Auckland in its re-amalgamation, is becoming an administrative model for local government throughout the country. But there are a number of systemic issues that need to be addressed if we are to make the sort of progress that was behind the creation of a Super City.

Property rates are a very blunt instrument for raising the capital to run local government. The electoral system favours the votes of residential property owners to the point where 7% of the properties in metropolitan Auckland (ie the urban business properties) are paying 41% of the rates.  This is basically unsustainable and is already costing jobs. The proposal to reduce this business differential over a period of ten years is far too slow.

Other methods of raising income for the development of Auckland need to be employed.

1. The judicious use of borrowing goes a long way to spreading the cost of major infrastructure developments over the life of the assets and is not a risky proposal when used in a city that is growing as fast as we are. (Where borrowing is inadvisable is in small centres with falling populations).
2. And user charges for roads can be a relatively painless and proven way of sheeting home the cost of infrastructure to those who benefit from it.

Waste Water charges: At this stage it is not clear what the full effect of waste water charges will be on business, particularly the SME sector. Again, the imposition of a business differential on business water users is neither appropriate nor sustainable. Be assured that your association will be ready to co-ordinate any response required should the effects of the new regime be an issue for members.

We kick off our Breakfast Meetings this year with the annual State of the City presentation from the Mayor. After a year of the new City, we can see areas of progress and look forward to development of a blueprint for the future.

One of the matters up for discussion is that of waste management and waste minimisation.  Council circulated a discussion document which was based to some extent on an assessment done for the Auckland Transition Agency, the organisation which was charged with clarifying transitional issues from seven old administrations to a single Auckland Council.  Clearly each Council had its own method of dealing with waste and there are residual contracts in place which mean that any integrated system would take until 2015 to be fully implemented.

GETBA’s response concentrates on the issues for commercial and industrial properties and submits that many of our members have requested kerbside recycling and rubbish collection for refuse from staffrooms etc in the same way as is offered to residential ratepayers. What is self-evident is that waste, like other issues facing the Council, is complex and far-reaching in its consequences: the question at the bottom of all aspects of Council activities is, “Does this provide the right service at the right cost?” We are all looking for savings as well as consistency and high standards from our new administration.

Over the summer I have been reading Smales’ Trails, a biography of the young Wesleyan missionary who came to New Zealand in 1840 and was deeply involved in the growth of the nation over the next 50 years.  He is remembered in East Tamaki by Smales Road and St John’s Church on the hill above the road. His efforts for justice for Maori and Pakeha alike remind us that greedy and unprincipled behaviour and serious failures of integrity in governments and financial institutions around the world are not new but nor are they to be condoned.

It’s been a mighty eventful year: bedding in the new Auckland Council, the Rugby World Cup and the Election at local level; the increasingly desperate international economic situation and major tectonic and climatic emergencies (including our own Christchurch earthquakes) reinforcing uncertainty and risk politically, in business and on a personal level.

So it is great to have the chance to take a deep breath, refresh ourselves in the sun with family and friends and celebrate Christmas and the New Year.

The Auckland Council has to work through a wide range of services and policies from the seven legacy Councils and create unified plans for each.  The way in which waste is collected is currently under review via a draft Auckland Waste Management and Minimisation Plan.

For the first time in East Tamaki, there is a proposal to collect recyclables from commercial ratepayers in the same way as already happens for residential ratepayers.  This is something many businesses have asked for so it’s worthwhile to make a submission (online at www.auckland.govt.nz/wasteplan) by the closing date of 31 January 2012. We will contact you in January for input into a GETBA submission but numbers count so please consider adding your own voice individually.

As the Pike River Royal Commission unfolds, the issues of governance and management of organisations is very much under scrutiny.  I’d like to take this opportunity to commend the integrity and the work of your committee and the GETBA management team.  Individually and collectively they are wonderful people to work with and are worthy representatives of the great industrial and commercial community we have in greater East Tamaki.

I wish you joy at Christmas and happiness and success in 2012!

Elspeth

The draft Auckland Plan for the next thirty years is out for discussion and submissions must be in to Council by Tuesday 25 October. (www.theaucklandplan.govt.nz)

With long term planning come some eye-watering figures but the plan does outline the various options for funding that spreads the costs over the generations that will benefit from infrastructural development. It is for sure that we need to use more sophisticated instruments than simple rating to address the massive deferred maintenance and devlopment bills of the past. (Come and listen to Stephen Selwood at our October breakfast for a great analysis of how we can do this).

The Economic Development section of the plan is possibly the weakest. It still appears to continue to pick trendy ‘winners’ to back and to propose geographical ‘centres’ for these to cluster in.

Here in East Tamaki we have a remarkable concentration of manufacturing expertise with three of the top twenty NZ technology companies with Head Offices here, including two of NZ’s most productive industries: F&P Appliances which generates $311,490 per staff member and F&P Healthcare which generates $251,661 per employee (all without a polluted river in sight and on a fraction of the land area of any dairy farm!).

