Public Address - Island Life (Home)

Everyone loves a quiz. | Feb 24, 2010 07:57

You have three minutes.

1. Complete the sentence: "If Radio NZ sounded like Kiwiblog…"

2. You are at Showgirls and you have a ministerial credit card in your pocket. Should you pay by the glass or get a whole bottle?

3. You have 30 dollars' worth of mining shares and you are the minister of foreign affairs in a cabinet that wants to dig up the National Parks for unobtanium. What will your statue look like?

4. What does our Prime Minister mean when he says: ''I'm going to Maui, where are you going?''

5. You are a political party. You organise protests the length and breadth of the country deploring the electoral finance bill as a threat to democracy. You win the election and then proceed to hand control of Auckland city to a collection of unelected and unaccountable bodies. You follow that with a law that strikes down proposed legislation that fails to satisfy "the principles of good law making". Is there anyone with whom you can share a drink and piss yourself laughing, without those lefty tools at Radio NZ getting wind of it?

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Anyone can do design. | Feb 19, 2010 15:29

Continuing today's open mic theme, I'd like to also introduce a designer friend of mine, Fraser Gardyne. His chosen topic: the logo competition they've just cooked up for the Auckland Super City. Personally I'm uneasy about the diversionary bread and circus dimension to the thing, but his objection is professional.

........

If the council is expecting graphic design to be the product of a public competition from folk from all walks of life, then why not apply the same concept to other public works? Let's have the public design carparks and road networks etc? Could it be because those works need experienced, professional, trained experts? Just like graphic design actually.

It is a widely held public perception, 'anyone can do design'. To create a logo that is successful and workable takes talent, training and experience. It also takes process, and this isn't it. As recently evidenced by the Queens Wharf fiasco.

Sadly this is another instance where politics gets in the way of the best result for the long term working objectives of the new Auckland Council. The ATA have shown a total lack of understanding and respect for our visual communications industry. The considered and professional use of our highly skilled graphic designers has been recognised by enlightened business and public bodies as a prime success motivator for their activities.

An effective logo comes about through a brief. Effectively there is none in this case. "We're looking for a logo that's compelling, elegant and compact", any logo brief could say that. The design process normally goes from a briefing stage, through research and development of initial ideas, presentation to and feedback from the client, through to design development and approval of the logo. This agreed logo is then developed and applied and guidelines for it's consistent ongoing use are developed.

Good graphic design comes about through a logical, considered process and the countries best practitioners are well qualified and equal to the best in their profession globally. Practically, logos need to be able to work across a wide range of media, and need clear guidelines. Yet, a panel of celebs, many of whom I know and respect in their various fields of practice, are being asked to judge the results of a wide open public competition into which no self respecting designer would enter. Why would you give away your most valuable asset, your creativity and experience, through a faulted process with little chance of success and no control or ownership of your ideas?

Fraser Gardyne.

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So, what do you think of New Zealand so far? | Feb 19, 2010 11:12

I don't care to be railroaded. The Auckland landscape is littered with the debris of last-minute plans. Nonetheless, Graeme Osborne, who is the chief executive of Tourism Auckland, has given me pause for thought with some rather dismal pictures. Let us begin with the slide show, and his commentary.

This, Graeme says, is how we handle their baggage.

And this is how we process them.

So, what do you think of New Zealand so far?

He has an argument to make. I remain leery of spoiling a grand opportunity through haste, but I'm happy to give him a platform. I now turn the microphone over to Graeme Osborne. Please feel free to debate in the usual manner.

……………...


At least four consultants' reports in the last 12 months. A public competition to procure a suitable design. In-depth analysis for the last 12 years. And still we fumble for the right decision on what to do with Queens Wharf.

Let's get on with it. We need a decent cruise ship facility and public open space on Queens Wharf. That's why the Auckland Regional Council and the Government agreed to buy it from Ports of Auckland.

The work has been done. Endless reports support the view that the $97 million option – including wharf repairs and a $49.2 million cruise ship terminal in time for Rugby World Cup 2011 – as the best for Queens Wharf. Right now we have a need to deliver bold decisions and generate momentum, and time is against us.

It's important to cater for the influx of visitors that the Rugby World Cup will bring. At least 60,000 international visitors are expected here for the event, with Auckland likely to host up to 40,000 of these at any one time. Clearly we don't have the hotel rooms available for this kind of influx, meaning that motor homes and cruise ships will be required to boost accommodation supply.

We expect that at least two cruise ships will be needed to accommodate fans during the Semi-Finals and Finals in Auckland. How compelling a proposition will it be to have them tied up alongside a couple of old sheds that are better suited as a holding pen for used cars?

The eyes of the world will be on Auckland like never before and we have the opportunity to create a stylish, welcoming, best possible shop window.

However, Rugby World Cup 2011 is only part of the picture. The true legacy benefit of investment in Queens Wharf will be delivered by the cruise ship sector.

More international visitors to New Zealand arrive on cruise ships than fly directly into Queenstown. In particular, the cruise market is one of the key drivers of United States visitors, our fourth largest source of international visitors. It is a discerning and high-spending market.

Right now we offer a substandard service to cruise ship passengers, which are growing in number. The treatment we give them, especially those leaving the ship in Auckland, is embarrassing.

