BayBuzz Magazine, Jul/Aug 2011

BIGSURVIVING THE

ONE

IS IT UP TO THE TEST?CRANFORD

“We can’t rescue everybody”

WHAT’S

CHOOSING TO BE

HAWKE’S BAY’S TWO ECONOMIESPOOR

PRODIGALS RETURN

THEY’REBACK!

SCIENCEIT MAKES GOOD

TO DIVERSIFY

WITHHAWKE’S BAYTOURISM

???UP

07-08:11new zealand ~ $8.0001

It’s time totake a stand

Hawke’s Bay food production must remain GM free

JOHN BOSTOCK

FREE EDITION

don’t be left in the cold this winter...Warm up with Terrôir at Craggy Range alongside our roaring fire and some great food and wine events.

eventsthursday 7th july Wine Options DinnerPut together your team of four and challenge yourself to a fun evening of blind tasting followed by a casual shared plate dinner. $55/pp

friday 15th july The Grove DinnerWinner of Metro Magazine’s 2010 and 2011 Auckland Restaurant of the Year, The Grove’s Michael Dearth and chef Benjamin Bayly will present their award winning cuisine to the people of Hawke’s Bay. $95/pp (3-course meal)

$135/pp (matched to wine)

monday 18th july - tuesday 2nd augustTerrôir Restaurant closed for maintenance.

thursday 4th august Chef - Rex MorganDine with Rex Morgan, Executive Chef and Partner in Boulcott Street Bistro - Wellington, former owner of Citron restaurant, Air NZ Consultant chef and star of a new TV series on food and wine. $95/pp (3-course meal)


thursday 18th august The Great Wine DebateIs Syrah or Pinot Noir New Zealand’s best red grape variety? Join Steve Smith MW (Craggy Range), Grant Taylor (Valli Wines, Central Otago) and others for a light hearted argument over dinner at The Great Wine Debate. Pick your side and join in the fun. $60/pp

every wednesday july - augustEnjoy an early dinner and glass of wine at Terrôir before catching the latest movie at Cinema Gold, Havelock North. $60/pp (movie ticket included)

terrôir winter hours wednesday - saturday lunch and dinner; sunday lunch only

for more information or bookings please contact terroir at craggy range253 waimarama road havelock north, hawkes bay

p: 06 873 0143 • e: [email protected] • www.craggyrange.com













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Prodigal sons and daughters are returning

to the Bay. Who are they, why are they back and

what have they brought with them?

4

Bay Buzz

ISSUE NO.1 : JULY/AUGUST : 2011

ContentsUP CLOSE INTERVIEWS

CRANFORD RE-BORNwith Ken Gilligan & Helen Blaxland Cranford Hospice

15

A NEW REGIMEwith Annie Dundas Hawke’s Bay Tourism

18

COLUMNS

MÃORI SETTLEMENTS MEANECONOMIC OPPORTUNITy Des Ratima

CRACkING ThETRANS--TASMAN BROCCOLI TRADE Douglas Lloyd Jenkins

ThE BRAT kID ANDThE WEAk PARENT David Trubridge

WhAT CAN yOU DOFOR yOUR COUNTRy? Rod Drury

CONFESSIONS OF AN ART jUNkIERoy Dunningham

PLONkINGBrendan Webb

GUEST ADVOCATE

keep hB food production GM freeJohn Bostock, Pure Hawke’s Bay

FUN & PROVOCATION

BrainfoodFor the under-stimulated

PunditsWill HB Rugby World Cup be a fizzer?

Ins & OutsWhat’s hot and not in Hawke’s Bay

Ani’s CalendarDon’t miss these events

Catch us online at www.baybuzz.co.nz

8THEBIGONEKathy Webb

Hawke’s Bay is vulnerable to many disasters.What are the worst case scenarios? Are we ready or not?

20SCIENCEINHawkE’SBay

Keith Newman

38THEy’REBaCk!

28CHOOSINGTOBEpOORTom Belford

< FEATURES REGULaRS>

Science and R&D are crucial to Hawke’s Bay. With primary sector blinkers

on we limit our vision for the future.

Does anybody in Hawke’s Bay actually make money? We seem to have two economies – one struggling to survive, the other quietly vibrant.

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kEITh NEWMANkeithisajourneymanjournowithnearly40-years’experienceacrossmainstreamandtrademedia.HeandhiswifepaulaNovakmovedfromthebushinTitirangitothebeachatHaumoanain2009.He’s

wonawardsforwritingabouthi-tech,producesMusicalChairsprogrammesforRadioNZandhashadfourbookspublished,oneontheinternetinNewZealandandthreeonNZhistory.

kAThy WEBBkathyhasbeenaHawke’sBayjournalistfor25years.ShewasthefirstfemalechiefreporterattheformerHawke’sBayHerald-Tribune,andinauguralchiefreporteratHawke’s Bay Today,movinglatertothe

Dominion Postandnowfreelancing.Hastingshasbeenhomefor40years.withchildrengrown,husbandBrendanandkathyspendsparetimetryingtotameawildblockoflandatTangoio. COLUMNISTS ~ThIS ISSUE

Rod Drury Entrepreneur (Xero, Pacific Fibre)

Douglas Lloyd Jenkins HB Museum & Art Gallery, author

David Trubridge Designer, entrepreneur, environmentalist

Des Ratima ‘Mayor’ of Whakatu, Mãori leader

Roy Dunningham Art historian & connoisseur

Brendan Webb Journalist, humourist, motorcyclist

John Bostock Fruit and vege grower, Rush Munro

Ani Tylee Communicator, project manager, artist

Tom lives with his wife and daughter on a lifestyle block along the Tukituki. In the States, he worked chiefly in Washington in politics and public advocacy. he served in the Carter White house and worked for Ted Turner in his pre-billionaire days. his professional focus is marketing and media and he writes a blog for political/nonprofit fundraisers & communicators called The Agitator.net.

welcometothelaunchissueofBayBuzz.

weaimtoofferbothseriousandentertainingreadingabouttheissues,challenges,lifestyleandprospectsofHawke’sBay.Todothat,we’vegatheredabroadrangeofvoicestotelltheBay’sstoriesandspeculateaboutitsfuture.Someyou’llhearfrominthisedition;othersareawaitingbehindthecurtain.

we’llexploretheissuesindifferentstyles–in-depthfeatures,interviews,personalityprofiles,opinioncolumns,issuebriefs,satire,andthebits&piecesthatmakemagazinesengagingandfun.

Inthisissue,weinvestigatetheBay’sreadinesstodealwithamajornaturaldisaster.Lookatchoicesourregionmustaddressifitistoprosperforusall.Examinethecriticalroleofscienceinsecuringcompetitiveadvantageforouragriculturalsector.amidsttheclamouroverkiwiexodustoOz,we’vediscoveredmany‘returnees’toHawke’sBay,andwetelltheirstories.

weupdateyouontworecentsorespots–CranfordHospiceandournewregionaltourismagency,Hawke’sBayTourism,interviewingthenewleadersofboth.

Ourgaggleofcolumnistsofferpassionateperspectivesonthetrans-Tasmanbroccolitrade(!),environmentalneglect,localartists,personalresponsibility,andMäorieconomicviability…plusahumorouslookatnationalelectionpreparations.whataresomeofthemostinterestingeventscomingupintheBay?whoorwhatis‘In’or‘Out’intheBay?will

HB’scelebrationofRugbyworldCupbeafizzer?Ouranswersareinthesepages.

Themagazineiscomplementedandextendedbyourexpandedwebsite(www.baybuzz.co.nz).Ifsomethinginthismagazinepiquesyourinterest,you’relikelytofindmoreinformationaboutitonoursite.andplentyofopportunitytotalkbacktous.Ihopeyou’llgiveusyourfeedbackinouronlineBayBuzzReaderSurvey–thelinkisonourhomepage.Telluswhatyoulikeordon’tlikeandwhatelseyou’dliketosee.

anumberofcommunityleadershaveco-conspiredwithustomakepossiblethelaunchofBayBuzzmagazine.Theirsupportisinspiring,butultimatelyyouthereaderwillmakethejudgmentastowhetherBayBuzz meetsaneedhereintheBay.

Ifyouthinkitdoes,Ihopeyouwillbecomeasubscriber(detailsinoursubscriptionadonp23orgotowww.baybuzz.co.nz/subscribe).yes,you’llseefreecopies(forawhile)instoresandshops.Butyouknowaqualitypublicationrequiresresources,sodotherightthing(!)andsubscribe.

Orperhapsbecomeanadvertiser.you’llseethatacoupleofdozenadvertisershavetakenarisk,placingtheirbrandsinthenewBayBuzzsightunseen.I’mgratefulfortheirwillingness.andifyou’repleasedandexcitedbythismagazine,pleaseletthemknowandgivethemyoursupport.

Iwanttothankallthefolksyou’llseelistedonour‘masthead’whohaveputthispublicationandwebsitetogether.It’squiteateamofprofessionalsandvolunteers…allpassionateaboutbringingBayBuzztotheBay.

andtomyneglectedwifeanddaughter–aswellasfriends,colleaguesandpeoplewho’vestruggledtogetaholdofmeoverthepastmonth–pleaseacceptmyapologies.Thiswillgeteasier!

Tom Belford

07-08/11

CONTRIBUTORS>

From the Editor ~ TOM BELFORD

EDITOR Tom Belford

SUB-EDITOR Keith Newman

SENIOR WRITERS Tom Belford, Keith Newman, Kathy Webb

COLUMNISTS Kay Bazzard, Rod Drury, Roy Dunningham, Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, Des Ratima, David Trubridge, Ani Tylee, Brendan Webb

EDITOR’S RIGhT hAND Brooks Belford

PhOTOGRAPhy Tim Whittaker

ThE BAyBUZZ TEAM >SUBSCRIPTIONS >

DESIGN & PRODUCTION Stefan Olsen @ Ed

ART ASSISTANT Julia Jameson

ADVERTISING SALES & DISTRIBUTION Anna Archibald

ONLINE Mogul

CREATIVE Steve & Di @ Band

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Advertising Enquiries [email protected] contact Anna Archibald on027 285 4711

Scan the QR code on the cover to visit our website.

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THE BIG ONE

NATURAL DISASTERS CAN STRIKE US AT ANY TIME.

How well prepared are we in Hawke’s Bay?KATHY WEBB investigates

So here’s the plan: If the big one hits, we all make our way home as best we can. We’ve got the survival kit just like it says on the fridge magnet.

Checklist: Transistor radio, torch and batteries; some bottles of water, baked beans and a can opener. And candles. Oh, and matches. Sorted. We’ll be fine until the council rescues us.

If only it were that simple.

Around the world during the past year, lives and landscapes have been lost to droughts, floods, fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and tornadoes.

Japan has just learned a hard lesson. Its strongest-ever earthquake created a tsunami that caused a nuclear disaster of epic proportions -- in a country everyone thought would be the best-prepared in the world.

More recently, an exploding volcano in Chile has wrecked air travel plans around the Southern Hemisphere, while neighbouring Argentina has watched its food-producing land disappear under 30 cm of ash.

The storm that devastated coastal Hawke’s Bay two months ago was a mere taste in comparison with some of those, but it was a wake-up call.

The April 26-28 “rain bomb” dropped 750mm of rain in 36 hours, turning streams into raging waterfalls and rivers that surged through houses, sweeping away vehicles, ripping up roads and bringing down hills. In its wake, the residents of communities such as Waimarama and Ocean Beach surveyed the devastation in eerie silence, cut off from the rest of the world with no power or phone lines, no cellphone coverage, no way out, and no way to summon help.

Still, it could have been worse.

Hastings mayor Lawrence Yule says that if the storm had been centred just 10km further inland, over the Heretaunga Plains, there would have been a huge disaster.

Drainage systems would not have coped. Thousands of homes and businesses would have been flooded, and rivers would very likely have burst their banks. The productive soils of the Plains, which form the economic base of the regional economy, would have disappeared under water, mud, silt and stones.

Even so, it could even have been much worse than that.

If the storm had been centred at the headwaters of the Ngaruroro and Tutaekuri Rivers, it would have sent a wall

• Earthquake• Pandemic of flu or some

other infectious disease• Floods• Fire involving hazardous

substances • Electricity failure• Pests or diseases hitting food

production or forestry • Tsunami• Rural wildfire• Release of hazardous

chemicals into the air• Coastal erosion

The Top Ten RisksTo hawke’s Bay

Continued on Page 10 »

THE BIG ONE

Photo courtesy of www.abovehawkesbay.co.nz

of water tumbling down on to the plains, pouring on to farms and spilling over stopbanks that were never designed to cope with such large volumes of water.

Water, water everywhereYule says the Ngaruroro would likely

have diverted to its old course, swallowing up Gimblett Gravels – some of the most expensive wine growing real estate in the world – then Flaxmere, before heading around the south-western side of Hastings to join the Karamu Stream. From there it would have surged on down to Havelock North, perhaps knocking out the Havelock North bridge and the Hastings water supply lines attached to it.

The Tutaekuri River could also have burst its stopbanks to inundate Taradale and other parts of Napier, taking more bridges with it. With rail and roads gone, Napier and Hastings would have been cut

off from each other, the airport and its air rescue services out of action, and the hospital unreachable for anyone north of Hastings.

Yule says there’s absolutely no doubt Hawke’s Bay dodged a bullet in April.

“It could have been a major disaster.” The storm was what civil defence

people call a “one-in-500-year-event” – which means it was so severe it could be reasonably expected to occur only once every 500 years. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen again for another 500 years. It could happen again next week.

Natural disasters can and do happen anywhere at any time. They can destroy our homes and livelihoods or even kill us.

Christchurch has been living with that stark reality for nine months, shaken and wrecked by continual earthquakes.

Hawke’s Bay Airport after the April rain bomb

Feature

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THE BIG ONE ~ Torch, baked beans, raincoat ... oops didn’t see that coming

The physical devastation and the emotional exhaustion of its citizens have been laid bare on our television screens almost daily since September.

It’s a scenario no one would have imagined, and we feel so sorry for them. And yet, for those who have seen it only on television it’s still sort of remote, not quite real, someone else’s problem, and that is a worry for those in charge of leading this region out of the mire the next time disaster strikes.

But not enough to drink?According to a survey done for the

Hawke’s Bay Regional Council in 2008, just over half of us have a water stash for emergencies. Of the 450 households interviewed, 96% said they had enough food to last three days, although not all of them had the means to cook without electricity.

The worrying statistic to emerge was that only 55% said they had stored water, while 1% said they hadn’t made any preparations whatsoever.

That adds up to a lot of people who could end up hungry and/or trying to get by without water once they’ve emptied the hot water cylinder.

Hawke’s Bay has it all in terms of natural hazards. In fact, nowhere in the region is safe from a disaster of some sort. We are constantly told it is a matter of “when”, not “whether” a natural disaster will befall us.

Yet it seems the message is not registering. While our councils plan and prepare, it seems Joe Citizen imagines there is little to go wrong, or nothing is going to happen, or that an army of White Knights is poised to ride to the rescue when summoned.

The regional council’s draft annual

The possibility: Map only shows areas potentially flooded by a breach of one or more of the rivers; also vulnerable are the airport flats/Ahuriri Farm

» “The immediate response would be pretty good,

but sustaining that over time through the recovery phase would really stretch

the group in terms of resources. We’d be

pretty patchy for a major, sustained event.”

andrew newmanhbrc chief executive

11

Bee in the know 07-08/11

THE BIG ONE ~ Torch, baked beans, raincoat ... oops didn’t see that coming

plans says there is “significant room for improvement in public awareness of natural hazards and what these risks mean to them”. That comment, so tactfully expressed, indicates that the hoi polloi are just not paying attention. “Public understanding of the likely impact of a major event on them individually is low. Few people would be prepared for an event and be able to be self-sufficient for at least 72 hours,” the council says.

The region of Hawke’s Bay covers 12,700 square kilometres, stretching from Mahia Peninsula in the north to Porangahau in Central Hawke’s Bay to the south. To the east is the Pacific Ocean, and to the west are the Ruahine, Kaweka, Huiarau and Ahimanawa ranges.

Around Napier and Hastings there are 140,000 people living and working on the Heretaunga Plains, a flood plain crossed by three large rivers kept in check by man-made stopbanks. There is an eroding coastline open to tsunamis, and the region, criss-crossed by fault lines, sits on the edge of a tectonic plate grinding against another one.

Large areas of land around Napier,

including the regional airport, were lifted out of the sea by the 1931 earthquake, and would be likely to suffer liquefaction during another big shake.

Beyond the Heretaunga Plains, toward the headwaters of our big rivers in the ranges, are vast tracts of hills denuded of their natural, erosion-controlling vegetation for use as farmland.

Beyond that again is the rumbling, grumbling Mt Ruapehu, one of the world’s most active volcanoes. It showered most of the North Island with ash during an eruption in 1996.

The patchy planOn paper, Hawke’s Bay is preparing

well for a disaster, but Lawrence Yule says things could be done a lot better.

There is fragmentation, political agendas, rivalries, reluctance to share resources, and “patch protection” going on among staff and politicians of Hawke’s Bay’s five councils, which could “test the relationship between different councils, priorities and staff as has happened in Christchurch,” he says.

