Some days, you get so caught up in life that you don’t get time for introspection. Other days, you discover or are reminded of something about yourself. Today’s situation was the latter.
   I joined the bus drivers today who were locked out of work here in Wellington. They decided to stage a peaceful protest, holding up signs criticizing Infratil management and stressing how they were expected to survive on NZ$12·55 an hour.
   A few representatives of the Socialist Workers’ Party were there, plus other unions were supporting them, which was encouraging. Now running for the Alliance, I wanted to see what their concerns were and asked a few of the people gathered there, and promised to pass their responses on to senior members of the party, which I did earlier tonight.
   It was the first time I had specifically wandered in to a situation with my political hat on, rather than those of my various companies or of Medinge. Until today, my candidacy for Parliament had been something I had mentioned in passing.
   Interestingly, we were round the corner from the local Labour MP’s office, but no one from the government or from the National Party came to visit the drivers. Maybe they considered their cause too minor. Or they had too many buddies at Infratil. Whatever the case, I wanted to hear more. As a businessman who is all too aware of the pressures management can face, it’s a humbling experience to see the other side and, in some ways, confirm that government policy and the blind following of monetarist theory has made things tough for New Zealanders.
   As many people know, my political views are more Confucian, which can under some interpretations be at odds with democratic socialism in some respects. However, if we looked at the economy as a single company’s, things become easier to understand.
   Let’s assume for a moment that monetarism is a good thing (a rare hypothesis on this blog). If we imagined there to be a New Zealand, Inc., then what has happened since 1984 is a Carlos Ghosn type of management. A target was set and people were expected to extend themselves to meet them, or get trampled on. Some might not make it. Some, as has happened at Renault under Ghosn, have committed suicide. Few would disagree, certainly by the late 1980s, that the pace of change under Labour was far too swift.
   The opinions of most people by the end of the 1980s was that the more prudent route would have been to set milestones in place and gradually ease the economy into a new mode. This would be the Honda route: taking things step by step, beginning with lawnmowers, then motorcycles, then automobiles, then trucks. It takes decades, but no one gets killed.
   However, New Zealand has never sincerely supported the creation of many international champions to take advantage of its monetarist ideals. There is the namesake of typographical glitches, Fonterra, the former New Zealand Dairy Board, currently caught up in the whole Sanlu milk powder scandal in Red China. But in other industries, foreigners have been taking the best companies and taking their profits offshore. That means there’s a lot less for tax and, therefore, for social services, and the government has to turn into a gambling institution (the Lotteries’ Commission) to fill up some of its coffers. (What else can explain the trebling of its size? It’s a very successful government department.)
   We need to wake people up and that is how I see my candidacy. That there is nothing to be gained by voting the opposition in just because one wants a ‘change’. National supported most of the unpopular Labour policies, not just in this most recent term, but fundamentally over the last quarter-century. A change is effected by looking at other parties, and I argue for at least some balance in the next Parliament.
   Hence my standing for Parliament.
   What I discovered today was not only a confirmation of some of my views but how they really affected companies and their workers, beyond mere theories or first-hand reports from friends in individual industries. Here was a group of people all in one industry, where management pressures have bitten them hard. As the child of blue-collar workers—a technician and a nurse—I have always had an affinity for wage-earners. The guys at the printing plant, Format, which produces Lucire in New Zealand, know me regardless of whether they are management or print-room staff. They all know what it is like to struggle and work to keep others happy; the guys in pre-press and in printing, like me, remember what it was like running around to different suppliers in the old days to get typesetting, bromides, film-making and plate-making done.
   I was blessed to have parents who sacrificed like crazy, just as hard as the drivers on the picket-line, to send me to a decent school and so I could go around wearing a suit and understanding all the prevailing management theories after a few uni degrees. Maybe I have found myself in this political position because I can see both sides—and that it’s going to take a real change in favour of New Zealand ownership and the building of national champions to help the situation I saw today. What will not work is more of the same, and by that I mean the technocratic viewpoints of Labour–National.
   I discovered, too, that I was never purely one of the drivers nor could I ever be one of the management. There was an old episode of Pointman, the mid-1990s TV series, where Jack Scalia’s Wall Street whizz-kid character returned home to help his working-class uncle and his colleagues fight a corporate raider. There, too, he found he no longer belonged: the townsfolk could not see eye to eye with him because of his success and wealth, yet he found the idea of corporate raiding repulsive and wanted to defend the working men and women of the town.
   What I am is someone who can be an advocate for the working people of New Zealand, someone able to point out some of the faults in management or in government policy, and see if something can be done to nudge this country in the right direction. Confucianism took centuries to be fully realized but it has to start somewhere, and getting government to understand that it owes these people a duty is a useful first step. A useful second step is becoming the government in order to fulfil that duty. Posted by Jack Yan, 11:15  permalink

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