Watch the presentation on YouTube. Sadly embedding of the video has been disabled for that video.

If we care for our environment and create a just, equitable and creative society, a “place where talent
wants to live”, then we can attract the best in the world, and provide opportunity for our most talented Kiwis to see their future here. Imagine what we could achieve if we built a strategy around, and made central to our thinking, the existing success of our emerging knowledge sector, gearing our education system accordingly.

I am not 100% about the detail of the policy suggestions he makes very briefly in one slide near the end but it is clear that there are hard environmental limits to how much further we can go with what we have been doing so far. In the future we need to think differently, not double-down on what worked in the past.

M&S says environmental and social issues remain important to UK consumers. A survey commissioned by M&S found that 72% of people surveyed are worried about environmental issues, with 73% saying that the recession had not changed their level of concern.

The commissioned research is part of a huge initiative that M&S announced back in 2007 to become the world’s most sustainable retailer by 2015. More simply referred to as ‘Plan A’. As, to quote M&S, there is no Plan B.

 M&S’s ‘Plan A’ eco-commitments include:

• converting 2.7 billion food, clothing and home items to meet the plan’s sustainability standards
• encouraging 10,000 food supplying farmers to adopt a sustainable foods programme

UK customers, along with the rest of the world, will be looking more and more for sustainability credentials in the products they choose to buy. Unless NZ businesses start respecting this they will not be able to access high value overseas markets in the future. The previous Government provided a level of funding and other support through the Ministry for the Environment, local authorities and organisations promoting and supporting sustainable business. The current Government would do well to reinstate and indeed increase that funding to ensure we are not left on the sidelines when it comes to international exports. A point clearly expressed in the Green Party’s sustainable business policy.

‘Sustainability’ may have been declared a word that government policy makers may not utter, but in the meantime the rest of the world, not least of all the business sector, is getting on with the real challenge of making their production and consumption patterns more sustainable.

Something has to change and while the Government seems unwilling to take the lead on this massive issue, the best and brightest of our businesses, farmers, producers, will take their future into their own hands and start practicing business the way it should be.

You can add that debt to the rest of the money you own from similar size debts you clocked up last year and the year before. In fact the last time we sold more than we earned for the year was back in 2002 (incidentally also the last year we decreased the amount we imported). Since then we have increased our our exports by nearly $8 billion. Sadly though, on the other side of the ledger, we have increased our imports by nearly $13 billion all during a period when our economy was meant to be booming.

Now there are two sides to this equation.  The first, which relates to the $3.6 billion of stuff we sent overseas last month, you will undoubtedly hear for a range of ‘mainstream’ economists and politicians.  It says that we are not exporting enough stuff and that we need to act to ‘transform’ our economy so it is more competitive and connected with global markets.

The second, and rarely mentioned, part of the equation though is the $3.8 billion of stuff we imported last month. Don’t expect to hear any mainstream economists or politicians asking how much of that stuff could we have made here, giving jobs to New Zealand workers and saving the carbon emissions from importing it?  Or how much of the time could we have reused, repaired or recycled some of that stuff already in existence rather than buying a new thing?

Most of the gap between imports and exports is now related to the rising price of oil and petroleum products.  While oil has fallen from its US$147 a barrel high last month to below US$130 at present that is still astronomically high compared to US$60 or US$70 a barrel price it was selling for this time last year. If oil can fall nearly US$20 a barrel and still be skyrocketingly high that should be the signal we need to do something about our economy’s reliance on imported goods, especially oil.

That’s a total trade deficit of $3.6 billion with China alone (our trade deficit with the rest of the world tells a similar story) – up over $0.6 billion from only the year before.

Business and Economic Research Limited’s (BERL) report to the Industry Capability Network in June 2006 shows that the benefits to the New Zealand economy for every $1m of imports that we replace with Kiwi made goods are:

• The creation of 11.16 jobs
• Government income tax revenue increases by $117,214
• In total an additional $1 million of value added manufacturing results in $2.16 million of initial value plus downstream value added.

In other words, by producing in New Zealand those goods we currently import from China, we could create 62,000 jobs, have $655 million more in taxes to spend on things like health and education and improve our economy as a whole by over $11 billion.

Yet a free trade agreement with China will mean we import more Chinese stuff, not less. So you can start doing that calculation in reverse.

So it did help grow the economy according to the government’s very narrow definition – we are now selling an extra $200-300 million more goods overseas. But in return we are importing more than $1.5 billion more than we used to. That debt with a country only the size of a Lake Taupo made up over a quarter of our total trade deficit for 2007.

Our third biggest export for the month of December (after dairy and meat) was petroleum and related products. It rose by just under $900 million, or 157%, for the year from 2006 to 2007.

Ironically our largest import for 2007 was … petroleum and related products – nearly $6 billion dollars worth (and $5 billion worth of vehicles parts and accessories). We also imported over $400 million worth of fertilizers, and nearly $300 million worth of food residues, waste and fodder.