All those councils could end up chasing after the same supplies of heavy

BRAINFOOD

Russel Norman, Green Party Co-leaderA Clean Green Economy

Sir Paul Callaghan, Scientist and Kiwibank’s New Zealander of YearBusting Myths to Achieve Sustainable Economic Growth for NZ

Winston PetersThe Thin Edge of a Disastrous Wedge (On Mãori special representation, including in Hawke’s Bay)

Dr Mike Joy, senior lecturer, Environmental Science/Ecology, MasseyThe Dying Myth of a Clean, Green Aotearoa

Colin James, ColumnistPostponing the Future – the Real Fiscal Deficit (Missing: children, the environment, innovation)

Listener, CommentaryImproving Our Waterways

not stimulated enough? Go to www.baybuzz.co.nz/brainfood and try these articles and speeches. Guaranteed to get you thinking!

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• First aid kit andessential medicines

• Torch and radio withspare batteries

• Emergency water andeasy-to-carry food rations

• Blankets or sleeping bags• Pet supplies• Emergency toilet: toilet paper

and large rubbish bags• Face and dust masks• Food for at least three days• Water – at least 3 litres

per person per day• Water for washing and cooking• A primus or gas BBQ for cooking• A can opener• A personal getaway kit containing

all the above plus documents such as passport, birth certificate, insurance policies, and precious family photos

whaT youReally need


Feature

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First Aid Kit: Don’t forget to include essential medicines

THE BIG ONE ~ No room for inter-city or regional rivalry at this level

equipment, machinery and manpower to cope with a big disaster.

“It is pertinent to note that since the 1980s the whole of this country has been run on a ‘just in time’ philosophy. There is no longer a Ministry of Works that can be called on, and there are no warehouses of idle equipment,” he says.

“We shouldn’t kid ourselves. We’re really good at managing localised flood events, but there are things we could do a lot better in terms of a regional event. We’re still focused on our own pitches.”

Yule, who is beating a drum for local government amalgamation in Hawke’s Bay, says such a re-arrangement of authority would bring far more effective and cohesive civil defence planning and recovery operations, compared with the current system of five councils working separately.

The four territorial councils within Hawke’s Bay – Wairoa, Napier, Hastings and Central Hawke’s Bay -- are each responsible for dealing with disasters in their own areas. The Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, which is responsible for the bureaucratic administration of regional civil defence, takes a hands-on responsibility for a disaster only when it is deemed to be a “regional disaster”.

Its group manager of assets, Mike Adye, says the region’s mayors will decide whether a disaster is a local or regional one. “It might take an hour or two, or a

couple of days. Then the process starts moving,” he says.

According to the manualThe regional council has a disaster-

management manual 10cm thick. It is based on legislation and rules laid down by Parliament, under which local authorities must prepare for disaster management and recovery. It spells out in detail who is in charge of what, whom they must consult and communicate with, who decides how serious an “event” is, and when other organisations are called in to help.

Adye says the detailed plans, coupled with practice runs, mean that everyone involved in civil defence management will know exactly what to do during any given disaster scenario. “The most important thing is public perception that somebody is taking the lead,” he says.

He is less emphatic when asked whether all the local councils are synchronised in their civil defence planning. “Within reason. They are all operating under the same legislation and objectives,” he says. However, he is confident that everything that could reasonably be done in terms of research and planning has been identified and is in fact being addressed.

Regional council chief executive Andrew Newman says a degree of introspection in civil defence planning is

“We shouldn’t kid ourselves. We’re really

good at managing localised flood events,

but there are things we could do a lot better

in terms of a regional event. We’re still focused

on our own pitches.”lawrence yule

head of local government nzand hastings mayor

Civil Defence: All hands on deck for civil defence operations exercise

»

13


THE BIG ONE ~ No room for inter-city or regional rivalry at this level

only to be expected, and it’s not all bad. “It’s understandable that people in their home organisations predominantly focus on their own issues,” he says. It actually works best when territorial councils are in charge and able to get on with the job. They have much deeper roots and better understandings of their communities and resources, he says. “I think it [the current structure] works pretty well for local events.”

Overarching that, though, it’s the regional council’s job to bring cohesiveness to the table. “We need a bigger focus across the entire region,” Newman says.

The regional council, while admitting it needs to improve “the accessibility and application” of its own research by territorial authorities and professionals involved in land use planning, has also identified its own weak spot – a lack of people to lead a sustained and co-ordinated recovery operation after a big disaster.

“The immediate response would be pretty good, but sustaining that over time and the recovery phase would really stretch the group in terms of resources. We’d be pretty patchy for a major, sustained event,” says Newman.

Disaster management managerThose currently in charge of directing

an immediate response, then recovery operations, all have day jobs and families, as do all the other council staff whom the public might think are going to be on-tap after a disaster. “It’s a pretty big ask to have them also step into full-time emergency management,” says Newman.

Adye estimates that probably only 30% of the regional council’s staff would be available to work after a serious emergency. The rest would be injured or taking care of their own families. Hastings District Council expects about 50% of its staff would be available.

With those statistics in mind, the regional council has decided to hire a full-time, dedicated, regional civil defence overseer, who would hold primary responsibility for co-ordinating disaster recovery, pulling in machinery and manpower from other organisations as needed. The council also plans to fully fund two emergency management officers in Wairoa and Central Hawke’s Bay.

Andrew Newman dismisses suspicions of political or parochial maneuverings

with the new regional appointment. “There’s no power struggle here,” he says. “We are putting in additional professional and dedicated resourcing to get clearer accountability.”

The decision to move the regional civil defence headquarters from the regional council building to one in Hastings – an earthquake-strengthened, single-storey building at little risk of flood – is proof of the regional council’s objectivity, Newman says.

Mayor Yule, who wholeheartedly supports the appointment of a regional director under the regional council’s wing, says the decision to move the emergency headquarters was actually made because the regional council’s own building in Napier sits in the likely path of any tsunami that might roll into Hawke’s Bay from the Pacific.

He says the new regional museum being built in Napier is at the same risk from tsunamis, yet millions of dollars worth of treasures are to be archived in its basement.

Such a design defies logic, he says, and is symptomatic of the problems hindering truly regional planning for civil defence.

Hastings, however, has its own Achilles Heel. Yule admits that the Hastings sewage plant at East Clive would be vulnerable to a tsunami of 5m or more, or a big flood from the Ngaruroro.

The highest riskThe number one risk on Hawke’s

Bay’s hazard list is earthquakes. Records going back 150 years show it to be one of the most seismically-active areas of New Zealand, sitting just 150km west of the Hikurangi Trough, the point where the Pacific and Part Australian tectonic plates collide and grind against each other.

During the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake, 256 people lost their lives, either from collapsing buildings or in the widespread fires that ripped through the rubble. According to the regional council’s


Emergency cooking: Get yourself a primus or gas BBQ

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Feature

THE BIG ONE ~ Are you ready? Well, get ready!

publication Hazards in Hawke’s Bay, many buildings at that time were constructed of unreinforced masonry or had poorly supported concrete facades that collapsed in the shaking. The fires that destroyed downtown Napier were left to burn as the water supply in town failed. All the bridges into the city collapsed, and the main roads into Hawke’s Bay suffered severe damage. The economic damage from the earthquake equated to about $300 million in 2007 values – an amount that would pale into insignificance should a repeat occur now.

The 1931 quake was a momentous event – for both the heartbreak and damage it caused, then the rebuilding that produced two cities of inspiring Art Deco and Spanish Mission buildings.

At a national level, the quake prompted the introduction of nationwide building codes, civil defence strategies and earthquake insurance.

The requirements for building strength have increased repeatedly, their value clearly demonstrated in Christchurch. Buildings must now be either constructed to set codes or strengthened retrospectively. With that in mind, Hastings District Council has drawn up a list of buildings that might be substandard.

Yule admits it might not be financially viable to bring some of the buildings on that list up to standard.

There has been some speculation that the regional hospital in Hastings might have qualified for that list, but the Hawke’s Bay District Health Board says it will complete strengthening of the last building identified as needing it, by July. And Yule says experts are satisfied its underlying geology is not at risk

from liquefaction. So our councils are doing what

they can to protect the region’s main infrastructure, but it seems the wild cards are still stacked high. Joe Citizen remains poorly aware, and only marginally better prepared.

It’s that aspect that worries the heck out of Adye and Yule.

If there’s an earthquake so strong we all fall over, we should immediately pick

ourselves up and head for the nearest high ground because a tsunami could be on its way, says Adye.

In Napier, that means walking or running (not driving) up the hill.

Napier has installed tsunami-warning sirens, although Adye says people shouldn’t automatically run for the hills when they hear them because it might be just a practice. Instead, they should tune in to one of the six radio stations that have agreed to broadcast information.

In Clive, Te Awanga and Haumoana, residents need to head for higher ground by whatever means, although to do that they must first be alerted, and therein lies another concern.

Already feeling helplessly exposed to the ravages of Nature every time angry seas bite a bit more off their seaward backyards, some residents are additionally anxious about what they feel is an inadequate tsunami-warning system – a siren and loudspeaker system on the top of civil defence cars that would drive up and down the coast.

The Hastings District Council is confident it is a solution that could become a template for the rest of Hawke’s Bay, although one Te Awanga resident, who preferred to remain anonymous, said he and his wife mistook a test run of the loudhailers for a flock of birds fighting and squawking on the beach

Mr Yule sums it up succinctly:

• Newstalk ZB90.3FM

• Radio New Zealand News 101.5FM

• Radio Kahungunu94.5FM

• More FM92.7FM

• Central FM93.5FM

• Wairoa FM88.5FM

TuninG inTo youR poRTaBle Radio

At risk: Havelock North bridge over Karamu Stream would be vulnerable in a ‘Big One’ flood

“People must depend on themselves. We can’t

rescue everybody.”

»

15


Up Close

REBIRTH : Something witty goes in here – just to show how clever we are.

over yet, as they await more evidence of performance by the new team and the culture it is creating.

New teamThe immediate trigger for this article

was an interview offer from Ken Gilligan, chair of the new Cranford Governing Board, and GM Helen Blaxland.

It’s fair to say that the new Governing Board, broadly representative of the community, has kept a fairly low profile to date. Appointed last July, the board meets monthly, but has yet to engage the public that it represents. Plenty of public appearances to accept fundraising proceeds, but not substantive interaction.

Chairman Gilligan, with strong corporate governance credentials, notes that the board has been focused internally on matters like recruitment, re-structuring services and building upgrades. “We’re pleased with the way it’s going,” he says. But he agrees that the board should now take steps to engage its public constituency, other than by newsletter.

Says Gilligan: “We can put together an afternoon or evening once we have a year completed and ask people to come along and we’ll give you a presentation from the board and from Helen and her team and talk about what is going on.” Adds Blaxland: “That seems necessary and appropriate.”

Mrs Blaxland seems quiet and

confident … and professes an open door policy, including to critics. “Things were broken down and there’s still a lot of rebuilding work to be done.” She cites her style of leadership as a key point of difference from the recent past.

Gilligan and Blaxland are diligent in distancing themselves from Cranford’s recent past. Gilligan says: “The shots were called … we come into it later” … noting that the new team, including the Governance Board, came in after the original set of criticisms were tabled and acted upon. And whatever one thinks of that process, “we are now charged with getting Cranford doing what it is supposed to be doing for the good of the people of Hawke’s Bay. We’re trying to get it right … but we realise there might still be hard feelings out there.” Adds Blaxland: “… we don’t want to downplay those individuals.”

Presently, the functioning capacity within the Hospice is six beds, six patients. While there is physical capacity for eight beds, Blaxland says “over the past weeks we haven’t any ongoing need to go to more beds, at times having only two or three patients requiring in-patient care”. Gilligan argues that while eight beds reflects the norm in terms of patient/population ratio throughout NZ, Cranford’s experience since in-patient care resumed has shown that six beds are adequate for now. That number will increase as needed in the months ahead.

CRANFORD RE-BORN?

I approach writing an update on Cranford Hospice with some trepidation.

writer ~ Tom BElfoRd

as most baybuzz readers know,back in February of last year, co-author Mark Sweet and I wrote a sharply critical account of the internal turmoil then at Cranford. That article, Dying in Hawke’s Bay, and further updates that followed, evoked strong reactions from all sides.

On the one hand, I was reprimanded for “setting off a bomb under a beloved institution … that’s not the way it’s done in Hawke’s Bay”.

And on the other hand, strangers approached me when I was out and about town, thanking BayBuzz for giving voice to significant concerns about the quality of care given by the Hospice.

In any case, a series of events ensued – executive departures, a staff ‘re-structuring’ that magically caused all ‘complaining’ nurses to disappear, temporary suspension of in-patient care at the Hospice, creation of a new Governance Board – that have changed the faces now managing and providing palliative care to Hawke’s Bay’s most ill.

Some would regard the Cranford story as over last November, when a new general manager, Helen Blaxland, took over and in-patient care was restored. Others saw it end in March when mediation resolved the employment dispute between former nurses and Presbyterian Support, with the latter issuing an apology and financial compensation.

And still others see the story as not


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Up Close

REBIRTH ~ The greatest amount of palliative care occurs out in the community

of time supporting and educating other health care providers out in the community.”

Supporting palliative care out in the community will be a new online

Blaxland says that Cranford has no trouble providing the medical and nursing staff to operate at six bed capacity; however, more patients would be problematic at present.

Of course treatment within the Hospice accounts for a small fraction of the palliative care Cranford provides throughout the community … a point I will return to.

Recruitment issuesMany differing perceptions swirl

around Cranford’s ability – since regime change – to in fact recruit sufficient qualified staff.

For example, while GM Blaxland managed North Haven Hospice in Whangarei for 12 years, and has extensive public hospital and NGO health sector management experience, her formal qualifications are in the area of general nursing, with a certificate in infection control. Some critics point to individuals on the present roster and compare them unfavourably position-by-position to predecessors, more experienced in palliative care, who formerly held essentially the same positions. That said, I have yet to hear anyone propose exchanging Mrs Blaxland for her predecessor.

Chairman Gilligan argues that, first, Cranford is well-staffed; and second, that while recruiting palliative care personnel is challenging, this is a sector-wide issue not limited to Hawke’s Bay … or even New Zealand … “it’s an issue all over the world”.

Mrs Blaxland is comfortable with

the new team that has been assembled. “We’ve put a lot of time into looking at staff needs and competencies … people could say we have some new staff here who are not fully palliative care trained, but they are engaged in education to become palliative care trained people.” She also maintains that a broader range of staff experiences will benefit the care Cranford gives throughout the community, and observes: “The ethos of caring for people doesn’t change … we’re getting back to the foundations of what has been here before.”

Care in the communityAlthough the image most people have

of Cranford Hospice is a lovely facility in Hastings, by far the greatest amount of palliative care given by Cranford occurs out in the community – about half in private homes and half in some other group setting – rest homes, private hospitals and managed care facilities.

At any one time, Cranford might have a ‘case load’ of 130 or so patients receiving various levels of support. Very few will spend their last days in the Hospice. Since patients will naturally be in frequent contact with their GPs, Mrs Blaxland indicates that a great deal of effort is being devoted to “rebuilding the trust and confidence” in Cranford’s relationships with GPs in the community, which the tensions of a year ago disrupted.

She also notes: “The role of our nurses will change. Yes, they will provide care in the Hospice and in patients’ own homes, but they will spend an increasing amount

Ken Gilligan, Chairman and Helen Blaxland, General Manager.

“... we are now charged with getting Cranford

doing what it is supposed to be doing for the good of the people of Hawke’s

Bay. We’re trying to get it right … but we realise there might still be hard

feelings out there.”ken gilligan, chairman

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Up Close

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REBIRTH ~ No one disputes that a higher standard of accountability must be met

given their opportunity to succeed. “What more can we do?” asks Chairman Gilligan.

He is clearly mindful of the public trust Cranford must earn and the increased degree of transparency required to do so. He concludes: “We must do this … 35% of our support comes directly from the confidence and generosity of the community, from a dollar in the cup to the biggies, as well as the support of our volunteers. The Cranford team is enormously grateful to the people in the community for all the ways they support us.”

patient record system that by the end of the year will give all care providers in the system direct access to complete, continually updated patient information. Among other benefits, this capability will enhance the existing specialist advice via telephone that is available 24/7 for Cranford patients and their GPs, whether inside or outside the Hospice.

Providing palliative care – physically and psychological – out in the community is consistent with a much broader emphasis, as seen in the DHB’s new strategy for care of older people, of distributing care outside of core facilities … like the hospital itself or the Hospice. The senior population in Hawke’s Bay is swelling. In 15 years, Hawke’s Bay will be home to approximately 36,000 people aged 65+, and nearly 5,000 people aged 85+ … or a 67% increase in 85+ residents by 2026.

So the number of patients requiring palliative care will increase steeply, posing significant resource issues – including major recruitment challenges – for Cranford moving forward. Against that daunting challenge, Ken Gilligan says that all Cranford can prudently do is plan for a rolling three-year window, ratcheting up services incrementally in line with demand.

Reflecting on this scenario, one might think the Cranford imperative would be ‘let’s get all qualified hands on deck’ … including interested former employees!

Future accountabilityWhile there are observers who are

legitimately skeptical of how the new team is proceeding at Cranford, surely everyone wants the institution to succeed going forward.

