OMG, it's NZ!

Here at the last bus stop on the planet, we notice when other people notice us. We thrill to it. Little New Zealand, up there on the stage. How our hearts swell. It doesn’t pay to dwell on how things might have been if Brazil and the US had made rugby their national pastime.

We scan the page, spot a ‘Z’ and our eyes go straight to that line looking for mention of our homeland. Mine do. They even register ‘$NZ’ as something special.

So for a brief, shining moment I sensed our plucky country might be caught up in something very big when I saw the headline on my screen, “Groupon seeks NZ$918m from IPO”.

You bet I clicked the link. Groupon is floating right here in our little corner of the world? Surely not. It wasn’t, of course. I was just witnessing the conventional conversion of the dollar amount in a story from the US, where these things actually happen all the time; especially stories like the Groupon one where a good internet idea can transform itself into a success in just months. You can barely hear them thinking down at the NZX for the sound
of crickets.

Well, perhaps not. But it cannot be denied that at a time of great economic change, New Zealand is less than deluged by an IPO tide. We may not be good at bringing them forth but we assuredly know how to lament the fact. I don’t propose to prolong the dirge here. I want instead to enthuse.

Small can be good. Small can grow large. Apple and Microsoft were both once small enough to fit in a two car garage. Small is a very good place to start.

When the prime minister first proposed his national cycleway idea it came dressed in the clothes of the grand idea. Worse, at a two day summit looking for great ideas to put Kiwis in their tens of thousands into jobs, it was virtually the only model on the catwalk. Just John, his cycleway and the crickets.

If you take a perfectly good idea and offer it as a solution to a much bigger problem, you can expect a headache. How they mocked him. “How many jobs prime minister?” “Are you sure?”

Now, as the fairy dust settles and the real world money is handed out, we’re beginning to see what this cycleway will actually look like and I like what I see.

I don’t see a big jobs engine, yet. But I do see something really exciting taking shape.
The opening of the first stage of a trail that will run from the Bay of Islands along the old railway track to Okaihau and out to the Hokianga was full of good news. Unemployed youth have helped build it. Locals have been learning from experienced Central Otago Rail Trail operators about the opportunities to offer food, beds and entertainment to the cyclists who will fill their trail. The locals are buzzing, ready to invest money and time and ideas to build up the trail.

You can be sure this will be emulated across the country and in this 21^st century, which is without question the century of the bike, you can be sure those trails will be full.

This little sawn-off cycleway could yet turn into something huge, but it’s plainly not beginning that way. It’s being encouraged to grow organically. Small businesses are seeing how their contribution will help create something big and it’s exciting.

If you listen to Sir Paul Callaghan, whose clear-eyed assessment of our unhappy economy has been filling houses around the country this year, you’ll likely be persuaded by his argument that the road to prosperity lies along a track of high value niche businesses.

Rakon and F&P Healthcare demonstrate his argument. There is nothing to stop you achieving world market dominance if the field you choose is very niche. Rakon doesn’t make phones; it lets Apple and the others duke that out. It just makes components that most of those phone makers willingly buy from Rakon because the company has made sure their components are excellent, in a market with few competitors.
We need hundreds of companies like those to transform our economy. They need not emerge from some cluster or grand master plan. In fact it’s far more likely they never would.

Companies like Rakon have been able to develop here and become impressive in an ‘OMG, it’s NZ!’ way, here at the last bus stop on the planet. Consider how busy Mark Weldon and his staff might be if we could have a few more hundred companies like them.

David Slack is the internet adventurer behind Speeches.com, and a passionate cyclist