Vicki Buck
Community LeaderA Voyage of Innovation and Discovery
I would like to start with a quote. It’s from a New Zealand icon and it says: "The dawn of a new era lights the way for New Zealand’s perpetual voyage of innovation and discovery." That comes from the Reserve Bank on their special collector’s edition ten dollar note.
I thought that if the Reserve Bank could start advocating a perpetual voyage of innovation and discovery when it was regarded as the bastion of stability then there was absolute hope for all of us. It quite definitely showed me that innovation and stability are not on opposite sides but that they are part of the same place that we need to be at. I actually brought a ten dollar note to give to somebody, whoever catches the ‘flying kiwi’.
The only places where you want to have stability are hillside subdivisions or mountains if you’re skiing, on bridges or on Transit New Zealand’s roads through the West Coast. If we were in a world that was stable and unchanging then it would be great to just look at stability, but the one thing as we’ve heard this morning that you can guarantee on is change and constant change.
If you consider the change all around us, particularly in the last five weeks, then even maintaining stability requires genuine and major innovation along the way. I want you to think basically about why you joined the Public Service - as a teacher, as a scientist, as a doctor, in job placement and creation, in agriculture, in conservation, as a soldier or a policeman, or whatever.
Why we joined the Public Service
Why did you join the Public Service? Why do we join the Public Service in New Zealand? Often it’s because we are really passionate about it. It probably wasn’t the money or the working conditions that attracted you. You knew what it was that you wanted to do and you desperately wanted to make a difference in that area. You were probably passionate about some changes that you wanted to achieve and some changes that you thought would make this place a better place for you and for others.
So you joined the Public Service determined to change the world or a small part of it for the better. You joined the Public Service in New Zealand where the issues you were dealing with were often way more complex, way harder than the private sector.
You joined the Public Service with a tradition of excellence and service, where there was a total lack of corruption, where the levels of accountability are far higher than the levels of accountability in the private sector. You joined the Public Service where the need for innovation was greater because mostly the issues you’re tackling haven’t actually been resolved anywhere in the world.
Stability often meant just leaving or maintaining injustices - issues like child abuse,or leaving in place an education system that actually fails the very kids it is supposed to serve, or the huge waste of human talent that goes with unemploymentWe seem to have solved this by redefining what full employment might mean. The Minister of Labour used to know the 18 names on the list in 1969. Now we have structural unemployment that means something like less than six percent unemployment.
There are the major environmental issues that we’ve heard a lot about this morning, the whole issues of the environment and its degradation. You and the Public Service got to deal with really big issues, hands on. You got to the place where innovation was going to be most needed and where the rewards for innovation may well be the greatest. You know that if you actually crack those issues or even part of those issues that you’re here to deal with then the country and probably the world community will be prepared to reward you, not just with money but with instant immortality or something similar.
When you got to the Public service
When you joined the Public Service it may well have been that your experience went something like this. You came into the Public Service, there was a sign above the door that welcomed you to it that said: "Some of New Zealand’s greatest innovators pass through this door every day." Warehouse style. "This department in line with the Reserve Bank’s edict helps light the way for New Zealand’s perpetual voyage of innovation and discovery."
You may well have found that the work environment was such that you were encouraged constantly to innovate. You had goals that you had to achieve but within those goals you were allowed and encouraged to innovate.
Risk-taking was encouraged in many areas and it was actually OK to make mistakes. You had permission to make mistakes, permission from yourself and from all those around you. There was a white board above the coffee machine that outlined areas that needed creative thinking.
You were sent on a creative thinking course within the first year in the Public Service. The first paper you wrote for Cabinet started with an outline of the opportunities and the possibilities, rather than an outline of the problem.
Each week in your department the best innovation was rewarded. Each week the best mistake was taken as a learning occasion. There was recognition everywhere in the department that humour and play were amongst the highest forms of human innovation and creativity.
There was an innovation bottom line in the department’s annual report to Parliament, which actually commented on the most interesting innovations, some of which had worked and some of which hadn’t. Innovations from around the world were regularly considered and mined for ones that might be appropriate here.
Your chief executive’s bonus was dependent on departmental innovations, so he or she was very supportive of them happening.
Innovation was written into your employment contract. Your first bonus was an innovation bonus. You were encouraged and rewarded to innovate so you in turn encouraged others in your community, in the community you served, to innovate and you welcomed their suggestions of creative new ways of doing things. If that for you is a true story of what happened when you joined the Public Service I have to say that’s fantastic.