No one disputes that a higher standard of accountability must be met, with ample opportunity for the community to voice any concerns. It is important to recall that the situation turned toxic when those raising informed concerns, including staff on the inside, were ignored – or worse … rebuffed and retaliated against.

New governance is of course a key element … assuming it is transparent and responsive to the community. Chairman Gilligan promises that the board will issue its own ‘Annual Review’ of Cranford’s performance – in terms of both care-giving and financials – in September, marking its first year of stewardship.

He notes that financial support from the community has rebounded since a year ago when “with the tensions, it had plummeted … it was way down”. Now,

“it’s come way back and we want to thank the community for that.”

I for one would hope that the Cranford Board does sponsor a public forum where that review can be discussed, together with a new strategic plan that has been developed for Cranford, and any community concerns can be ventilated.

Then there’s the new general manager, who should be granted time to make her mark and demonstrate her accessibility to the community. Meantime, Cranford is participating in a quarterly bench-marking process, a nationwide self-evaluation process for assessing progress against service goals and standards. While that’s currently a process outside of public scrutiny, it is monitored by the Board, and both Blaxland and Gilligan indicated they would be willing to make these performance results available to the public.

More formally, the hospice ‘sector’ is in the process of developing uniform standards, key performance indicators (KPIs) and assessment tools for hospice and palliative care throughout New Zealand. Mrs Blaxland is a member of the national governance group for that exercise, with work to be completed at the end of 2012. While many might shudder at the mention of KPIs in the context of care for the dying, with the enormous growth of demand ahead for palliative care services – and a context of more demanding patients and families – it seems prudent that some systematic framework for evaluating the care provided, and setting agreed standards, is necessary. Perhaps that will avert the need for special crisis audits, as was required to break the log jam at Cranford last year.

KPIs aside, at the frontline, it is first and foremost the patients and their families who must be satisfied with the care given by Cranford, whether at the Hospice or out in the community. That satisfaction is actively assessed through an extensive survey completed by each family upon the death of their loved one. These surveys too are now monitored monthly by the Governance Board. A copy of the survey will be published on the BayBuzz website.

In summary, it appears that appropriate measures are in place, or being implemented, to enable Cranford Hospice to provide the services our community expects. So long as Cranford’s leadership team indeed is open – to critics and donors alike – and pays attention to the signals delivered by the community, they should be

Ken Gilligan – Chairman Member of the Maritime NZ Authority. Director of City Medical (Napier). Trustee of the Napier Family Centre Financial Trust. A former director of Unison; nine years as chair of HB Power Consumers Trust. Past GM & director of Port of Napier.

Hayley AndersonHealth consultant, and general manager of the Hastings Health Centre. Director of the Hawke’s Bay PHO. Trained as nurse; has acted as Director of Nursing for HB District Health Board. Former manager of Heretaunga Health Village.

Tim BevinA GP and part time medical officer for HB District Health Board Addiction Services for 27 years. Medical advisor for Te Poutama Tautoko Addiction Programme, chairman of City Medical, a director of the Hawke’s Bay PHO, and deputy chairman of Springhill Trust.

Judie WebsterInvolved as volunteer with Cranford since 1993. Chairs the Cranford Committee that promotes public awareness & fundraising for the Hospice. Trained as a teacher; also worked as a play therapist at Napier and Hastings Hospitals.

David PearsonManaging partner of BDO Napier. Chair of EIT Council, trustee of Sport Hawke’s Bay and chair of Otatara Trust.

Michael KonigChair of Presbyterian Support; board member of PSEC since 2003. Manages his Hastings-based business Sunshade. Most recently chief executive of EnzaFoods NZ. Member of Round Table, Rotary and Village Baptist Church in Havelock North.

Frane RosandichCurrently a member of the PSEC board. A family group care and protection co-coordinator for Child Youth and Family services. Volunteer at HB Regional Prison’s ‘Whare Tirohanga Mãori focus’ unit. Former chair for Parentline HB.

Cranford Hospice Governance Board

for guiding the remnant tourism staff of Venture Hawke’s Bay for the fiscal year just ended, and planning the transition to a new era. She is now the general manager of Hawke’s Bay Tourism and its full-time staff of five.

As such, Annie Dundas is in the spotlight, charged with managing $2.55 million of public investment in tourism over the next three years (starting 1 July 2011), complemented by $160,000 per year from the tourism industry. BayBuzz interviewed Annie recently.

Toss the baggageWhile there’s no question that Dundas

is a talented and experienced travel industry professional, she’s an ‘outsider’ to the Bay.

She touts that as an advantage. She hasn’t had a hand in the internecine warfare that has occurred among councils, and between councils and the local tourism operators. She brings fresh ideas. And she has seen firsthand how little Hawke’s Bay has delivered its message outside the Bay, where it matters.

When asked about the previous feuding between various tourism players in the region, she simply shrugs her shoulders, saying that’s a history she’s had no part in. She’s looking to the future.

Great attitude. Whether it inoculates her from the rivalries that have impeded regional tourism promotion in the past, time will tell.

Both Hastings and Napier Councils own, operate or ‘house’ major tourism assets, and have independently promoted

With the 2010 meltdown of venture Hawke’s Bay (which also held broader regional economic development responsibilities), the tourism industry alternated between delight and dismay.

Delight … because the old crew running VHB was deposed; dismay … because much backbiting and groping for direction then ensued. For its part, the ‘owner’ of VHB, the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council (HBRC), seemed ambivalent about the matter, alternating between hand-wringing over its past stewardship and reluctance to provide more ratepayer subsidy to the tourism industry.

Enter the team of Annie Dundas and George Hickton. Both seasoned tourism industry pros, they were lured onto the scene by Sam Orton, chairman of the (now) Hawke’s Bay Tourism Industry Association.

Hickton served ten years as chief executive of New Zealand Tourism, and agreed to superintend development of a new HB tourism strategy and structure. He now serves as chairman of Hawke’s Bay Tourism (HBT), the new dedicated agency that will lead our region’s tourism promotion. Other board members are HBRC Chair Fenton Wilson, Sam Orton, Jim Coyle (Snapper Park), and Dave Simmons (GM online & leisure, Air NZ).

Annie Dundas has served in senior roles for Tourism NZ, including delivering all of TNZ’s marketing plan in North America and marketing NZ tourism globally to the travel trade. She took over the hands-on responsibility

these in the past. Both will spend amounts at least as great as HB Tourism marketing their own identities, events and attractions. And, at least for now, neither – unlike the Regional Council – has a direct financial investment in Hawke’s Bay Tourism.

Dundas expects that the other councils will eventually be willing to contribute funding to specific marketing campaigns. Presently about $500,000 is available in the HBT budget for actual marketing activities. Joint work is also underway with respect to event planning (about one year overdue) and promotional website integration.

In her first trial by fire, Dundas recently coordinated Hawke’s Bay’s presence at the industry’s annual trade event in Queenstown – the showcase event for national and international travel planners and buyers. BayBuzz has heard glowing praise of the professionalism of that effort. From participant Catherine Hobbs-Turner of Mangapapa Petit Hotel: “Annie has been a breath of fresh air, for the first time since I have been in Hawke’s Bay it really feels that we have a unified focus within the sector.”

HBT hosted seven major international travel buyers from the US, UK and Holland in the Bay beforehand, telling our story. Nuts and bolts stuff that Dundas, with 16 years in the trade, has long ago mastered.

Says Sam Orton, “I am really pleased with the impact that Annie has had since coming to Hawke’s Bay … She has brought a huge amount of experience

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A new regime for Hawke’s Bay TourismNo public organisation has come under more critical scrutiny in Hawke’s Bay in the last two years than its tourism promotion agency.writer ~ tom belford

Annie Dundas: General Manager, Hawke’s Bay Tourism

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“Annie’s grasp of the big picture in Hawke’s Bay is comprehensive. Her understanding of our

place in New Zealand and the world leads me to have

confidence in her ability to target our marketing

with real results”.napier mayor

barbara arnott

of the Hawke’s Bay GDP, and therefore its contribution to the stability of the region’s economy. She argues that the sector is critical to supplying entry level work for younger workers. And she notes that strategic investment in tourism assets could potentially have major beneficial impact on local economies within the region – such as upgrading facilities at Lake Waikaremoana benefitting Wairoa. [BayBuzz thinks she’s figured out what constituency HBRC Chair Fenton Wilson represents!]

Dundas’ third priority, finally, is to project out of Hawke’s Bay with campaigns – public relations and advertising – that tell our story, targeting NZ domestic travellers and Australians. She says: “We must make Hawke’s Bay into a most desirable destination … it’s the hot destination … we need to go there.”

Up Close

Hb toUrISm ~ We must make Hawke’s Bay into a most desirable destination … it’s the hot destination … we need to go there

and leadership skills.” But from a key industry player: “So we’ve got a new logo, where’s the finished artwork I need to use it?” There will be no free ride for the new tourism organisation!

Still, for now, it’s mostly smiles and back-slaps all around, as everyone wishes the new team well. Says Annie: “The mayors have been tremendously supportive; they cannot be faulted.”

Mayor Barbara Arnott comments: “Annie is a real professional in the tourism sector. She has a comprehensive grasp of the big picture in Hawke’s Bay. Her understanding of our place in New Zealand and the world leads me to have confidence in her ability to target our marketing with real results.”

Challenges ahead for tourismSo how will Dundas move the

needle in terms of increasing visitors to Hawke’s Bay, a number that has flatlined at best? Obviously, a variety of macro-issues far beyond the control of anyone in Hawke’s Bay (or New Zealand for that matter) exert huge influence on our tourism prospects – from world recession, to currency exchange rates, to fuel prices.

Meantime, the habits and preferences of travellers are changing. Dundas sees the key overall metric that needs improving is increasing the length of stay of domestic visitors (80% of HB visitors). However, fully two-thirds of our visitor nights – that’s 2 million – are now spent in private accommodation, and not even on the radar. How does one identify and engage these visitors and get them to spend more? The answer seems to lie in tactics designed to make local residents into more enthusiastic ‘ambassadors’ for our region.

Changing preferences might also mean there are winners and losers within the sector. Hotel stays are increasing, for example, while motels are down. And not all attractions are evergreens. Arguably, there’s not much HBT can, or should, do about such trends. Its job is to develop and implement strategies that fill the feeder, so the calves can fend for themselves.

A final factor affecting visits to Hawke’s Bay – and one HBT has no direct control of – is the quality and differentiation of the region’s attractions and service. Visitors are increasingly well travelled, sophisticated and demanding, expecting both ‘unique’ and ‘above-average’ experiences. Surveys – and

plenty of anecdotal evidence – indicate service is not a Hawke’s Bay strong suit. The general manager of Hawke’s Bay Tourism is discreet about such matters.

Getting priorities right One of the first thing Dundas notes

is: “We’ve been clear that we won’t move the needle in one year.” That said, she mentions a variety of initiatives. A freshening of the Hawke’s Bay brand presentation has been completed, at the hand of HB-based advertising maven Kim Thorp. “Now we’ve got to get that out in the consumer media, particularly Wellington and Auckland.”

Her main priorities include firstly a thorough review of the HB Tourism website (www.hawkesbaynz.com) and digital strategy, something that must be sorted by September when the next key promotion window for the Bay opens. She notes that the Tourism New Zealand website gets 12 million visits per year. “We need to leverage that site and get our share of its traffic.”

Second, a new membership model for Hawke’s Bay Tourism must be shaped, and local industry buy-in achieved. Not an easy task, given the diversity of players in the region’s tourism business – hospitality, food, wineries, attractions and other service providers. Most agree that the sector’s ‘skin’ in collective regional tourism promotion must increase if Hawke’s Bay is to remain competitive against other parts of New Zealand.

Throughout New Zealand, regional tourism agencies enjoy some combination of public sector and industry funding. The diplomatic Dundas says about HB Tourism’s present public funding: “We’re not poor; we’re not rich. I wouldn’t want any less.” BayBuzz has been less charitable, calling HBRC’s $850k per year an “exit strategy”, a vestigial amount related to past funding politics, and not a viable tourism investment.

Moreover, it’s fair to say that the regional council’s current funding commitment for three years will not be renewed without a strong ‘public good’ case being made by the industry, as well as continuing cash support from the industry itself. Some HBRC councillors hold the view that tourism is no more deserving of council subsidy than other struggling industry sectors in the region.

Dundas sees the public good component arising out of the very size of the sector, variously estimated at 5-10%

SCIENCE AND R&D

ESSENTIALS FOR A PROSPEROUS ECONOMY

It’s time to break out of commodity mode.writer ~ KEITH NEWMAN

Genetically perfected specimens on the farm (Rissington Breedline)

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“In most sectors there is a major disparity in

production performances between those at the

leading edge of technological adoption

and those who are reluctant to change.”

john loughlin ag research director

AgResearch and the Port of Napier and an owner of Askerne Estate Winery, says high land, labour and comparative freight to market costs, mean we’re not a cheap place to produce food.

To compensate we are dependent on highly productive systems and investment in R&D to deliver “differentiated products” at premium prices.

Science wasn’t done any favours this budget; the funding pool was drained by $13.9 million to $773.7 million following the restructure of the Foundation and Ministry of Research, Science and Technology into the Ministry for Science and Innovation.

However, an end to industry-specific contestable funding may be a good thing; with a third now in a general pool for core industry areas.

While the Government wants Crown Research Institutes (CRIs) to become more focused on practical science for the sectors they serve, Loughlin says a shortage of R&D investment by both the State and the private sector remains the biggest impediment to progress.

“It is interesting that the kiwifruit and dairy sectors invest heavily and cohesively in R&D and have displayed strong compound annual export revenue growth of over 9.8% over the last decade,” says Loughlin who’s also chairman of Zespri International.

Of course the kiwifruit trajectory has been somewhat curbed by the Psa bacterial threat, but he suggests other sectors could leverage its formula for success.

Loughlin reckons the best way to lift R&D spend and effectiveness is tight partnerships between industry and researchers. He says Zespri’s relationship with Plant and Food Research improved competitiveness and stimulated further investment.

Plant and Food Research is one of our largest employers of scientists, after Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, with purpose built labs in Havelock North and 60ha of research orchards. Its research and testing is mainly around bio-protection, insects and pests, plant pathology, environmental sciences and crop and fruit production systems.

Broadband essentialUnison could be said to be deploying

scientific skills and instrumentation for its region-wide roll out of ultra fast broadband which has the potential to change the game for a wide range of

industries, including those in rural areas who’ve had decades of dodgy dial up or expensive satellite links.

Faster communication is essential for smart farming and literally keeping up to speed with what’s happening around the world. It improves access to real-time tools such as mapping based applications to help manage resources, compare yields, model terrain and temperature, grass growth and water supplies.

Tools being developed and enhanced by Hawke’s Bay Regional Council (HBRC) scientists and Massey University now help farmers get a better idea of water use; where certain crops will perform best, the right crop rotations and irrigation planning.

Ian Ritchie, Dean of applied science and computing at Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT) says there’s a lot of science in getting the most out of animals, and technology can help match food supply and demand, identify the number of growing days and when to plant so “all your peas don’t mature at once”.

It can also prevent double up when putting chemicals and fertiliser on the land. “Customers clearly want product with no bugs but they don’t want it covered with insecticide either,” says Ritchie.

Feature

SCIENCE AND R&D ~ R&D can turn ideas into new cash crops

If Hawke’s Bay ever hopes to rise from the economic mire, it must take the decades old call to diversification more seriously by adding value to goods and services and increasing investment in science and technology.

Science is not something the region is known for, few businesses engage in the deep esoteric areas of physics, electronics and software, and non-primary sector research and development laboratories are a rarity.

Even though the traditional primary sector comprises 40% of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP), a lot of the serious R&D that can bring in new revenue streams is still contracted out.

Regardless, breakthroughs in animal genetics, forages, forestry, horticulture, grape growing, animal health, genetics and environment sciences – including elements of computing, engineering and electronics – play a big part in modern primary sector practices.

Examples include the development of drought resistant pastures, disease resistant crops, new varieties of plants, improvements in livestock fertility and weight gain, and the Carla saliva test which supports selective breeding to combat parasitic worms.

Ongoing scientific challenges include the elimination of pests, viruses and bacteria that can undermine our core industries, whether it’s varroa burdening our bees, Psa on our kiwifruit or parasites on our potatoes and tomatoes.

While the sector looks to improve efficiency, productivity and sustainability, our export partners are raising the bar; insisting our products, practices and processes comply with international standards, and supply chain technology enables tracking from the plate to the farm gate.

Like never before the primary sector is being forced to break out of commodity mould and look at smarter ways to produce and deliver products that world markets will happily pay premium money for.

Going for goldThe outstanding recent breakthrough,

according to John Loughlin, who’s deeply entrenched in local heartland industries, is the development of Zespri Gold kiwifruit which has grown from a small base 10 years ago to earn more export revenue than the entire apple industry.

Loughlin who’s a director of


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SCIENCE AND R&D ~ We’re not a cheap place to produce food

Collaboration a keyEnvironmental science has a big part

to play in long term planning and sustainable use of resources, and is increasingly driven by national policies around soil and water quality and availability.

HBRC employs 24 scientists with a strong focus on environmental sciences. The big project of the moment is the regional water storage dams in Central Hawke’s Bay designed to buffer us against low water situations.

