Creating jobs?

First published in Column Eight on the 6^th October, 1993

The third anniversary of my first Midweek column comes midway between today and next Wednesday, on October 10. I could say this gives October 10 something to be proud of each year, but with due modesty, I won’t.

October 10 doesn’t seem to be a day on which other things of great note have happened, though it was the day Liz Taylor and Richard Burton got married for the second time – somewhere in Botswana. Emmeline Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union on this day, and a British QC called Igor Judge rose to the High Court and became, confusingly, Mr Justice Judge.

Fascinating stuff, huh? At least the Pankhurst item has some topical relevancy.

Three years of finding column ideas have included hair-tearing when the Sunday evening clock is ticking on towards bedtime and I still haven’t written anything. On other occasions someone has spoken no more than a sentence and ideas have tumbled out too fast to keep up with.

The bit of the brain that produces ideas is a fairly enigmatic corner. It constantly cries, ‘Need more input!’ But having received aforesaid input, it’s just as likely to ditch the lot into some miscellaneous brain bin and inquire why you haven’t fed it today.

Thus, while feeding my brain from my 1988 collection of clippings, I came across a couple of items related to job creation ideas, both of which came from (good grief) Christchurch.

I hear on the news that Canterbury is now the fastest growing area for job creation in the country. Business Grow, the scheme which uses a business adviser to link businesses with a wide range of assistance to help them with expansion, began there. Four hundred have come out of this idea alone. (Has Dunedin begun Business Grow yet?)

Back to the 1988 clippings. On October 12 that year James Maddren, a Christchurch businessman, suggested to the South Island Local Bodies Association that they consider selective immigration to the South Island (like about a million people), to increase our population base and improve our economy. (A new job is supposed to be created for every five new people.)

The association’s executive committee was to investigate the proposal. I guess it did, but I haven’t seen droves of skilled immigrants arriving. Did the Government scotch the idea with its usual anti-immigration approach?

In another clipping a Christchurch law tutor named Owen Dennis ran an ideas seminar in Dunedin for the NZ Institute of Management. What he presented wasn’t new, but the first paragraph of the report reads, ‘Here’s a great idea: start an ideas competition to generate jobs and activity in Dunedin.’

I can’t remember anyone taking this up, although not being the most organised collector of detail, I may easily have missed it. Has anybody tried an ideas competition here in town?

We could do with an ongoing ideas presentation on a public basis, perhaps as a weekly column in one of the newspapers. A list of all sorts of ideas might well stimulate local brains dulled by too much occupation with incomes and outgoings.

The bright, witty, foolish and downright silly ideas would all need to have a home in such a list, because even though a particular idea may have no merit, it may spark off something really useful. They’d need to be ideas, though, not just criticism of the status quo.

Thomas Edison is said to have a goal of coming up with a minor invention every ten days and a major one every six months. He was one man. What might a similar city-wide goal in the job creation area achieve? And if Christchurch can do it, anyone can…I mean, can’t we?

 

Justice Igor Judge, courtesy of the BBC

As things do over 36 or so years, there have been some changes. I don’t know that the ideas idea has ever taken off, but immigration has, at least as far as the North Island is concerned. And Christchurch is a sprawling city nothing like its former self. So maybe the ideas idea worked well there.