We are competing with Sydney as a hub port where cruise ships offload and pick up new passengers. The inflow and outflow of cruise passengers provides Auckland with a great opportunity to be a host city and has downstream impact on cruise ship visitors scheduled throughout New Zealand.

We need to make a bigger priority of providing cruise ships and their passengers with a profound sense of arrival and a facility that gives them an integrated transit process to include baggage handling, check-in and forward transport.
Next season we are expecting around 133,000 passengers on 70 voyages. What will they find when they get here?

Tourism is big business for New Zealand. It comprises 10 percent of the New Zealand economy, 10 percent of employment nationally and is our top earner of foreign exchange. Tourism earns $1.6 billion of GST per annum. Yet we only capture 0.5 percent of global visitor arrivals.

Auckland is a key driver of New Zealand's visitor economy. Of all New Zealand visitor nights 34 percent are in Auckland, 57 percent of all overseas students choose to study here and 57 percent of film sector GDP is in Auckland.

Tourism is a highly competitive business internationally and we need to be on top of our game with our visitor infrastructure, delivering a top class visitor experience, and in communicating our attractions to the world.

If we invest in the appropriate infrastructure in Auckland, the rest of New Zealand benefits. For 70 percent of international arrivals to New Zealand, their first impressions of New Zealand are based in Auckland. Of this number, 80 percent carry on to visit other parts of New Zealand.

A decision to proceed with the $97m Option 4 for Queens Wharf is in Auckland and the nation's best interest. It therefore seems appropriate and reasonable that Government should come to Auckland ready to help fund this investment in partnership with Auckland's ratepayers. These opportunities do not come along often. Let's seize the moment and move forward.

Graeme Osborne

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What I saw at the step change. | Feb 09, 2010 16:36

The Prime Minister was giving me the hard sell about his plans for transforming the New Zealand economy - a "Step Change" no less - when my phone rang. It was a client, on the line from Texas. I exported him a fresh copy of his speech and turned the sound back up. I may have missed a spellbinding moment, but I suspect not.

Baby Steps

In between breathless stories about the resuscitation of the breathless property market, most notably in the Sunday Property Times and the Herald on Veitch-Day, the mantra has been rising: New Zealand's economy will remain porked while everyone keeps pigging out on loans and using them to buy each other's houses.

For a narrow-based economy, we export sweet fuck all to pay for the wide variety of goods and services we import. This is a mantra I have been hearing (and endorsing) since I was a kid. It is dispiriting to consider how little has changed in half a lifetime.

A starting point would be to pull all the lazy greedy little piglets off the teat and let the property market slump. Get the true level, adjust, and start over on getting the composition of our economy right: a variety of exporters, capitalising on the growing Asian markets. Yes; of course it's not easy. But the alternative is harder yet, once the borrowed money runs out.

So anyway.

Here comes the man with the step change ladder. Will the government bring the boom down on property investment? Will they take advantage of the bloody big gun the Tax Working Group has conveniently wheeled all the way up to the emplacement for them? It has given them a complete rationalisation and justification for them to proffer as they step forward to regretfully but nobly fire the damn thing.

All around the village, the citizens are braced for it. We know this because the media has been full of it and the message is emphatic: the market is already taking a hit; there might be a land tax! A capital gains tax! A closing of the very big hole through which every Leonard-Cohen-going, black-polo-neck-wearing, four-rental-property-owning silver-haired baby boomer has been dragging the paperwork for their LAQC and their tax deductions.

You know for sure that a policy has real heft when the market is moving even before you announce it.

So what does that nice Mr Key do with this mighty once-in-a generation opportunity for a step change? He consults the polling.

He gets up there, stands alongside the mighty gun, pulls out a water pistol, squeezes it and says: "I make no apologies for making a few of you a bit wet."

Heaven forbid anyone should substantially change the 'investment' habits of a lifetime. That would be a step too far.

Steppes

But a substantial policy statement is a cloak of many colours. Let's try Green. And Gold. Those Aussies are making out like bandits, just because they've got big drills. Why can't we dig up ours? Step change number two: We're going to drill in public lands. And each time we do, we're going to put a shiny dollar in Russel Norman's tip jar. Now I get it. Lay waste to the National Parks. It's a Steppe change!

Seriously?

This is like digging down the back of the couch for spare change. Next they'll put the couch on Trade Me.

That's not my real ladder. It's my step-ladder.

Needless to say, the ordinary New Zealanders have not been forgotten. They'll get to pay more GST. If that had been bracketed with Gareth Morgan's Big Kahuna, well, I might have gone for it. But as it stands, all it's likely to do is claw back some of the tax that everyone who should have been on the top rate was not paying because no-one had the nerve (or time and money, more likely) to properly work over some tens of thousands of family trusts of dubious merit. In its wake, expect a regressive tax burden on the low-paid.

It's possibly a step, it's possibly a change, but if this were the movies, I'd be rubbing my 3D glasses and trying to work out if I had the angle wrong. There wasn't even a hot woman with blue skin and a tail, and surely to God the National Party has some of them.

I have a mantra too, and I see no reason to change it on the strength of today's vision thing: I reckon these guys will be remembered in the end not for what they did, but for what they failed to do.

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