There’s also a joint ‘whole of catchment’ project with Massey University and AgResearch, based on water tables and minimum river flows to inform consenting processes and assist with farm management practices and economic and environmental performance.

HBRC is also in ongoing discussions with Plant & Food on initiatives to increase primary sector productivity.

HBRC’s Chief scientist Graham Sevicke-Jones says science within councils is no longer an isolated and autonomous affair; there’s better networking and information sharing within and between regional councils and with CRIs.

With greater collaboration everyone’s a lot more informed resulting in more practical application of science in the region. “This stuff costs too much to be doing it individually or replicating what’s already been done,” says Sevicke-Jones.

Changing attitudes There’s no question science is a major

driver of innovation and development, but entrenched attitudes and practices often stand in the way of diversification and adopting new farming practices.

“We’re trying to understand the psyche of the farming community in order to have better engagement around their current interests and the triggers they have in regard to changing land use,” says HBRC economic development manager Michael Bassett-Foss.

While younger farmers might be more open to land use change, older players who’ve done things a certain way for generations are often not so easily convinced. “We need to know what will trigger them to move into higher rates of cropping which might achieve higher rates of return,” says Bassett-Foss.

For example, pastoral land value may have been reduced over time and new soil treatments or a move to cropping or even vineyards may deliver better economic yield. Steep or damaged land

may be better off in forestry rather than sheep and cattle.

“We’re leading the charge in lots of areas, particularly around water …however, I think we can improve how science is done strategically in the region,” says Bassett-Foss.

AgResearch director John Loughlin says Hawke’s Bay must find ways to tighten the integration of research and development and increase investment in these areas if it’s to deliver on key sector goals and strategies.

“In most sectors there is a major disparity in production performances between those at the leading edge of technological adoption and those who are reluctant to change.”

The gene geniesAn important part of delivering

consistent quality from our pastures to the ports is ensuring the animals we raise are healthy, resilient and of the best quality.

Rissington Breedline, local pioneers of ‘genetically superior’ sheep and cattle breeds, recently commissioned independent research confirming that genetic technologies boost production levels.

A nationwide survey of 225 farmers saw 72% acknowledge high quality genetics were vital for a successful farming operation; around 90% strongly agreed new technologies were essential for optimising genetic and financial gain.

Rissington Breedline merged with LandCorp Farming’s genetics division in July to create Syrex Genetics, which is now boosting its investment in increasingly expensive research and development technologies.

The merged entity now has the largest single commercial DNA breeding database in the world, enabling customers worldwide to access genetics from its trademarked sheep, cattle and

deer breeding lines. Its technology means clients can quantify quality outputs at all points along the supply chain.

“Syrex Genetics will consolidate and focus the red meat genetics industry in New Zealand for the benefit of the whole industry including farmers, processors, retailers and consumers,” says CEO Graham Leech.

Raising the skill baseWithout a university or a tertiary

institute focused on the primary sector, the region is at a disadvantage, although EIT is increasingly tailoring its curriculum to deliver to local needs.

The closest we get to raising young scientists is applied science degrees for those wanting to become technicians in the food industry or become grape growers and wine producers. “We mustn’t forget that most of the food that comes off our farms has to go through some sort of processing,” says Dean of applied science and computing, Ian Ritchie.

Despite a glut of certain grape varieties, recessionary times and even bankruptcy for some boutique vineyards and outlets, Hawke’s Bay continues to be a vintner’s paradise, consistently winning awards for world class vintages.

EIT is one of only two New Zealand institutions with internationally recognised courses for a degree in viticulture and wine science. It has its own well-equipped wine lab and vineyard, produces about 60 graduates a year, and has recently added an online course.

Despite being surrounded by an expansive coast, EIT won’t compete with Nelson Marlborough and Bay of Plenty polytechs by training people for marine science and aquaculture. However, local Iwi are currently researching possible aquaculture options which could involve science and have regional spin-offs.

EIT has 100 full time students

New varieties from Plant & Food Research local labs comprise 13% of NZ apple exports.

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SCIENCE AND R&D ~ We’re not a cheap place to produce food

taking its computing systems degrees including computer science and business computing. These can play an essential part in computerised farm management practices, in particular supply chain management.

“IT has the potential to make a tremendous difference, particularly if you have a big farm and are involved in track and trace which is also helping drive broadband uptake,” says Ritchie.

About 25% of graduates end up working in the primary sector and others in support areas such as accounting, where 50% of the clients may be farmers.

Looking to the future, EIT is considering higher-level applied management and business studies specialising in horticulture and agricultural, although a lot depends on the daunting task of attracting candidates.

Saucy science incentives Much of what distinguishes Hawke’s

Bay from neighbouring regions is its processing capabilities, whether it’s grapes into wine or tomatoes and beef into tomato soup with meatballs. Both require

R&D and food and nutritional science.Heinz Wattie, has been upgrading

plant and practices for years to become a highly cost competitive, globally successful processing operation. It’s currently relocating production plant from Australia to Hastings to make sauces, beetroot and some canned products.

McCains, another global food giant, has also been centralising here, adding credibility to recent descriptions of the region as ‘the Australasian food capital’.

Food Hawke’s Bay, the only organisation of its kind in New Zealand, has seized the opportunity to expand on this theme. Its mandate is to connect 130 or so food related businesses with innovation and development resources, including consulting experts around the region who have food science and related skills.

General manager Jane Libby says the food industry faces considerable compliance hurdles to get products to local and export markets. “Adding value often means there are technical or scientific requirements to create products that are worth more.”

The group, primed with seed funding

from the Regional Strategic Partnership is now armed with a series of case studies to support further investment and is hopeful of partnering with the new food R&D unit at Massey University.

The unit at Massey is part of the Food Innovation Network New Zealand (FINNZ), one of four food labs, including Manukau, Lincoln and Waikato, recently established by the Government. Chamber of Commerce chief executive Murray Douglas remains aghast that Hawke’s Bay, the so-called fruit bowl, was ignored in that process.

In his own family fig growing business Douglas wants to move beyond jam into producing fig extracts which are “full of flavouring and antioxidants”. This process, which could be a New Zealand first, will require significant food science input and post harvest treatments.

The thing that grates Douglas is that he’ll most likely have to contract the work to Massey University. “We need to start doing these sorts of things ourselves but we’re not even on the radar, because we’re not standing up and making enough noise.”


So how much does BayBuzz mag cost? $50 a year for six issues. Each packed with stimulating reading like this edition.

Send your cheque payable to Baybuzz, with your mailing details to: BayBuzz, PO Box 8322, Havelock North 4157.

Or do it all online at: www.baybuzz.co.nz

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Reasons for subscribingright now to BayBuzz!

10. Dan Carter subscribes.

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1. Accepting handouts, when you have the bread, is tacky!

24

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Feature

SCIENCE AND R&D ~ We’re not standing up and making enough noise

» He wants to see a Hawke’s Bay centre for innovation where business meets industry, academic institutes and local experts, not only for the food sector, but technology and other businesses looking to develop new products.

Bio-security breakthroughHastings-based Biovapor New Zealand

has to engage in some serious scientific research to advance its breakthrough fumigation technology which is at the frontline of biosecurity in several ports around New Zealand and the islands.

The heat-based, environmentally friendly alternative to traditional toxic approaches, treats containers of imported and exported goods including machinery, sawn timber and pallets, fruit bins and the majority of imported vehicles.

fumigation system we never imagined we would have to write our own standards and get involved in all the cost and science to get into logs,” says Dear.

He remains determined to gather scientific data to prove the case, although it could be five years before a new standard is approved. In the meantime Biovapor is working with a process engineering partner to model a solution that will recapture and recycle toxic methyl bromide residue.

Exporting the waste streamRecycling less appetising animal parts

has proven a highly lucrative niche for Waipukurau-based Agri-lab, which supplies raw material to international pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, dietary supplement and cosmetics industries.

Animal organs, glands and other by-products rich in enzymes, hormones and bioactive tissue are carefully extracted from selected farms at optimal times of the year, then frozen, freeze dried or powdered and packed for export.

Director Angela Payne describes her business as “adding value to the waste stream”. Agri-lab won the HB Business Awards Innovation Award in 2010, and earlier Agri-business and export awards.

The company has built up its own skill base and because it has broken new ground ended up helping develop industry specifications. “All our product have to be 100% compliant to meet export requirements and in many cases our products are brand new to MAF so we’ve had to work closely with them.”

Another firm dealing with biomaterials for medical, pharmaceutical and medical export market is Southern Lights Ventures based in Napier, with offices in New Jersey. It engages local and US scientists and sources ‘product’ including bovine tissue and formulations to international medical standards based on customer requirements.

‘Waste stream’ products are still a niche area for New Zealand and there’s clear potential for significant growth, although Payne says this is limited by our low profile. “Many don’t even know where New Zealand is, let alone Hawke’s Bay.”

Whole of industry approach EIT’s Ian Ritchie agrees international

customers have difficulty enough identifying New Zealand products without trying to relate to Hawke’s Bay as an exporter.

He supports a whole of industry

approach with the country as one big factory, delivering our best product to market in a continuous flow, based on international specifications.

Currently we’re known for producing quality only when conditions suit. “When you’re trying to run a restaurant in Paris it doesn’t cut the mustard when you say something is not on the menu this week because there was a drought in New Zealand.”

HBRC economic development manager Bassett-Foss says the ideal supply chain situation means everyone needs to know exactly what’s coming so they can maximise the flow and produce an optimum end product.

Although scientific advances have a significant impact on productivity and the wealth of Hawke’s Bay’s primary sector, they haven’t gone far enough. And new technology is often treated as an imposition rather than being embraced as essential for a more modern and innovative economy.

According to Chamber of Commerce CEO Murray Douglas, everything points to the need for a more balanced and modern economy.

He wasn’t surprised BayBuzz found little evidence of science in Hawke’s Bay outside of agriculture, horticulture and viticulture. He’s hopeful the new private sector-based Business Hawke’s Bay group may take a leading role in promoting diversity.

“That’s not to say nutraceuticals, biotechnology or plant physiology are not important, but we’ve got to build a broader base that’s not prone to the winds of change of commodity prices.”

Business HB is in discussion with Massey University and other entities to encourage other kinds of research. While ultrafast broadband will be a major step forward, Douglas says we need to learn how to use it to enhance productivity and reduce our carbon footprint.

Currently New Zealand’s State and private sector investment in research and development is only one percent of GDP, half most other OECD nations. Unless Hawke’s Bay region can improve on the national average, innovation will suffer.

If we hope to attract new types of businesses we need a determined strategy so entrepreneurial and high net worth people with great ideas bring their energy, focus and vision to Hawke’s Bay. As Douglas says, “we’ve got to be like a centipede walking on every leg we can find”.

“The technology we have developed is unique in the world; it’s completely mobile and self contained, we can take it to the port and treat the containers in a really efficient way,” says company founder Lance Dear.

Pressurised turbines deliver bursts of time controlled humidity and heat to an international standard core temperature. Dear sees huge global potential in treating logs for export, describing this as the Holy Grail.

Forestry is a major local industry which uses a considerable amount of science in growing, managing and processing the logs to add value; PanPac in particular grows and processes trees, timber and pulp for local and export markets.

Although tests of Dear’s Biovapor fumigation process have proven 100% effective in eliminating surface insects and larvae from logs, there are no heat standards for log treatment.

There are also political obstacles, as many timber buying nations including India and China insist on using the toxic and ozone depleting agent methyl bromide.

“When we created a fast, large-scale

Lance DearInventor of the

Biovapor alternative fumigation process.

Any excuse for a party. Someone having a birthday? ‘Do’ required. Not to celebrate growing one year older but to invite folks round, share experience, have a laugh. Same with RWC2011. It’s an excuse to get together with people for some reason other than because there’s been a natural disaster. To extend the party metaphor, you could sit in the corner and yawn, but that’s more a reflection on you than on the event. To make it a party join the dancing, loop arms with strangers, kick up your heels, get yourself a game schedule and start backing an underdog. RWC2011 should be a great party - it’s important not to place too much else on its shoulders. Might create a couple of jobs. May bring a few visitors to town. Really it’s just a shindig, that’s how it should be treated - not significant as in life or death, not earth shattering, but certainly not a yawn – just a party to which we’re all invited. Now if the ABs lose, of course, I reserve the right to change my tune!

JESSICA SOUTAR BARRONbaybuzz asked:

For the six girls in our house RWC in HB will be fantastic – it’s in our blood. We’ve already got our tickets to both home games, and after that we’re bach’a’lettes - what bliss! While the man of the house ventures off chasing France right through to the semi- finals, we’ll be chilling out and making the most of it. We’re already preparing – there will be plenty of shopping for black and silver and we’ll be watching all the All Black games on a huge projector screen at home. When rugby is not on we’ll be out and about – it’ll be like one great big girls ‘trip’ doing all those things that girls get up to, and then sleeping in! No one is complaining. I made sure of a fair trade off for not going to the final game and will have just returned from a trip to Italy, with my suit bags full of designer wear and leather shoes, just before the RWC games begin.


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Pundits

PUNDITS ~ Who says the Rugby World Cup will be a fizzer?

Hawke’s Bay’s lead up to the 2011 Rugby World Cup has been too quiet for many, me included. Local business people have been voicing their displeasure at the effort and a lack of communication from local organisers, with large proportions of the general public still unaware of what is planned. I foresee Hawke’s Bay people taking matters into their own hands. With individual and community effort RWC2011 WILL be the biggest party Hawke’s Bay has seen. Friends, communities and clubs getting together, partying, celebrating our region, country and national game and showing the visitors and millions of viewers what a fantastic place we live in. Add to that McLean Park and Napier reverberating to the sound of Gaelic passion, Nippon fervency and maybe the odd Canuck moose-call before, at and after the games and the city will regain some of the flavour and “oomph” it has been lacking.

ANNA LORCK

ANDREW FRAME

“It’s an excuse to get together with people for some reason other than because there’s been a natural disaster.”

jessica soutar barron

Will Rugby World Cup in Hawke’s Bay be a yawner or the event of the year?

Ins OutsVenture

Hawke’s Bay [Officially buried]

Napier CBD [Asleep]

Using them while driving [Crash & burn]

Velodrome [Crashed before

first turn]

Ngati Kahungunu Inc. [Inc. not the only game in town]

Poop [Old sewage

discharge name]

Federated Farmers [Old agenda – biz as usual]

Water as free commodity [Let’s over-allocate it]

Global warming [Invisible, in denial]

Ovation meatworks [Dead]

Havelock North’s pride [Mac attacked!]

Baybuzz tabloid [Gracefully retired]

Hawke’s Bay Tourism & Business Hawke’s Bay

[Brand new]

Ahuriri [Awake]

Smartphones [The ultimate e-toy]

iWay [Cycleways & lanes

everywhere]

Tangata Whenua Reps [Treaty claimants will get $$$]

Biomass [New sewage

discharge name]

Pure Hawke’s Bay [New agenda – GM free]

Water as precious asset [Let’s store & harvest it]

Severe weather events [Visible, impossible to deny]

Lamb prices [To die for!]

Havelock North McDonald’s [Under construction]

BayBuzz magazine [WOW!]

26

GM free at the same price as domestic Japanese production.

The truth is that we in Hawke’s Bay are not large volume producers and therefore have no real scale and very high costs. We are struggling to be competitive in the world.

Regardless of what the technology may offer, the consumer signals remain clear and strong. In this environment, introducing GMOs in Hawke’s Bay would have devastating consequences for the region’s premium food exporters. Damaging the Bay’s brand in international markets would compromise the economic returns and sustainability objectives of our growers.

Being a GM free food production region is an excellent marketing opportunity for Hawke’s Bay. Moreover, if field use of GMOs resulted in contamination of other crops (which we believe would be inevitable), the economic damage would be irreversible.

That means that for the foreseeable future, outdoor GM food production should not be an individual choice – it would affect all food producers and processors in the region. We are all in this together.

Hawke’s Bay needs to lift its economic performance as a region in New Zealand and we need to do something now.

Our local councils have a significant role to play in this matter. Their initiative would cost very little and have a huge impact. In fact, protecting our GM free status has to be the lowest cost, least risk and best opportunity to have been presented in years.

Pure Hawke’s Bay represents Hawke’s Bay growers and producers who believe that branding the region as a world-renowned producer of premium food that is not genetically modified (GM) should be a central plank in our region’s economic development strategy.

Our proposal is simple – declare Hawke’s Bay a ‘GM free’ food producing area. In practice this simply means endorsing the status quo. We are not talking about GM in the lab or medicines, but the release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the outdoors; something the Hawke’s Bay environment is currently free from.

As food producers, we are firmly pro-science and look to new technologies, systems and approaches that can help us make production more sustainable and valued in the market place. For the time being GMOs do not fit into that picture.

I grow, pack and export large volumes of produce all around the world. I can tell you, consumers are increasingly concerned about food safety and will pay a premium for GM free food.

I currently sell waxy maize to Korea which is sold for human consumption as GM free corn. It fetches a premium of US$100/Metric Tonne above corn that cannot claim that status.