Sixty percent of NZ’s top twenty high tech companies are in Auckland. These are the guts of the $11billion manufacturing exports contribute to NZ’s economy.

They all started with a single entrepreneur with a great idea and grew from there.

Council needs to prioritise encouraging high tech entrepreneurship and ensuring that central government promotes R&D in this area.

Trains and boats and planes….

Great song, yes, but also a major issue for Auckland and for New Zealand.

They form a major part of what is loosely called infrastructure and rarely come without huge dollar signs attached.

In the case of Auckland we have a great port and airport and a great city train terminus in Britomart but we are sadly lagging (and lacking) in the buses, ferries, trains and routes to make best use of them.

And it always comes down to politics and money, often in that order, whenever we try to develop our infrastructure. Time and again, central and local government have failed to act responsibly and with foresight in terms of planning, timing and scale of infrastructural developments.

Auckland’s population is projected to reach 2 million in 20 years. It is already the engine room of New Zealand’s industrial and export economy.

Yet we are hamstrung by inadequate transport infrastructure. Congestion costs each of us personally and in business. One of our members has quantified that cost at close to $3million a year.

The speaker at our Breakfast in October is Stephen Selwood, CEO of the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Developments. NZCID is a not for profit membership industry group comprising over 70 leading private and public sector organisations. Stephen is a member of the Urban Technical Advisory Group set up last year by the Government to look at the Resource Management Act.

He has a wealth of knowledge and experience of strategic and public policy issues across transport, energy, water, telecommunications and social infrastructure development – and he knows East Tamaki well!

So diary 26 October and come along and hear about real options for infrastructure developments in Auckland, and how to fund them.

The end of this month marks the initial consultation phase for the Auckland Spatial Plan discussion document released last month. Any submissions need to be in Council hands by close of business on 31st May.

The draft document outlines the proposed basis of Local Government planning for the next 30 years in the Auckland region.

Particular issues affecting the economy are:
• Where can industry take place and what provision is there for industry to grow as a component of the Auckland economy?
• Where are the freight corridors and what provision is being made for the movement of goods and people?
• Is the spatial plan robust enough and compelling enough to ensure it attracts maximum central government funding consistently over the period of the plan?

The draft plan has some disappointing aspects.

It identifies two “economic opportunity zones” which both appear to have been selected more as a sop to parochialism than as part of a grand plan for the economic growth of Auckland. They have the tired, insular look of annual plans from a couple of the former “cities” that now make up the single economic powerhouse of the country. If there was ever a time to grasp the opportunity to identify the whole industrial-commercial muscle of the region from Albany to Pukekohe and seek to utilise and develop it as a coherent, collaborative whole then this is it. A wee “economic opportunity zone” at either end of the city is going to achieve nothing and is going to let the real economic heart of this city freeze to death.

Council seems to have swallowed the premise that “tourism is the answer”. If tourism is the answer then it was a pretty dumb question. Hospitality and tourism are an important part of the mix in a major economy but the jobs in it are the lowest of low- paid and the whole tourism scene is vulnerable to international and national economic and other disasters: take volcanoes, earthquakes, pandemics and terrorism as four recent examples. Yes, the tourist dollar is an important part of the mix but let’s get the high value economic activities at the front of the funding queue.

There seems to be no real mention of the Ports of Auckland. It would appear that any mention of the waterfront (and remember there’s an agency created specifically to address this important part of the city) focuses on public access and tourism. Yes the waterfront is the jewel in Auckland’s crown. But the commercial port is a critical part of that jewel and a major contributor to Auckland’s wealth. Yes, we need a cruise ship facility but climate dictates a November to March window for cruising in these latitudes so we need to be sanguine about the level of investment in such a facility. We need to provide for commerce the whole year round. Critical to this is the provision and protection of freight corridors to industrial areas.

The Metropolitan Urban Limit is worthy of serious discussion and there is no simple answer: we do need to intensify our residential land use and the suggested models have real merit. But there is a need to identify clear industrial-commercial land requirements and provide for them intelligently too.
I do encourage you to read the Auckland Spatial Plan and make submissions on areas of concern to you and your business.

Personally I blame JFK. When the Soviets built the Berlin Wall (yes we’re talking 1963) the US President proclaimed “Ich bin ein Berliner”. Unfortunately, that translates as “I’m a jelly doughnut” but he was trying to express solidarity with a city under siege.

The last six months have brought real tragedy to the people of Canterbury, Christchurch and the West Coast but the solidarity and deep sympathy we feel for those who suffer is felt as fellow New Zealanders and fellow human beings.

For too long have we let the regional rivalries within New Zealand shape our perceptions of who we are as a nation. And the trite suggestion that “we are all West Coasters” or “all Cantabrians” is not only facile but patently untrue. It is in fact this thinking that has too often led us as a nation to “play the man and not the ball”: to dismiss someone because they are from Auckland, for example.

It also trivialises the real solidarity we feel as New Zealanders to help each other in adversity, to identify what needs doing and to get on with it.

