to ensure they are being held to the standards of some activist bureaucrat. Do we really need over 150 elected municipal politicians in Auckland? The place is dysfunctional. The Government has bravely established ..... a Royal Commission. In an earlier Labour Government, abolished over 400 local government units. There is much to celebrate, our major city centres and airports have been rebuilt, Port reform has opened up all that magnificent Port land, our cafés, tourism, and arts have improved.
But a thousand New Zealanders are leaving a week. Why? Because they can. Sure, it’s natural people move about, they always have. But NZ is facing something else. Sorry, it is tax, and a desire always by Governments, local and national, to be bossy, and our very average productivity rates mean every year New Zealanders get poorer relative to others. Accountants regularly advise mobile, high earners to leave. We are the only country that taxes overseas currency accounts because of currency movements. Australia has now enacted the same tax rules as London, Geneva or Hong Kong. You will only be taxed on income you receive from the country you reside in. If you earn $100,000, that’s $40,000 tax, you can’t do much with that, but if you earn a million dollars, that’s $400,000 tax, $8,000 a week, which is something ! This encourages people to leave and penalises those who wish to return.
The studies of Richard Florida, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, have confirmed what many cities and regions have long known. In the new economy, the competitive advantage of nations and places is the creativity of its people. This, underpinned by open communication systems, property rights and the predictable rule of law, is now what matters. Creative talent is not drawn to any kind of city or region. These skilled entrepreneurs are highly sought after and highly mobile. Where they choose to work has much to do with the social makeup of the community around them, as does the work itself. Respect for diversity, cultural dialogue, the arts, openness, tolerance, free information, food, entertainment - all these things make up the great and successful cities and regions of the world.
We are experiencing an economic paradigm shift. It used to be that communities were called good places to live if they were good places to work. Now they are considered good places to work if they are vibrant places to live.
Regions that combine a high quality of life with a respect for and accommodation of diversity, are most likely to enjoy the greatest success in attracting the sort of talent required to fuel growth in the new economy. Diversity, tolerance, respect and acceptance of others is not just an expression of social solidarity, but a profound economic good.
As a boy, the church sent me door to door to collect old clothes to be sent to the poor in Singapore. I always wondered why they needed woolly jerseys. Now they have a higher income per person, live longer, and enjoy a lower infant mortality rate than New Zealand. This has not happened by accident. The present Singapore leadership knows Singapore must reinvent itself as China sucks investment away. They have found that the very policies that built their present success - hard work, a puritanical no-nonsense nanny state - were good for the ‘60’s, even the ‘80’s, but now to create a new, more sophisticated economy based on services, information, healthcare and education, it must take a new direction to revise its old economy and transfer to the opportunities of the future. A state committee called “Remaking Singapore” has discovered Professor Florida. So they are now talking of ending strict laws on censorship and abolishing petty laws such as not dancing on bar tops, and will allow pubs to open all night. The government is now quietly hiring gays and
lesbians in the civil service. This is a complete reversal of what in the 1960’s was called “yellow culture” or degenerate behaviour. In the 1960’s, I was stopped in Singapore by the police and told to get a haircut within 24 hours or leave. How things are changing. Alas, time has solved the “hair” problem.
Smart cities, Singapore, Shanghai, Dubai and London study the future and make decisions. They call on the world’s best and mix central government and local government strategies. I’ve been at some of their seminars and am now on the Advisory Board for Rotterdam city.
This experience reminds me of a profound manifestation of the present phase of globalisation is the capacity of those with skills and money to choose where to live. And they are making that choice.
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