Mrs Watanabe, the classic Japanese housewife living in Tokyo, typically pays double the price to purchase domestic Japanese produce because she has a sense of safety. Home grown is perceived to be safer than dreaded foreign food. There is a huge market to win if we can sell our current products branded as

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Keep local food production GM freeby JOH N BOSTOCK

“The truth is that we in Hawke’s Bay are not large

volume producers and therefore have no real

scale and very high costs. We are struggling to be

competitive in the world.”pure hawke’s bay spokesman

john bostock

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Advocates

GM FREE ~ Time for Hawke’s Bay to take a stand as a GM free brand

Acceptance of this proposal that Hawke’s Bay food production remain GM free has advanced a great deal and now our region is ready for it. Pure Hawke’s Bay is working with both large and small food producers who support and see the economic opportunities.

We expect that over the next few years the risks of GMO use will become even more clearly understood, the lack of benefits established, and public consumer resistance – most especially in our overseas food markets – will intensify. New Zealand, with Hawke’s Bay in the vanguard, must differentiate itself by preserving its status as a GM free food producer.

GM free food producing status represents an economic opportunity for all producers (conventional and organic), for processors and marketers and people with a passion for the Bay.

So what can our councils do?They can write ‘GM free food

producer’ status into our local, district and long term plans (LTPs), as well as our Regional Policy Statement. And we are asking them to take precisely that precautionary approach as these

plans are revised over the coming months. Pure Hawke’s Bay has made its submissions in the annual plan process and presented to the Rural Community Board, the Hastings District Council and the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council.

The Ministry for the Environment (MfE) recognises that local bodies have the power under the Resource Management Act to prevent the release of GMOs in their respective regions. MfE and Environment Minister Nick Smith have communicated this advice to other local bodies in New Zealand who are contemplating similar local protective action.

This is not just an issue of whether decisions by the national regulator will meet the needs of our region. It is an opportunity for Hawke’s Bay to decide and pursue its own economic advantage. Hawke’s Bay has a great chance to position itself as the premium GM free food and wine producing region in New Zealand.

Hawke’s Bay is currently GM free. So why don’t we just take advantage of our current status and benefit from the economic advantage this gives us?

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FOOD A S I T S H O U L D B E

POORDoes anybody in Hawke’s Bay make money? Sure, everybody who holds a job ‘makes money’, but how many earn more than enough to just make ends meet? And what about the businesses they own or work for? How many are profitable enough to fuel expansion?writer ~ TOM BELFORD

CHOOSING TO BE

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Feature

CHOOSING TO BE POOR ~ Does Hawke’s Bay have two economies, one struggling, the other vibrant?

Continued on Page 30 » Chart courtesy of Economic Solutions

Figure 1 ~ Hawke’s Bay’s economy by sector

The backbone of the Hawke’s Bay economy is primary production; growing sheep and cattle, fruit and veggies, grapes and trees. And (largely) exporting those as raw commodities or, with added value, processed consumables.

Growing and processing stuff, and servicing those that do, accounts for as much as 40% of the region’s economy. Yet when one reads or hears accounts of the sector’s fortunes, the picture is one of dire straits. Farmers are drowning in debt, unreliable water supplies, depleting soils, uncooperative weather, less stock, biosecurity threats, high production costs, profit-killing exchange rates and overseas consumers becoming more demanding.

Other than the increased agricultural production assumed from new irrigation schemes, few point to the ag sector as one promising dynamic growth for the region’s economy. Many workers in the sector receive relatively low wages while others are only seasonally employed, if they can get work at all, considering the recent loss of 300 boning plant jobs in Waipukurau.

Then there’s tourism which accounts for another 5-10% of our region’s economy.

Local media and council papers routinely discuss the politics of who’s in charge of Hawke’s Bay tourism, who or what is to blame for stagnant (at best) visitor numbers; strategies for improving ‘bed nights’ by some infinitesimal number, and how much the industry should be subsidised by ratepayers.

This is another sector where it seems, only the lucky few businesses – mostly

catering to high-income visitors – actually make money, and which pays mainly low wages, reflecting low skills.

Then there’s the rest of the Hawke’s Bay economy; say 50%, quietly doing other stuff and mostly operating under the radar. Maybe they’re the ones making money without council subsidies of one sort or another? Maybe they’re the ones who pay higher incomes? Maybe they’re the ones who actually represent the region’s economic growth potential – on a sustainable basis – for the future?

Does Hawke’s Bay in fact have two economies; one struggling to keep its head above water — the other quietly vibrant?

Regional economic profileThe official statistics remind us

regularly that Hawke’s Bay is a laggard region economically. We have the third-lowest value regional economy, measured by GDP. We lost more jobs in the last year than any other region. And we have the third lowest incomes. As Hawke’s Bay Chamber of Commerce CEO Murray Douglas notes: “This is a persistent issue over many years, where we lag New Zealand in good times and have an inferior outcome in bad years.” (See Figure 1 for the basic structure of the Hawke’s Bay economy by sector).

Our present line-up of economic activity produces a lower income profile relative to the rest of New Zealand. While the median personal income (for people age 15 and over) across the country is $24,400, for Hawke’s Bay it is $22,600, just above Manawatu-Wanganui ($21,600) and Northland ($20,900).

There’s little reason on the surface to expect significant improvement, given the sectors that presently dominate and the adverse population trends that lie before us.

Overall, Hawke’s Bay’s population is projected to grow by only 3,500 in the next 20 years; hardly a runaway engine driving economic growth. Our percentage of ‘non-productive’ residents (in income-producing terms) will grow sharply as the Bay’s population ages. Nationally the median personal income of those 65 plus is $15,500.

Meanwhile, the highest growth in working-age population will come from our Mãori segment, which presently has the lowest incomes, skills and education. The median personal income for Mãori in Hawke’s Bay in 2006 was $19,200. Of those employed, 35% were aged 15 and

over and work as labourers; 45% of local Mãori aged 15 and over had no formal education qualifications.

A further reality is that the typical wages associated with industry sectors that dominate our economy are generally low.

If one assumes that the benefit of growth is generating higher incomes for our population, it would follow that any strategy for economic growth in Hawke’s Bay must address these fundamental structural realities.

Not to do so is effectively choosing to remain poor.

Our alternative economyNo one disputes that any near

term strategy to improve our region’s economic performance must begin with extracting more (but sustainable) productivity from our land and water resources. Every ‘official’ discussion of economic development in Hawke’s Bay begins from that premise.

The Chamber’s Murray Douglas writes: “With some partnering through our tertiary institutions, some key skill development and some fine tuned investment, we can be more confident about building up the quantity and quality of our agri-food and rural support processes.”

Hawke’s Bay has unique IT and engineering skills associated with fruit handling systems, innovative packaging and other food technologies. In the right environment, he says these “can be leveraged into the global market”.

Hawke’s Bay GDP by Sector % of Total

Processing & manufacturing 22.3

Agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining 14.8

Business services 14.3

Retailing/wholesaling 9.7

Accommodation/transport communications

6.1

Health care & social assistance 5.9

Government/Public administration 4.0

Rural services 3.9

Education & training 3.2

Construction 3.1

Cultural/Personal services 1.8

Electricity/gas/water 1.6

All other 9.3

Total Value – $6,052 million 100.0

Hawke’s Bay Employees by Sector Employees

Agriculture, forestry, fishing 13,200

Manufacturing 10,190

Health care & social assistance 8,190

Retail trade 7,110

Education & training 6,050

Construction 4,250

Accommodation & food services 4,190

Administration & support 3,710

Professional, scientific & technical services

3,130

Public administration & safety 2,870

Transportation, postal, warehousing 2,670

Wholesale trade 2,140

Arts & recreation 1,260

Financial & insurance services 1,100

All other 4,175

Total 74,235

Figure 2 ~ Hawke’s Bay’s Employees by Sector

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Feature

CHOOSING TO BE POOR ~ We need to build the Hawke’s Bay where talent wants to live

As Michael Bassett-Foss, Hawke’s Bay Regional Council’s economic development manager, puts it, “the economic power is on the fringes of the momentum already created by primary production.”

The implicit point is that not all activities associated with the primary sector are low wage, and our farm output need not be satisfied to earn commodity-based revenue.

The HBRC has just updated its regional economic development strategy, with input from a wide array of stakeholders. The resulting document says: “CRIs, central government agencies and universities are keen to be involved in implementing science in the primary sector, assisting with commercialisation and export growth – this is an area that has been lacking in Hawke’s Bay.” And: “Continued innovation and productivity improvements such as livestock genetics, water management and bio initiatives have allowed further on-farm gains to be introduced, although there are barriers to getting uptake of these improvements.”

By far the largest local government infrastructure investment under consideration in Hawke’s Bay – potentially involving more than $200 million – is a series of water storage and irrigation schemes. There’s no question where HBRC is looking to place its economic development bet.

The second largest local government ‘bet’ is being made on behalf of the region’s tourism sector. The most visible investment is the regional council’s grant of $2.55 million over the next three years to Hawke’s Bay Tourism, the region’s new tourism promotion agency. But that amount will be matched – and more – by funds spent by Hastings and Napier councils promoting their own identities and attractions.

But Murray Douglas argues, leaving aside the inherent dysfunction of a multi-headed tourism promotion effort, tourism “… on its own is simply the ‘hotel on the farm’ concept – useful but not a hugely productive investment for Hawke’s Bay’s future.”

At the most recent gathering of the HBRC’s stakeholder group, an interesting mini-debate occurred, with some asking for even more emphasis on boosting the primary sector, while others were looking for a different emphasis looking to the future.

The latter view, because it is newly

emerging, was not as clearly articulated. It revolves around building or attracting ‘knowledge-based’ businesses and the individual entrepreneurs and more educated technical workers and professionals associated with such businesses. Many of these people are assumed to be younger, helping to fill the Bay’s ranks of 30-50 year-old peak earners.

Sir Paul Callaghan, a much-honoured scientist and Kiwibank’s New Zealander of the Year, argues that New Zealand needs to focus its growth aspirations on entrepreneurial companies looking to fill small technology niches. He identifies ten such companies that presently have export sales of nearly $4 billion … and asks why not 100 such companies?

Leading BayBuzz to ask … why not more of those in Hawke’s Bay? Our region typifies what Callaghan argues is the wrong path – stubborn emphasis on primary production and tourism.

The HBRC’s strategy paper, while solidly behind the primary and tourism sectors, at least nods at the importance of diversification, saying: “Hawke’s Bay is inappropriately perceived as a location with limited economic opportunities outside of its core industries of agriculture and food processing. There is business diversity although more is needed.”

A campaign is proposed to “build on our centres of excellence and target new innovative industries to diversify our economic base”. This campaign would include tapping the region’s expat community to recruit businesses, entrepreneurs and investors; co-odinating ‘red carpet’ treatment for businesses considering moving into the Bay and leveraging the broadband deployment

now occurring, to attract knowledge-based businesses.

Of course, Hawke’s Bay already has many companies like these, congregated around software, IT, communications and marketing/advertising, applied engineering, and niche technologies. These businesses are staffed with higher earning, well-educated professionals and high-skill technicians. However, they are generally tiny, and their growth potential lies in exporting their services far beyond Hawke’s Bay. In theory at least they are perfectly positioned to do this, since they are chiefly selling highly scalable brainpower and ‘lightweight’ components (low weight relative to value).

Former Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand chief executive and Bay resident Kim Wicksteed says: “These people are very dynamic and intelligent. They need to network and increase their visibility … they could well give us a competitive edge.” Bassett-Foss refers to this as ‘clustering’ – excitement and momentum begets more of the same. As BayBuzz sees it, once organised, this cluster should seek to influence the direction of Hawke’s Bay no less than Federated Farmers or HB Fruitgrowers or the sports fraternity.

Attracting companies and workers like these – businesses and people who could locate anywhere – requires delivering a lifestyle and amenities that can compete respectably against our urban centres. The creative and cultural community contributes importantly to the ethos necessary to attract more cosmopolitan (and maybe more energetic?) migrants. As Kim Wicksteed notes: “These people are young, vibrant, up-to-date…they are Hawke’s Bay’s future.”

Band: The creatives at Band leave little footprint and deliver work anywhere

»

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Nil or Loss

$1 – $5,000

$5,001 – $10,000

$10,001 – $15,000

$15,001 – $20,000

$20,001 – $25,000

$25,001 – $30,000

$30,001 – $35,000

$35,001 – $40,000

$40,001 – $50,000

$50,001 – $70,000

$70,001 – $100,000

$100,001 +

CHOOSING TO BE POOR ~ We need to build the Hawke’s Bay where talent wants to live

They enrich the social fabric of Hawke’s Bay, adds Bassett-Foss. “But these educated, skilled people, and their spouses, need more than a job, good schools, good lifestyle and climate; they need culture, entertainment, and excitement.” He talks of marrying business and social diversity.

Localising the refrain of Paul Callaghan: We need to build the Hawke’s Bay where talent wants to live.

Hawke’s Bay’s Mãori economyThe younger rising professionals we

are just talking about might as well be on another planet, when compared to another key group in Hawke’s Bay to be reckoned with.

Half of Hawke’s Bay’s Mãori population is under age 23; 36% are under the age of 15. As noted earlier, of those employed, approximately 35% of those age 15 and over are labourers and 45% have no formal education qualifications.

Is this a group consigned to provide low wage labour forever, staffing the Bay’s fast food outlets and fields? A permanent under-class? If so, this is the income distribution that will persist.

Some powers-that-be, talk about a sort of ‘demand-pull’ solution. If we irrigate enough, and grow more stuff, we can process more stuff and there will be more jobs to fill that demand higher skills and pay better. But is that more than theory or wishful thinking?

The recent announcement by Heinz Watties that it was shifting significant food processing business to Hastings doesn’t offer much hope. According to

chief operating officer Michael Gibson, while a small number of new positions will be created, “the Hastings facilities have the infrastructure to absorb the additional volumes into current operations.”

Murray Douglas notes that young Mãori could represent fully half the Bay’s entire workforce by 2021. He says the primary production jobs “will always be here in Hawke’s Bay”, and expresses hope that ten years is enough to improve education and training opportunities.

However, it’s not at all clear who might drive an initiative to up-skill young Mãori or present them with opportunities greater than those available to their parents. Jason Fox, chair of Hawke’s Bay’s Mãori Business Network, says that role modelling is critical. He’s advocating a physical centre that would bring together the best Mãori minds in the region into one place, where they would be far more visible. “The alternatives need to be easy to see” for young Mãori. Not that he has anything against teachers, lawyers and accountants, Fox hopes more of the smartest kids can be enticed into business.

Beyond that, he suggests that more Mãori need to move from the ‘employed’ to the ‘self-employed’ mindset, starting their own micro-businesses, like most of the existing 130 businesses in the HB Mãori Business Network.

Nationally, the Mãori economy is estimated to be worth $37 billion. Mãori enterprises generate about 8% of our income and account for $9.5 billion in assets (all figures from BERL). But there’s

little evidence of that wealth in Hawke’s Bay. Local Treaty claimant groups will receive an estimated $300 million compensation. How those funds might be used to uplift the skills, competencies and aspirations of young Mãori in Hawke’s Bay is, well, a million dollar question.

Paths to exploreEffectively maintaining the economic

status quo in Hawke’s Bay is choosing to be poor. While healthy ‘debate’ might occur between those wanting more focus on the primary sector and those advocating more diversification, one thing is crystal clear, changes are required. Distilling from the debate, here are some paths forward.

Improve agricultural productivity and profitability

Many observers believe that significantly more income can be generated by the Bay’s primary sector. Says local economist Sean Bevin: “We can’t dismiss the natural advantages we have, those are unchanging; but we must generate a greater economic return from them… Not enough thought has gone into product development and marketing.”

In theory, it’s simply a matter of adopting best practices to improve productivity, applying technology to add value, and better marketing the end product. Nice aspiration, but where will the leadership come from to bring more ag science into the Bay, and then get slow-moving (and aging) farmers to embrace it?

Some growers in the Bay believe the challenge is in smarter positioning and marketing of our produce as pure and premium, including ‘GE free’. John Bostock of Pure Hawke’s Bay advances that view elsewhere in this issue.

Expand the Bay’s technology sectorSir Paul Callaghan says New Zealand

needs to deploy its human capital against far more lucrative enterprises than primary production and tourism. Tourism, he notes, generates around $80,000 in revenue per job. Just to maintain our current GDP, each job must generate $125,000. Fisher and Paykel Healthcare, with $500 million in exports, generates $232,000 per job. To Callaghan, it’s all a matter of deploying human capital against the most productive sectors, which he expects will be niche technologies. 5%0% 10% 15%

Hawke’s Bay New Zealand

Figure 3 ~ HB Mãori Income Distribution Continued on Page 32 »

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“We will be successful in the technology niches … we have grown such companies … they do not sell in New Zealand. They do not sponsor the ballet or children’s soccer. They make weird products that our kids and their parents do not understand.”

Feature

CHOOSING TO BE POOR ~ Every single business in Hawke’s Bay must be an exporter

We don’t have a Fisher and Paykel Healthcare in Hawke’s Bay, yet. However, we do have tech-based firms that fabricate and manufacture — and export beyond the Bay; precision electronic controls, restaurant fittings, software, welding components and frost protection windmills, to name a few.

Educational leadershipThe strategy advocated by Callaghan

assumes educational priorities that motivate and develop the skills that match up against the high value opportunities. EIT and our high schools are key players in any Hawke’s Bay economic development strategy. “They need to be leaders in this debate,” says Murray Douglas, who worries about future workforce capabilities.