It’s that kind of belief in practical nationhood that we need to embrace in this country’s response to the earthquake. Yes, of course, our every endeavour at present is rightly focused on the personal and human needs of the people of Christchurch and yes, of course, we will pour resources into rebuilding the city and its economy.

But, dreadful as this earthquake has been, we must not take our eye off the desperate need for our nation as a whole to get its economy in order.

Specifically, we need even more urgently to continue to support and develop our export industries and to ensure that the country as a whole is focused on raising the game of New Zealand Inc.

Those who have called for the development of Auckland’s lamentably neglected infrastructure to be halted because of the ‘quake could not be more misguided. It is this short-term and often blatantly parochial thinking that has hobbled the growth of New Zealand throughout the 1900’s and we cannot allow it to cripple us in the 2000’s.

The amalgamation of Auckland into a single city has been a one shot opportunity to capitalise on the economic grunt that is here. We are the economic powerhouse of New Zealand, particularly exemplified in the industrial south of which East Tamaki is a significant part. The local government disunity and parochialism that hobbled our growth for decades cannot, on a larger scale, be allowed to hamper our role in the salvation of the nation as a whole.

I know that our people and our businesses are wholeheartedly involved in efforts to assist the rebuilding of the economy of Christchurch and fully support that.

At the same time we need to ensure that we are doing our utmost to grow the economy of New Zealand by tasking every opportunity to continue to develop strong and innovative export industries right here in Auckland. To achieve this we need, as signalled by the Minister of Finance, to maintain traction on critical infrastructure development.

I guess many of us were pleased to see the back of 2010 but there are still big question marks over what 2011 will bring business.

Election years are always “interesting”. The political parties are seeking to woo the voters who are, by definition, residential electors. Yes, they are seeking a mandate for the next three years but there is little incentive to be fully candid either about the situation or the specifics of policies. And of course, we have our own preview with the Botany by-election in March and possible subsequent by-election for a seat on the Auckland Council. GETBA does not endorse political candidates or parties but is always keen to work constructively with elected members. We note that Pansy Wong was extremely supportive of the industrial and commercial community and advocated well for us at Government level.

On a wider level we live in a particularly volatile global environment: political, climatic and economic crises seem to be falling over one another to hog the headlines – and it’s only the first month of the year! By any objective assessment New Zealand is a small wealthy country in the South Pacific. Yet we do have serious issues to address in terms of the level of private debt which needs to be addressed by systemic change – Aye there’s the rub!

Economic commentators offer conflicting forecasts and equally conflicting solutions to our current woes as a nation. And successive governments offer little consistency in their policies. While we are at the mercy of global events we do have a right to expect that our leaders will make rational decisions on the internal policies that can at least make this a fair and just society with the incentives to pay our way and grow good enterprises.

I worry that this is not clearly top of mind in the Beehive. The Savings Working Group is a case in point: their terms of reference were so restrictive as to hobble a full examination of the options. And the government immediately ruled out one of the few proposals that the Group did feel able to make before the ink was dry on the paper. Don’t frighten the horses in election year!

This is not a criticism directed at one political party: it is a call for politicians in general to have the courage to look beyond the palatable policies to those that will make a step change to rebalance the internal economy.

We need to reduce debt and encourage growth. Only exports generate real income in a country. East Tamaki is strongly about making things and exporting them. We need clear policies that will provide the skilled workforce, the direction and impetus to lift our game in 2011 and beyond.

It seems to have been a long hard year, 2010.  The Prime Minister said at our August breakfast that he had predicted that “we’d all be better off in 2010 but wouldn’t feel as if we were.”  That probably sums up the situation for many of us in the industrial commercial field:  in the long run, we may have turned a corner but it’s hard to feel too upbeat just yet.

Exporters are under real pressure from the high dollar and the world-wide economic situation still gives real cause for long-term concern.  The mood of the nation is certainly far from buoyant.

Yet Christmas and a new year offer the opportunity to refresh the batteries and approach business with new vigour.

At GETBA, your team  has worked hard in 2010 to build infrastructure to support business in East Tamaki.

• our new website and its underlying CRM (customer relationship management database) are up and running.  This provides a robust framework to support, communicate with and promote business and businesses in East Tamaki;
• we have started working formally with NZ Police, the Asian Council on Reducing Crime, the Auckland Council and other partners on new ways to involve the growing number of Asian businesses in our crime prevention programmes;
• we are working with a range of partners to meet training and development needs of the small to medium businesses in the area;
• we have implemented a strong programme of networking events which have been well supported by our businesses.

The year ahead carries on a nationwide stage the promise and opportunities of the Rugby World Cup and the triennial central government elections.

The first GETBA event of 2011 will be our February Breakfast with the Mayor of Auckland as speaker so do make a diary note to attend: Thursday 17th February at 7.15am.

We have a  full programme of events and services to support business in East Tamaki and we welcome your participation, your feedback and your suggestions!

The Committee and Executive of GETBA join to wish all members a joyous Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year!