Callaghan mentions three steps that seem relevant for our region’s education leadership; get kids and teachers visiting the smart businesses, significantly boost science and mathematics education, and build school programmes in entrepreneurship.

Everybody must exportSo obvious, but sometimes overlooked

as a challenge to ‘growing the Bay’, is our tiny market size. If a business really wants to make money, it needs to export outside the region and outside the country. Murray Douglas would like to see Hawke’s Bay ‘embassies’ in Auckland and Sydney. “Every single business in Hawke’s Bay must be an exporter…selling in Taupo, Auckland, Sydney and Shanghai.”

There’s an aspiration! And we have businesses that do it. Like Furnware, ABC Software, Southern Lights Ventures, Future Products Group, Blue70. Most Hawke’s Bay consumers have never heard of these businesses, precisely because they are focused on exporting their goods and services and quietly returning wealth to our region.

Who will lead regional economic growth?Local politicians can provide critical

infrastructure; allocate land and water; subsidise this or that industry; market the region as a whole to visitors, investors and outside businesses. They can lobby for central government largesse and coordinate region-wide amenities like cycle ways.

Local education leaders and institutions can study and help us understand our regional economy and its

many sectors, prepare young people to be competent in whatever role they aspire to, provide more occupation-specific training, and by their reputation for excellence, help attract migrants.

The business community, including agri-business, is the engine. Individual entrepreneurs, some world-class, create enterprises and generate jobs across all sectors. However, they can compete against one another commercially, thereby complicating collaboration for the ‘greater good’ of Hawke’s Bay.

Collaboration is an essential ingredient for creating the tide that lifts all boats. The Bay is too small and resource-thin to duplicate efforts to promote itself to the outside world as ‘the place to be’. Similarly, collaboration is needed to focus responsibility for other initiatives within the Bay; building infrastructure, identifying and meeting training needs and networking within sectors, to strengthen our competitive advantage.

Business Hawke’s Bay offers a new structure, potentially, for much of the business community to coalesce around common growth objectives, and then to collaborate with local government, iwi and education, who bring their own perspectives and responsibilities for achieving them.

Murray Douglas, shepherding the Business HB initiative, sees it as a way to capitalise on the Bay’s most accomplished entrepreneurs, who can help entice others to the Hawke’s Bay party. “We need to much better harness the energy of people in the Bay who have done it, like Ray McKimm and Robert Darroch. That’s one of the strategies Business Hawke’s Bay will pursue.”

Ultimately, any economic growth for the region must occur within a

broader framework of sustainability and social equity. That framework, and any ratepayer investment in economic development, must be determined and overseen by our local elected leaders.

As for our elected leaders, perhaps the greatest contribution they might make toward advancing Hawke’s Bay’s prospects would be unification, which deserves to be fully explored.

And soon.

Sir Paul Callaghan: Scientist and Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year 2011

FPG: Future Product Group’s Glen Colechin works on refrigeration unit

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Hawke’s Bay is now known as aregion with a low income economy. In 2006 the median yearly income of Hawke’s Bay people aged 15 and over was lower than the national median of $24,400. The rural central and southern districts had the highest median income ($23,500 and $23,660 respectively). These were followed by Napier city ($22,700), Hastings district ($22,600) and Wairoa district ($20,000).

While the national average for those earning $20,000 or less per year was 43%, regionally it was 46%; and while an average of 18% earned more than $50,000, the Hawke’s Bay average was 12%.

Communities are the result of evolution. Evolution is the result of change. Change is a reflection of what values we choose to honour in our lives. Change cannot be stopped, only managed. In Hawke’s Bay we should agree that there has been change; change from prosperity to poverty. High unemployment, high crime, poor health, low educational achievement levels, and the list continues.

While this list is not about the poor state of Maori alone, it would be fair to comment that Maori will form the bulk of the population in any of these statistics.

Maori continue to argue their difference in terms of the te taiao – our environment, whanauora – family values, and hauora – wellness to give a name to a few. Whether it is in front of the Waitangi Tribunal, Office of Treaty Settlements, local government or central government, Mãori continue to provide value-based arguments to support their

case for shared understanding, inclusive participation and redress. Constantly, these values are intimately analysed and translated so that non te reo participants are able to obtain a glimpse into trying to understand the argument.

Mãori argue that the running of this country, from let’s say 1840, has been in the absence of Maori participation and decision making. Mãori would say the country is worse off under the current economic value system than under our people-valued system. Some might stereotype this as socialism or communism, I prefer that it be called quite simply Mãoriism. Wow, a true fusion of cultural words. Regardless, the point I want to make is that it is time for the Mãori viewpoint to find its way into the light.

It is possible that a change of hands on the steering wheel might well contribute to an improved future for this nation. Mãori will no longer accept that they are economically helpless and without any ability to contribute towards the future of our country. A recent article released by Dr Ganesh Nana, a leading New Zealand economist, identified the Mãori economy as having a value of $37 billion including land, fish, capital assets, tourism, geothermal energy and forests.

New Zealand should prepare for the arrival of a smarter, skilled, bilingual leader that has retained the values of the proverb, ‘what is the most important thing in this world, it is people, it is people, it is people’.

Mãori will seek changes to the way our futures are managed. We will insist that we sit at the decision making table.

We will contribute to the changes needed to return our nation to one that values people and our environment so strongly that all else is insignificant. Mãori no longer accept the paternal ‘we know what’s good for you’ approach. Change must be managed. Change is unavoidable.

It might be tempting for some to see this article as a call to action against the status quo. Consider this: From the beginning Mãori recognised the value of the new immigrant arrivals in many ways. We wanted to work with these new immigrants to develop a nation built on the proud histories of two nations woven together, forming an unbreakable bond of kinship.

Mãori aspirations focus on the better application of resources to assist their people move from these poor statistics to improvement in the next ten years. Mãori are already contributing to education and health and social services; there is a capability which now exists. The Treaty settlements will bring a financial capacity to give effect to these changes. What is good for Mãori is indeed good for New Zealand.

Arriving on our doorstep in Hawke’s Bay over the next three to four years will be the settlements of five major claimant groups. We are going to have to learn to work together in a completely different framework. It is not just a matter of paying the same rent to another landlord. It is a wonderful, empowering opportunity to be inclusive, decisive, and innovative to meet the needs of our grandchildren and aged into the next 100 years.

Mãori settlements mean economic

opportunityHawke’s Bay ‘the fruit bowl of

New Zealand’, was once the catch cry of a very productive

and prosperous region.

by DES RATIMA

Columns

ONE MÃORI VOICE ~ Treaty claims will empower local Mãori to improve poor statistics

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Columns

The new hot issue in Australia is ‘food security’. What that means is that in the last few weeks Australians have been having a little panic that they might soon run out of food, with headline making predictions including: ‘Australia faces widespread food shortages in as little as a decade.’

The reason for this is that Australia has 22 million people and they live in a desert full of minerals but not much in the way of water. As a result, Australian food production is stagnating – even falling. Top of the list of issues is water. In South Australia – a significant food producer – the shortage requires water to be imported interstate. Even then, many farmers are receiving less than their full allocation. As a result they are either reducing plantings or failing to expand to meet growing demand. Other issues … a decline in farm numbers, less people taking up farming and urban sprawl over productive areas, are impacting on farming there and elsewhere in Australia.

Food security is becoming an issue now, because last year for the first time Australia imported more food than it exported. The largest source of that food was an underpopulated, wet, largely mineral poor, New Zealand.

Looked at a little more broadly the general feeling is that food production globally must double in the next 40 years in order to simply keep pace with population growth. So it’s not just Australia that’s going to need to import food but China, America and a host of others. It seems then that New Zealand might soon have something all these

others are going to need, the price of which is bound to rise significantly.

It’s no new idea that New Zealand might be a good place from which to feed the rest of the world, but it’s one we don’t always pay as much attention to as we should. However, it is dangerous to think that just because we grow it, they’re going to buy it. Particularly as attachment of the two terms, food and security, means that Australia has a degree of paranoid protectionism being built into the mix.

How then do we prepare for a future in which we feed Australia?

A visit to any Australian market, or even a lone vegetable stall, makes it hard to get to grips with the notion of impending food shortages. Somehow Australian fruit and vegetables always seem bigger, bolder, brighter and more various than those at home. That is, until you understand that the asparagus is from Peru, the garlic from China, the citrus from America, the pineapples from the Philippines and the Brussel sprouts (I kid you not) from Belgium.

Therefore, if New Zealanders want to crack the Australia broccoli trade they need to understand that the issue is not as much about supply … but demand. Middle class Australia, which has got used to having pots of disposable income, has become food mad. MasterChef is the national religion and fresh good-looking produce rules in homes and restaurants. Those same wealthy middle class Australians have also invested strongly in design, be it bold restaurant schemes, over-the-top home kitchens and even their very own version of Grand Designs.

This is in part because top quality is usually associated with top presentation – and when that involves packaging it also includes a high degree of design awareness. In short, Australians don’t buy things that aren’t stylish – even fruit and veggies. In New Zealand we still think of the design aspects of a product as an add-on. In Australia design is seen as a central plank of a purchasing decision.

New Zealand can of course sit out the intervening years between now and 2050 when the world will probably get to the point of buying any old cabbage leaf. Or we can start thinking of food in design terms and selling it to the Australians ahead of the rush. And from here, one of those options seems bigger, bolder and brighter than the other.

There has been much talk in political and business circles about the possibility (or not) of New Zealand catching-up with Australia sometime, anytime, soon. This catching-up is always presented in terms of wages and salaries, as if this was all that mattered. However, if we put those limitations aside for a moment, even wage parity with Australia seems something of a stretch.

One doesn’t need to have a complex understanding of economics to know that the essential difference between Australia and New Zealand is that there are 22 million of them and that they have minerals. They have both critical mass and the resources that China and America need. That combination has allowed them to cruise through recent global downturns, but it also means that they’re going to stay good and rich for some time to come – unless of course there is some sort of dramatic change in the world order.

Just how important mining is to Australia, can be grasped by their resistance to either a mining or a carbon tax. However, it really hits home when you open the financial pages of an Australian newspaper. The number of stock market listings for mining companies more or less equals those of all other businesses combined – you begin to get the picture.

New Zealand on the other hand has not so many minerals and an increasing resistance to harvesting those we do have. So be it, in the meantime New Zealand will either become poorer or learn to develop an alternative source of foreign income.

DOUGLAS LLOYD JENKINS ~ How then do we prepare for a future in which we feed Australia?

Cracking the trans-Tasman broccoli trade

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Columns

The brat kid and the weak parent

DAVID TRUBRIDGE ~ We are denying future generations the prospects of a better life

You know the scene: a child lies on the supermarket floor yelling, kicking and screaming because his mother wouldn’t let him have junk food. The child knows his mother is too weak to stand up to him and can’t bear the spectacle, so he will win in the end.

So the parents abdicate their responsibility to their child and society at large, failing to deliver the moral training so obviously needed. As he continues to get his selfish way, his nastiness proves to be an asset. He pulls legs off insects and gleefully watches them struggle, and if his parents try to stop him there’s another wild tantrum. His sensitive sister retreats into herself and tries to build her own values but receives no support from her feckless parents.

This scenario is precisely what is happening around the world: industry and big business are the brat kids and governments are the ineffectual parents. Why is it that, despite repeated, unrelenting and escalating warnings from the entire (uncompromised) scientific community, world governments have failed to take any significant action to prevent climate change, pollution and environmental desecration?

Why did nothing happen at the Copenhagen Climate talks, despite unified demands for action from the public and commentators? Simply because industry shouts so loud, and in the face of the torrent, weak governments care only for their daily image.

Greenhouse gas emissions increased to a record amount last year, according

to the International Energy Agency. Some European countries claim a drop but that is only because they have exported manufacturing elsewhere. In other words, we are doing nothing to prevent global warming. Governments have utterly failed to take any long term responsibility toward the planet and future generations, because this would require the same unpleasant treatment needed for the brat kid.

Mike Joy’s brilliant article in the NZ Herald recently (The dying myth of a clean, green Aotearoa) exposed John Key in all his unfortunate weakness. Joy states that half our lakes and 90% of our lowland rivers are “classed as polluted”. Yet Key had the gall to deny this on BBC, claiming we are 100% clean! Doesn’t he care about the cow shit and bacteria in rivers made dangerously low by over-extraction of water? It doesn’t seem to matter to him that our children can’t swim or play in these waters.

Why has he done nothing about this? Because the brat-kid dairy industry would throw a tantrum, screaming that clean-up measures would hurt profitability too much. And because Key is one of them anyway. A truly responsible government can only be effective if it is impartial.

This is a small scandal, but the world is tragically full of them. Take bottom trawling, described by Claire Nouvian in Above magazine as “oceanicide”. Ninety percent of marine diversity is located in the sediment on the ocean floor, in a

complex system that has taken hundreds, even thousands, of years to evolve. Dragging a trawl through this is like stripping the forest and topsoil off the Amazon rain forest.

Yet silently, out of the spotlight, this is what is happening as the process cleans out each newly discovered species, such as orange roughy, then moves on to the next. We might not understand the full implications, but governments and the UN do; they were petitioned by 1,400 scientists about the issues in 2004.

Why do they not act and show responsibility? Because the brat-kid fishing industry protects the mere 285 boats responsible. It gets worse; bottom trawling is actually unprofitable and only


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Columns

DAVID TRUBRIDGE ~ Industry and big business are the brat kids

able to continue through governmental oil subsidies. Unwittingly, the taxpayer funds this destruction of our last pristine wilderness for 0.3% of fish caught, all of which are sold to industrialised countries.

The ultimate brat-kid is the banking and finance industry, as now fully revealed in an award-winning documentary Inside Job. This screaming little monster got its own way for so long that it caused the world-wide financial crisis. Even after the melt-down it caused, it accepts no responsibility and still has its way. There have been no inquiries and all regulators are industry appointed.

Across Europe, weak complicit governments force drastic austerity cuts on a pathetically compliant populace to pay for the banks’ excesses, even as the bankers return to business as usual and award themselves the same old outrageous bonuses.

Now with all this anti-business talk, you are probably thinking that I am some sort of Fabian Luddite. Actually I would have to be called a businessman, because I own and run a company that turns over $2m and employs 18 people. There are other ways in which a business can be run: my catch phrase is that the business does not exist to make money – it makes money to exist . . . and it exists to provide a fulfilling and meaningful lifestyle for all of us, while at the same time producing what we like to call culturally nourishing products.

My role model is Yvon Chouinard with his company Patagonia, and my business bible is his book, Let My People Go Surfing. Our ‘Core Values’ are publicly stated on our website. I believe that businesses run on these principles can supply us with the things we need with hope for the future.

Some years before Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, before global warming was widely accepted and before the financial crisis, I was writing that our systems of government, our economic systems and our capitalist system are failing us and need to be redesigned. It is even more acutely obvious now.

Sure, you will argue, capitalism has given unprecedented benefits to so many people, and of course that is true. But two crucial things have changed. Throughout most of the 20th century, the individual excesses of capitalism were balanced by the community demands of socialism. But since capitalism won the cold war, it has run rampant and unchecked as the ruthless Chicago neo-

liberal school of Friedman economics violently forces itself onto the world (read Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein).

So the rich are getting immeasurably richer and the poor are getting poorer and more numerous. The “trickle-down effect” does not work – it goes the other way: 7% of Americans live below the poverty line.

Secondly, we have run up against the limits of the planet. Unending growth and prosperity were fine as long as the resources were there to feed them, which is no longer the case. Increasingly middle classes around the world chase fewer and fewer resources. Not only are we stripping the planet of its treasures but we are also denying future generations the prospect of a decent life.

That is why I say our present economic model is failing us. I can’t see any way in which the current, capitalist business-government coalition will take the drastic

measures required to protect the planet and the future. Weak governments are in hock to the brat-kid industries and show no signs of shouldering any of the responsibility.

It pains me to see the deeply-felt and well-meaning efforts of so many caring people trying to improve their lifestyle (the sensitive little sister) while the brat-kid negates it all a thousand-fold.

As long as the sole raison d’etre for business is its own profit, nothing will change. Future generations who inherit this mess will be utterly appalled by this abdication of parental responsibility. Hopefully the Bolivian initiative enshrining the rights of nature into law will spread and we will see some of these violators and ineffectual appeasers retrospectively brought to justice (just as war criminals are now) for crimes against nature. And, after all, we are just one more part of nature.

“The business does not exist to make money – it makes money to exist . . . and it exists to provide a fulfilling and meaningful lifestyle for all of us.”

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Columns

ROD DRURY ~ We face death by a thousand cuts

In 1961 John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you … ask what you can do for your country.”

Over the last few years I think we’ve forgotten this message in New Zealand. We seem to look to the Government or others to make things better for us. In fact, as individuals, we need to make things better for ourselves.

I travel a lot for work, primarily to the UK, USA and Australia. To me it’s very obvious that New Zealand is slowly getting worse. Education, healthcare, living standards and the number of hours we need to work to get by are all moving in the wrong direction. Our infrastructure is in a state of atrophy and we’re not even investing to maintain the same position, let alone keep up with investments happening in other countries.

Like the frog in the pot this is a gradual decline, hardly noticeable to the frog but very obvious to those outside. New Zealand’s decline is certainly very obvious to those outside, tracking us over the long term.

There is no burning platform, no one big issue to get upset about. But if we don’t act, we face death by a thousand cuts.

Our lack of action is compounded by our low cost of leisure. It’s easy to have a fantastic lifestyle in New Zealand. While issues may grind us down, New Zealand remains special in that we can all have a millionaire’s lifestyle with easy access to beaches, parks, diving, boating, skiing. Almost anything outdoorsy is available to us, so we think things are not bad.

But they are. Take broadband. Kids in the USA have much greater access to technology and services. They are learning differently and have more opportunity. It’s the same in business. People in the USA work differently – good Internet infrastructure is taken for granted.

In healthcare, people in other countries have access to treatment and specialists that we simply don’t.

In Australia people invest in productive businesses. We choose non-productive investment property. Australian private equity companies have hollowed out New Zealand mid-sized businesses so the dividends flow back to benefit Australia. We work for wages and they get the upside. They also get our good doctors, nurses and teachers.

How do we turn this around? It’s actually pretty simple. We need to sell more higher value stuff overseas. We need to export more of our goods and services. And when I say we, I mean you.

This isn’t someone else’s problem. It’s everyone’s problem. It’s your problem.

Imagine if we changed our culture so that all New Zealanders felt personally responsible for increasing our exports? What would happen if we only wanted to work for companies that created export revenue or supported companies that did, or in businesses that aspired to not just service your local area but Melbourne, Hong Kong and New York? How would things change if all business owners felt obligated to be on a plane one week a month to build their business overseas and create those connections.

Imagine how much more satisfying dropping the boat in the water would be if you’ve just get back from LA on Saturday morning with some more orders for your business? What if the export culture was so strong in New Zealand that Telecom and Vodafone’s response to ridiculously high international roaming rates was to provide overseas SIM cards for you when you travelled?

If the country were unified in increasing its value in the world, our tyranny of distance and small scale would become an advantage. We’d become boutique. Others would want to invest and live here. We’d compete for talent. New Zealand would be the best place in the world for global leaders to base themselves and in turn they’d contribute to further local investment. That would then lead directly to better education and healthcare.

We simply need to get started. An example of New Zealanders doing it for themselves is Pacific Fibre. Our newly proposed $US400m submarine cable venture will link Australia, through New Zealand, to the USA, bringing much needed competition to our digital trade route. You might argue such a massive, vital and obvious infrastructure project should be the responsibility of the Government, but it can’t compete with big business even if it has the best interests of the country at heart. So a number of individuals have got together to make it happen.

As well as fixing the problem of our unreasonably high international broadband costs, Pacific Fibre will, I hope, inspire others to get out and make a difference. If you don’t fix things, then who will?

Another example is, Mogul, a web design firm in Havelock North. Its team is world class at building socially interactive websites. I’ve connected them to people I’ve met in my travels and they are now providing services into Australia. They are exporters.

Xero already has a team of 17 people in Australia that complements the 100 in New Zealand. We’re building a global business. That means being on the road a few days a week and away from the family, late nights and early phone calls. Operating globally does takes some effort, but the rewards are worth it, and that’s what’s needed if we want to make New Zealand a better place.

We live in the best country in the world. We might be the furthest away from anywhere else and our scale might be small, but technology is making us closer and connecting us to huge markets. I truly believe we can turn the trends around, but all of us have to work on it.

It’s 50 years since John F. Kennedy said those words, but they have never been more important for us in New Zealand. What are you doing to make New Zealand better?

What can you do for your country?

Feature

COMING HOME ~ If you are or know a ‘returnee’, contact [email protected]

After Havelock High he’d enrolled for a computer science degree at Otago University but changed to design and psychology. He saw those choices as complementary and leaning more to the creative side, which held greater fascination for him than number crunching.

Post-graduation he became a freelancer for film and television production houses in Wellington, doing everything from set building to unit manager and production.

It wasn’t consistent enough to be a career path, so he headed straight for London where he became a white van errand boy for an architect and a structural engineer engaged in high-end building renovations.

“I was really interested in architecture and I got to know London well. We worked on 20 million pound houses including a Getty family mansion behind Knightsbridge which had five levels and its own art galleries and panic rooms.”

When Tom’s girlfriend (now wife) Benita, also from Hawke’s Bay, arrived the travelling continued. The couple

First stop in the morning TOM ORMOND Owner, Hawthorne Coffee

It was the aroma of coffee,the business opportunity that went with that and the prospect of raising a family in his old stomping ground that drew Tom Ormond back to Hawke’s Bay.

ended up on the Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland, where they managed six holiday cottages on a 2000 hectare estate.

The now married couple returned to Wellington, intending to transition to Hawke’s Bay “in a couple of years” to raise a family, but there was an offer they couldn’t refuse.

“My father-in-law knew we wanted to be in the hospitality business and on learning that Hawthorne Coffee was coming up for sale, he thought it would be a good fit for us.”

It was everything they were looking for. “I loved coffee and machinery and there were technical aspects as well so it was a pretty varied job and really appealed.”

Tom and Benita’s initial concern was that they might miss the city life, but five years later, there are no regrets. “We love the slightly laid back rural lifestyle and there’s a cosmopolitan feel about it if you want to find it,” says Tom.

“People tend to think everyone knows everyone else in Hawke’s Bay but that’s not the case, there are artists and

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THEY’RE BACK!

A familiar story told in Hawke’s Bay is of the prodigal son or daughter who, after high school or attending university,

leave the region to sow their wild oats elsewhere, often following the great Kiwi OE tradition.

BayBuzz is heartened to see many Hawke’s Bay ex-pats returning to the fold with rich experiences and enhanced skills. We ask the ‘returnees’ where did they go, what did

they do and what prompted their return. If you’ve come back or know someone else who has, and is

making a difference in the Bay, let us know.

[email protected]

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almost two decades it can be hard to establish new friendships. This requires some effort, but happily, a number of new friendships have been formed with other parents through their children’s activities.

The transition of the MSHomecare head office from Auckland to the Bay was challenging and involved a lot of travel and rethinking of how information needed to be transferred from Miranda’s head to the other managers. This has now settled down and day trips away are now less frequent. Kay Bazzard

Marketing pro re-calibrates KIM WICKSTEED Principal and Founder, ADVICE

‘Finding balance’ is the theme of advertising man Kim Wicksteed’s riff on returning to Hawke’s Bay.

In his ‘youth’, “chasing a lovely woman to Hawke’s Bay in the early ‘70s”, Kim began his career doing community relations work for the Hastings Public Relations Office before establishing an advertising agency in 1976.

After seven years his talents took him to Wellington, where he practiced the advertising craft for a series of agencies, culminating in 13 years with Saatchi & Saatchi, ultimately serving as CEO for New Zealand.

During that phase of his career, Kim played a key role in the implementation of Absolutely Positively Wellington. He also served as a trustee of the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts and as a director of the Wellington Regional Tourism Agency.

That was life in the fast lane. “After 25 years in the advertising sprint, I was ready to re-calibrate.”

In 2002, Kim established his own consultancy, ADVICE, offering


technology guys and pockets of everything.”

Having a family and the pressure in the cities has made a lot of people think about the simpler things in life. In fact Tom, now 33, says a number of friends are now moving back and starting families.

“A lot of our Auckland friends are blown away by the fact that we live in a cottage on the farm, the peacefulness, and the ease of getting around. We can go out to Craggy Range or Black Barn and have an amazing lunch then head to a great little bar in Havelock North. It ticks all those boxes.”

Tom says technology has broken down a lot of the barriers of distance. People keep in touch through their social networks and a number are now running successful Auckland or Wellington-based businesses from Hawke’s Bay.

Because the pace is slower and new businesses are getting established he says there’s a sense of being part of growth in the region. Keith Newman

Home care pioneer manages world service fromTe Awanga MIRANDA SMITH Founder and Director, MSHomecare

Miranda Smith left Woodford House at the end of sixth form, working in a variety of Hawke’s Bay jobs before heading overseas at 21, for her OE adventure. She wound up working in London as administrator for Patricia

White Personal Homecare, living in Patricia White’s household where the business was run.

As she was about to return to New Zealand, Patricia’s advice to the then 24-year-old was, “This is the way elderly care is going [in-home]; you should start one up when you get back.”

Having acquired a thorough understanding of how the agency worked, on her return Miranda launched MSHomecare in Auckland, now the longest established in-home care agency in New Zealand. Within months she met Hawke’s Bay ex-pat, Campbell Thornton.

Miranda Smith built up the private in-home care service and today MSHomecare, with centres in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Hawke’s Bay, is administered by a team of 14 women and employs 250 carers nationwide.

The time and cost of daily travel to work from their home in Piha on Auckland’s west coast was considerable; life was intense but exciting, although with two small boys it soon became unsustainable. The couple moved back to Hawke’s Bay three years ago, primarily because of strong family links and the easier lifestyle being so accessible.

Fortunately the homecare agency is a family-friendly kind of business and can be run from her Te Awanga home and from the office of Thornton’s Realty (her husband Campbell Thornton’s family business). Her managers in the other centres are trusted friends, who also bring their babies into the office when necessary - all that’s required is a boardroom or quiet office for the bassinet.

The Thornton’s now have three boys, aged five and three years and nine weeks. Besides the homecare business, Miranda runs Puku Baby Clothing and the Karitane Nurses and Nannies Bureau, employing 120 specialist baby nurses with placements in several overseas countries, including the Bahrain royal family.

First and foremost in the minds of the many business entrepreneurs seeking a return home, is the need for a family life. This holds true for Campbell Thornton and Miranda Smith.

They really miss their Auckland friends who will sometimes travel down for a break in the Bay, and in August she and some girlfriends are off to Samoa for a few days catch-up without their spouses and children.

After being away from home for


Feature


Bring ‘can do’ attitude with you GEORGINA (GEORGE) MILLER Co-founder and Director, Mogul Ltd

George (Georgina) Miller reckons there’s something about Hawke’s Bay that gets in your blood and draws you back, even if it means having to create your own destiny.

She says people returning to the Bay need to have get up and go and ignore the ‘nothing to do here’ myth. “Ask what you can do to have a career, grow your business or help Hawke’s Bay grow, not the other way ‘round.”

While George moved around a bit as “a pub kid” with parents in hospitality management roles, she spent much of her youth in Hawke’s Bay. After Woodford House it was Massey University to study for a BA in social anthropology. “I was going to save the world in those days.”

She continued her studies at Otago University where she met Matt and headed to Dublin and on to London where they were married. George worked in accounts and Matt was hired by the local council and did research for a New York stockbroker.

Many of their friends were making good money in IT and the couple realised the world was on the brink of another dotcom boom.

After three and a half years in the UK, George and Matt returned to Christchurch where Matt’s parents lived. He did a post-graduate diploma in e-commerce and she completed a chef’s course and a small business course in hospitality at the New Zealand School of Food and Wine.

To pay her way George took on

strategic counsel on marketing and communications. In 2006, he and his wife Margaret (the woman he chased) moved to the edge of Havelock North. “We returned here for great memories, great people and very good weather.”

Kim and Margaret originally figured they would buy a place to relax in Waimarama, while continuing to live in Wellington. After numerous trips back looking at properties, “we decided we had it all wrong … we should live in Hawke’s Bay and visit Wellington …and we’ve had no disappointments whatsoever with Hawke’s Bay”.

They keep an apartment in Wellington and so “enjoy the ying and yang of tranquility in the Bay with the hustle and bustle of Courtney Place”. That said, they bought their first house in Havelock North back in the late ‘70s and now say it’s incredible how cosmopolitan ‘the Village’ has become. “Universally, people say to me … how lucky are you to live in Hawke’s Bay.”

Kim, now aged 57, says his great ambition was to spend three days working with clients outside Hawke’s Bay, commuting to Wellington or Auckland, and four days in the Bay. “I’m not there yet … more like four days outside and three days in. I find you do need the face-to-face to create business. You need to be there and work through the issues as opposed to trying to do it remotely.”

As Kim sees it, with company downsizing and more responsibility put on people, many are working harder than ever, and the attraction of an easier lifestyle to balance that stress is enormous.

“They’re saying, I don’t know if this is worth it anymore. But they’re highly talented, skilled folk, many looking to raise families, and if you offer a work/lifestyle balance, you’re really beginning to hit a rich vein … Hawke’s Bay offers people a chance to get balance back into their lives.”

He adds: “These people are young, vibrant, up-to-date … they are Hawke’s Bay’s future.” Tom Belford

technical support for email software which made her aware of the language gap between the average person and the technical world.

During their five years in Christchurch their two girls were born and family became a priority, prompting a return to Hawke’s Bay where Matt began building websites for local businesses.

The common ground between working in pubs and doing technical support was customer service, and helping people get beyond techtalk into business realities seemed logical.

The web development business grew and she and Matt founded Mogul, initially operating from their kitchen bench and then from offices in Havelock North. Solid networking within the Hawke’s Bay business community and delivering on “where the money is” for clients, was key to their success.

George describes herself as “a general dog’s body” but in real terms that means business development, sales, project management, account management and “anything else that needs to be done”.

And the social life? “What, you mean when we’re not at work in the weekends? We love going to the beach in the summer or getting the scooters and bikes out. We love the wineries and the food but mostly the weekends are family time.”

George says the local market is now being stimulated by what she describes as a real “brains trust” of technology and computing people.

“Rod Drury is helping by pushing that message. We need to attract more people like him so we can build businesses that don’t rely on the land and weather and can help Hawke’s Bay grow.” Keith Newman

From the oil fields to solar power CAMPBELL SIMMONDS Electrical Contractor

Life started out routine enoughfor Campbell Simmonds on his parents’ pear orchard in Twyford, 40 years ago.

He went to Twyford School and Hastings Boys’, then completed an

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Next Issue: Sophie Sowman and Chris O’Reilly

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in the smooth relationships within the Conroy family –after all not everyone can work successfully with family members.

Fiona finds satisfaction in her role as general manager at Conroys, describing it as a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ job, responsible for recruitment, employment agreements, and sales and marketing. She says it’s rather like ‘an apprenticeship’ as she works her way through the challenges, with her dad as mentor.

The company was established 40 years ago by David Conroy, who as a young man had a great love of trucks, but now, reckons Fiona, is a workaholic who loves his business and will never retire. They employ 170 staff in New Zealand and Australia, with the international removals side of the business being managed by her uncle, Gary Conroy.

Joe Koenigsberger successfully runs his own business, Pacific Powder Coatings in Napier and they have two small girls, Ava aged three and Millie 18 months. Her duties at work haven’t changed with the arrival of children thanks to Marie, the children’s devoted and trusted grandmother and caregiver. On Marie’s one day a week off, Fiona is able to handle work issues on a home-linked computer.

They don’t really miss their life in Wellington, having become fully established in Napier, but do enjoy visiting Joe’s family and friends who live there. What they appreciate in Hawke’s Bay is being so being closely involved with family, the ease of getting around and of course, the climate, all of which motivated them to return.

Fiona recognises that in her case, returning to the Bay was a happy and natural thing to do and acknowledges that enticing other bright Hawke’s Bay ex-pats home is dependant on work being available.

She points out however, that Joe’s experience demonstrates that entrepreneurial opportunities do exist for those prepared to take the risk. For those who yearn to return to their home territory to live and work, digital technology allows many business owners the freedom to operate at a distance from their customers, even where they are elsewhere in the world.

Living in Hawke’s Bay and working in or commuting to Auckland or Wellington is quite common for many people. Being in Onekawa and close to the airport, Fiona finds that travel for work reasons is easy and pleasant. Kay Bazzard


apprenticeship as an electrician and worked with Talbot Electrical. His path seemed set. Then in 1995 he followed some friends to London, and in the classic Kiwi roundabout way, started in Rome.

Campbell’s path led to Nectar Shipping in London, a firm that provided operating services to oil drilling companies, where he specialised in keeping the oil rigs and pumps powered and running. London became a mere ‘rest and relaxation’ base, between assignments abroad to locations including Mozambique, Vietnam and the North Sea.

After a while, he jumped to Halliburton, the oil services company made famous by former US Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton sent Campbell to some tough locations – Algeria, Gabon, the (then) Congo and Angola.

High pay. High performance. And not a little risk.

He settled into a ‘routine’ lifestyle; 28 days working on location, 28 days ‘off’ (but paid) in a location of his choosing. Most of that off-time was spent in London or South Africa.

But love caught up with Campbell. He met Adele, a nurse, now his wife, in London. Their first daughter Eleanor followed, and the family started looking toward New Zealand. “London is great when you’re young, but who would want to raise young kids there?” asks Campbell.

Plus his adventures as an oilman were “hard on the liver” and there was the opportunity to own real land.

With excellent oil biz pay, he had saved money and bought properties in Hawke’s Bay over the Internet; a house in Napier and a sizable lifestyle block out along the Tukituki. “I always planned to come back … I knew the area because my father used to take me fly-fishing out there.”

So, in 2002 the family returned to Napier, where second daughter Olivia was born. The only risk in returning was “how my spouse would like it”. From a business perspective, he didn’t see any risk at all. He had solid skills and experience, and as

he views it, “things are always going to go ahead in Hawke’s Bay”.

After a brief stint again at Talbot’s, Campbell struck out on his own as an electrical contractor and now has two employees. Much of his work comes through up-market builder Andy Coltart, and the rest from word-of-mouth referrals. Working almost exclusively on upper-end projects gives Campbell the opportunity to do things first-class, and occasionally to indulge his strong interest in solar power.

The family now lives in a completely off-the-grid home Campbell built from the ground up on their Tukituki property. It’s powered totally by solar panels, with a bit of support from a windmill.

However, he hasn’t ruled out running a power line to the closest grid connection. “I might want to sell them a bit of electricity some day.” A true entrepreneur. Tom Belford

Lifestyle and family win the day FIONA CONROY General Manager, Conroy Removals

Coming back to Hawke’s Bay after 12 years away was an easy decision for Fiona Conroy. She and her husband, Joe Koenigsberger, were planning to move to Melbourne when her father, David Conroy the CEO of Conroy Removals, made her an offer too good to refuse.

They had been in Wellington for some years and were looking for a lifestyle and career move. They could see the benefits in being involved with family, affordable housing, and working in a secure job in their preferred region, Hawke’s Bay.

The confidence to make the move back into the family business was grounded

CONFESSIONS OF AN ART JUNKIE ~ Local artists breathe soul and vitality into the community

The Arts

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JUNKIETalk is cheap. Anyone can visit an exhibition or a local artist

at their studio and say “that’s great” … but it doesn’t pay the bills.writer ~ ROy DUNNINghAm

CONFESSIONS OF AN ART

reaching for your credit card at an art exhibition is the most sincere compliment you can pay an artist, and it was gratifying to see the number of red stickers on works at this year’s Creative Hawke’s Bay Invitational Art Exhibition at the Hastings City Art Gallery.

It did occur to me though, that the best artworks don’t always come in convenient flat rectangular frames that can be hung on walls. Sometimes art comes in a form where scale, content and material composition preclude its purchase by private collectors.

An example is Leanne Culy’s work. Her delightfully painted oars are deservedly popular. But the best and most touching work I have seen from her was the installation that told her family story in last year’s Source exhibition in Hastings. Another whose work doesn’t always come in a readily collectable format is Chris Bryant-Toi.

In the past, the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery has commissioned this type of project and I am hopeful that sometime in the future the Hastings City Art Gallery’s financial kitty will stretch to permit such presentations. Currently, we rely largely on the loyal support of local artists who give their time and personal expenditure to provide work that will be enjoyed but not necessarily sold.

It also occurred to me, walking around the Creative Hawke’s Bay show, how much I depend upon these artists. For me, it is the creative people who make life worth living in Hawke’s Bay. They breathe soul and vitality into the community and I need to have a regular “fix” of art from them to keep going.Medicated Mommas, by Jo Blogg

Big Yellow Mandala framed, by Jo Blogg

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CONFESSIONS OF AN ART JUNKIE ~ Local artists breathe soul and vitality into the community

If anything, entering an artist’s studio is an even headier experience than seeing an exhibition; visiting the studios of Napier artists Jo Blogg and Fane Flaws is simply exhilarating.

Jo Blogg has one of the sharpest minds on the local art scene. She has an unerring eye for selecting unlikely materials to match ideas drawn from current events, trends and personal experience. I can recall corrugated card, jigsaws, resin, acrylic and Perspex, pen and ink, pharmaceutical pills and now paper chads. The chosen media is always used in a way suited to its possibilities and limitations.

The repetition and rhythms of pattern obviously fascinate her and in her recent work the concept of Buddhist sand mandalas has provided a vehicle for her ideas. Her mandala patterns can be read in many ways. They can simply be a sensory experience with the repetitive patterns inviting zen-like contemplation of their calm beauty (she is a good colourist), but they can sting as well. Patterns can be seen as symbols of control as in her road sign mandalas “Don’t Tell Me What to Do”.

Sometimes there is anger as seen in “Medicated Mommas” (ever wondered why women are given so many pills?). There is even anxiety in “Living with Animals”. Alternately, her work can amuse, touch or needle you. This artist is pathologically incapable of being boring or clichéd.

Fane Flaws is something of an old-fashioned modernist and one of the most creative people I know. Artist, designer and musician he has been part of a vital New Zealand sub-culture which has never really been officially recognised (I don’t see him getting a knighthood), and yet has in its way helped define us.

And the ideas just keep coming. Demolishing an old garage, he looked at the wreckage and thought, “this stuff is too beautiful to dump”. Since then it has worked its way into a brilliantly entertaining series of assemblages which echo a range of modernist masters but still end up characteristically the work of Fane Flaws. “Father and Mother” (Marewa Gothic) playfully reprises Grant Wood’s iconic “American Gothic”, while “Deconstructed Shed Tiki” nods to a range of artists from Picasso and Henri Laurens to Dick Frizzell.

Flaw’s work is a mix of reverence and irreverence. He unashamedly acknowledges the modernist artists

and the musicians whom he admires. The enemy he sees is pomposity and frequently his work is punctuated with texts of droll and often self-deprecating humour, such as “Self Portrait as almost Serious Artist”.

Don’t be put off by the entertainment value though. He is a seriously good artist. The assemblages reveal an acute sense of design and he really can paint and draw. His work is loaded with ideas which are often more intuitive than contrived. He says himself, “I don’t really understand what happens.” Well, maybe, but he puts it all out there for a viewer to unravel and enjoy.

For whatever reason, not all of our best artists were displaying at the Invitational. For example, it’s easy to forget that Gary Waldrom, from Waipawa, is still one of our very finest artists, though he’s rarely seen and his output is small. Waldrom is very demanding on himself; nothing leaves his studio until it is up to his standard. Unsatisfactory areas of paintings are ruthlessly expunged and reworked until resolved.

So what makes Waldrom’s work remarkable? Well, for a start, he paints like an angel with that easy grace we see from painters like Vermeer or Edouard Manet. Like a good dancer, the apparent ease of performance masks the years of hard work that underlie his skill. Waldrom is self-taught. James Mack in Art NZ wrote how Waldrom “in virtual isolation has taught himself to paint like a Renaissance master”. This is, of course, a bit unfashionable in contemporary art circles, where skill is often hidden under the guise of “faux primitivism”. For this writer, though, the beauty of his glazed and layered oil paint is a joy to see.

The best part of Waldrom’s art is its content. Most New Zealand art seems concerned with things, issues, places or abstractions.

We are not often confronted in paintings with individuals of such disturbingly vivid presence.

The casting of Waldrom’s pictures comes from an assortment of Flash Harrys, clowns, losers and innocent/knowing females who are, as David Eggleton says, “comic, yet also vaguely menacing”, their presence amplified by the close-up, wide angle perspective. Their incongruity is often heightened by setting them in the stifling heat of Central Hawke’s Bay in high summer.

Waldrom denies any intentional narrative or symbolism, but you can spend years reading your own interpretations into his work. There is no-one else like him in New Zealand art and his projected local solo show can’t come too soon.

Whitewalled and Supercharged(2009/10), by Gary Waldrom, oil on canvas

Jo Blogg : www.joblogg.co.nz // Fane Flaws: www.faneflaws.com // Gary Waldrom: www.milfordgalleries.co.nz

Self Portrait as Almost Serious Artist, by Fane Flaws (enamel, acrylic and ink on paper)

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Island work. It’s still a work in progress, says visitor services and retail coordinator Lizzie Russell, but the philosophy is exciting.

Most work is either “upcycled” – defined as ‘reinventing redundant materials in new and clever ways’ – or made sustainably. So you’ll find funky jewellery from Paula Taafe and Nigel Roberts or cool carry bags knitted by Judith Knauf from plastic supermarket bags.

At the other end of the cost and size spectrum is distinctive furniture: hard-edged, modernist pieces from Roger Kelly, Philippus Meier’s elegantly simple tables and stools, and the beautiful “Pacific Ray” bench by Kevin Webby. There’s also a great selection of unframed original prints including works by Fane Flaws, Jacob Scott, Terri Reddish, Anthony Davies, Jill Webster. Whatever your criteria - collectable, affordable, sustainable, distinctive - Auaha ticks the boxes.

It’s a short lunchtime stroll from the centre of town to the Hastings City Art Gallery, a perfect distance and timeframe for both corporeal and cultural digestion. Gallery director Maree Mills deftly melds a stylish mix of challenging and stimulating shows, representing the best of local and national work.

So, how to respond to the Rugby World Cup, arguably New Zealand’s biggest national cultural event of the year?

Game On is her answer, running to October 2, 2011

The ‘dream team’ of over 70 works has been hand picked by the ‘selectors’ – local designer and artist Jacob Scott, and John Walsh, another practicing artist with nine years’ curatorial experience at Te Papa.

It’s a bigger team than any rugby selector would want to manage, but these two couldn’t resist the opportunity. Their class pick covers most media and is a mix of leaders, coaches and emerging run

The Arts

VIEW AnI’s EnTIRE CAlEndAR @ www.baybuzz.co.nz

Date Event Type

July 9 – Oct 2 ~ Hastings City Art Gallery Game On ~ The ‘Dream Team’ ~ 70 national and local art works Art Exhibition

July 30, 10am – 4pm ~ Clive School Hall ~ [email protected] All-Comers Singing Workshop with Julian Raphael Singing Workshop

July 30, 8pm ~ Napier Municipal Theatre Saguaro Trio ~ Chamber Music NZ Chamber Music

Aug 9 – 13, 7.30pm & 2pm ~ Napier Municipal Theatre Jack & The Beanstalk ~ A Roger Hall Pantomime Pantomime

Aug 13-28 ~ Contact Christine Heeney ~ [email protected] Tree Cosies ~ Knit a Napier Palm Tree Cosy Public Art Event

Aug 19 ~ Assembly Room HBOH Hot Club Sandwich ~ wit & whimsy, great original music Jazz/Humour

Aug 19 – 20, 7.30pm ~ HB Opera House Soap ~ Bath time will never be the same! Acrobatics

Sept 8, 11.30 & 1.30 ~ Napier Municipal Theatre The Gruffalo ~ stage show of the wonderful kids’ book Children’s Show

Sept 8 – 11 ~ Pukeora Estate, Waipukurau CHB The Festival Festival

Sept 2, 6.00 – 9.00pm ~ Real People @ Mosaic Real People @ Mosaic Charity Wine Box Auction Fundraiser

Sept 10 – Sun Oct 23 ~ HB Showgrounds Fiesta of Lights ~ Rugby Salute Light Show

Sept 15 – Sun 18 ~ Various Takitimu Festival Performing Arts

Sept 1 – 30 ~ Taniwha Station, SH2, Waipukurau Taniwha Daffodils and Sculpture in the Daffodils ~ pick your own Plunket Fundraiser

Best of Ani’s Calendar ~ Go to www.baybuzz.co.nz for all 50 of Ani’s Picks for July, August, and September!

away stars. Here’s a taste of some of the big name players: Colin McCahon, Bruce Connew, Liz Maw, Shane Cotton, Judy Millar, Neil Dawson, Paul Dibble, Irene Ferguson, Ans Westra, Ralph Hotere, Gerda Leenards, Len Lye, Paul Hartigan, Seraphine Pick, John Pule and Pamela Wolfe, and many of Hawke’s Bay’s own professional artists. Winners all.

While 17 of the best international teams will thrash it out on the field, Game On will present something of the broader underlying cultural plays and games New Zealanders currently engage in.

This show is live, so push your way through the scrum, be a front row spectator and taste the sweat – this event won’t be televised!

Auaha > shape, create, formStill at the City Gallery, there’s a new

space. Auaha has taken over the (best forgotten) café –– transforming it into a retail space showcasing local and North

Dream Team at Hastings City Art Galleryby AnI TylEE

Auaha

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VIEW AnI’s EnTIRE CAlEndAR @ www.baybuzz.co.nz

0624HAW BAY BUZZ 80x58 AD.indd 1 23/06/11 11:54 AM

SPECIALISTS IN FINE ART SUPPLIES

107 KARAMU ROAD, HASTINGSPH: 06 870 7069 FAX: 876 3017

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Humour

BRENDON WEBB ~ There’s only one thing that can stop a landslide win in November...

The private secretary knocked on his leader’s door and stepped into his office. He stopped when he saw the leader face-down across his desk, his highly polished shoes resting on the window sill.

“Sir, are you all right?” he asked anxiously.

“Come in Nigel,” said the leader calmly. “I’m fine. I’m training to be New Zealand’s top plonker.”

“Top what?” asked the staffer.“You know --- one of those young people

who lie on the parapets of buildings and other strange places. Then they put their pictures on Spaceface or whatever it’s called.”

“Ah, I think you mean Facebook sir,” murmured the official.

“And,” he added after a moment, “you are planking I believe, not plonking … except perhaps in the polls.”

The leader turned his head and glared at his staffer.

“That’s the point,” he said. “I’m so far down in the polls that I’ve got to change my image. It’s the young vote we need. Everyone else has given up on us.

“If the PM’s spotty-faced son can get himself on the front page of the country’s biggest newspaper for just lying across the settee in his lounge, surely to God I can do something that will get me national TV coverage. Maybe even a clip on the interlock.”

“Ah, that’s internet sir,” murmured the staffer. He quietly closed the door as he heard footsteps coming down the corridor. He didn’t want anyone to see his leader in this position.

The staffer cleared his throat. “You did try the hair-dying thing to make yourself look younger but that didn’t really produce a spike in your popularity ratings sir,” he ventured.

“That was the wife’s idea,” snapped the

leader. “I wanted to do Botox but she said it would be too obvious if my eyebrows suddenly vanished into my scalp.”

“Women MPs can suddenly look like badgers that’ve fallen into a vat of bleach and nobody blinks an eye. But I sneak a dab of Just For Men on my silver-tinged scalp and the bloody Press Gallery goes bananas.”

“Anyway, relax Nigel,” said the leader. “This plonking business is all part of my cunning plan to wipe the smirk off the face of the PM right on the eve of the polls.

“In the meantime, can you jiggle my right leg, it’s gone numb.”

************

On the ninth floor of the Beehive a short distance away across parliament grounds, the PM hastily put down a glossy BMW accessories catalogue as a gentle knock came on his door.

His chief of staff poked his head in. “Seen the latest polls sir?” he asked eagerly.

“No, but frankly I’m beyond caring,” yawned the PM. “I’ve tried scaring them with threats of asset sales, excessive overseas borrowing, cut-crystal glasses and infrared seat warmers in the next fleet of Beamers and even a photo of that half-wit son of mine, Mad Max, parked halfway between the Lay-Z-Boy and the Italian settee … and they still love me,” he said with a goofy grin.

“There’s only one thing that can stop a landslide win in November.”

“Our huge borrowing programme coupled with the growing cost of Christchurch’s reconstruction sir?” asked the official.

“No, you idiot. Ritchie McCaw’s ankle injury. That could cost us dearly in a few months.”

“The public surely won’t blame us for that,” said the staffer.

“Of course not,” snapped the PM. “I’m talking about our rugby chances. Nobody cares about the election.”

“Ah, you mean in that world sporting event that’s costing taxpayers a small fortune and whose name we dare not mention?” asked the staffer.

“Exactly,” said the PM. “While we’re on that subject,” said the

official, “there’s something here I think you should read. It’s a report from OSH about potential hazards and necessary precautionary measures related to the aforementioned world sporting event.”

The PM’s fixed smile faded. He looked at the cover of the thick volume, the sharp edges of its pages carefully filed off to avoid paper cuts and its covers made from soft pliable cardboard.

“Who asked that lot for their opinion?” growled the PM.

“Nobody sir, they always look at the potential risks of … well anything we do in this country,” replied the staffer. “It’s not good reading. They are insisting on seatbelts for everyone seated at a stadium during the preliminary rounds of the cup and full rally harnesses for the final. They’ve done some research which shows that whiplash injuries, heart attacks, burst blood vessels and claims for loss of voice skyrocket during All Black test matches.”

The PM stared at the staffer in disbelief; his mind suddenly blank.

“There’s more sir,” the staffer said. “They want the Government to subsidise airbags for people at home who will be watching the games on TV. Their figures show that 68% of dislocated backs, 46% of wonky knee complaints and 89% of cuts caused by flying glass from shattered TV screens in New Zealand homes can be directly related to poor refereeing in Tri-Nation rugby matches in the past three years.”

The PM groaned. Bloody OSH. He wasn’t even allowed to carry a cup of coffee along the corridor to his office these days in case he scalded himself or tripped and emptied the contents over a parliamentary messenger.

“And finally sir, they want to appoint their own staff as referees.”

“What?” roared the PM.“They say they can’t fund the growing

list of sports injuries and want to scrap all lineouts, scrums, tackles, mauls, plus all forms of kicking ---- and no sprints because of the high risk of hamstring injuries.

“Naturally the haka is a complete no-no as well. Overstretched eyeballs, groin strains and tongue strains seem to be the big worries there.”

The PM glared at the report on his desk.“Shred it,” he said, “before anyone else sees it.”

“Too late I’m afraid sir,” said the staffer.“The report has already been leaked

to the Opposition and their leader’s come up with an alternative world event that can be held with minimal risk to participants and spectators alike. He plans to represent New Zealand in it himself.

“In fact, I understand he’s training for it in his office as we speak.”

Plonking













Documents

BayBuzz Magazine, Jul/Aug 2011