Occasionally, just occasionally….. it’s not the story of what happens when people join the Public Service. It wasn’t quite my experience. I had a lovely introduction to the department of what was then Social Welfare. I got the job because I’d been out taxi driving since five o’clock in the morning and fell asleep during the interview so I wasn’t able to be as cheeky as I usually am in such things. I got the job, which was a worry. But the introduction was two weeks of reading a manual, which was really a fun way of learning social work and working with families and also pretty scary when you think about the implications. What I very soon discovered was that nobody checked that what was behind the cover of the manual was actually the manual. It did give you an opportunity to catch up on a lot of good reading in the department’s time. Completely crazy.
There’s another woman in this room who worked with me in the Department of Labour and we were asked to leave the building that we were working in because we laughed too much and too loudly while we were working. It was very very disruptive to the factory inspectors who shared the floor of the building with us because laughing, of course, is never part of the job, according to those guys. It actually worked out really well. We went to a lovely office and nobody hassled us at all.
This is a long time ago and I know that the Public Service has changed dramatically since then. But what happens if innovation is not a feature, not a defining feature of the Public Service? What happens then? It means that innovation and creative thinking can only be applied in the private sector, generally to the business of making money. It means that we get a sort of business roundtable as a sort of cabinet of innovators for New Zealand. I find that a really scary prospect. It means that many of the country’s best brains will not be encouraged to think creatively and the country will be much poorer for that.
How do we feel as New Zealanders about our Public Service when they don’t take seriously our innovative ideas and our suggestions either from the community or from us as individual citizens? It means that the really big important issues and the really really big possibilities just will not get addressed. It is not enough to have money or to generate wealth if our environment isn’t there, if it is completely degraded, or if we beat our kids, or if we get beaten up in the street or we’re not safe in our houses.
The really big issues in this country and in most countries tend to be the preserve of the public sector. They are the really important ones that will make being a New Zealander a really good thing to be. If the question is what can be done about it I think there is really just one thing.
The answer was in this case given to us - not by a company I like to emulate - but given to us by Nike. The answer is just to do it. If you wait for others, often you will wait a really really long time and you have to be incredibly patient to do that. I don’t think patience is really necessarily the virtue that it is cracked up to be.
Just do it
Don’t wait for others to innovate, don’t wait for the person ahead of you, don’t even wait for the politicians to begin the innovation. The nature of politics is that quite often politicians have had to wait a really long time to get into the position of power. Once you’re in that position of power as a politician quite often the last thing you want to do is to give it away to anybody else. So it is really important that you don’t wait for permission to innovate, just do it. The leadership that you need is actually in here. The leadership is you.
I just want to deal very briefly with a couple of really practical examples of opportunities that were perhaps wasted. Recently as a country we decided through the government to invest a billion dollars in a private company called Air New Zealand, to keep it running. It meant that for every New Zealander we invested approximately $232 in a company that was previously privatised. If you think about the way that this was done, it seems to me that there were some tremendous missed opportunities.
What would have been nice is if each of those $232 worth of shares had been registered in each one of our names. Sure, the government needed to keep the voting rights and sure, maybe we weren’t allowed to sell them for ten years. But imagine what that would have had by way of an impact on a New Zealand that was feeling pretty dismal about itself at that stage, if each of us suddenly had $232 in Air New Zealand. Every man, woman and child in this country is then a shareholder of their national airline. Imagine what it does to national pride and to the feeling of those people who don’t have savings. It is a very equal, a very fair way of treating that sum of money. What we got in that response was not even the capacity to think about whether there was a better way of doing it.
Think about some of the things that we have to deal with. You’ll be familiar with GST returns and employer deductions and FBT returns. Lovely little joys of being an employer. Charming little things that arrive with monotonous regularity in separate envelopes from the Inland Revenue Department. I find them really boring. I got an honorary PhD in Commerce, mainly because Lincoln didn’t give them in anything else. I can’t do these forms. They just drive me crazy. There is nothing in there. I would like cartoons, I’d like pictures, I’d like anything to relieve the monotony of actually filling in these forms. I don’t know why we can’t have one that we fill in, or we just give you 30 percent or however much you want at the beginning of the year and you sort out the forms and give us back what we want.
There was an instance where young teenagers were hanging around in McDonald’s car park. They were regarded as a security problem. They were seen as threatening and perceived as dangerous. The usual solution that they looked at first was to put security guards into the McDonald’s car park and to pay them to be there all the time. That’s a very expensive solution. As soon as they took the security guards away, of course, the teenagers came back. McDonald’s was the cool place to be.
So what they did next was to think about what would make that car park a really uncool place for teenagers to be hanging out. What they did was to pipe some music into the car park that was really suitable for the 50-year-old to 60-year-old age group and that was really uncool to be near. The teenagers disappeared overnight.
In Christchurch it was really difficult to get roads closed to look at whether you could pedestrianise that area, whether you could take cars out of it, whether the adjoining roads would cope with the load. You couldn’t just say, "Well, we’re experimenting, we’ll just close the roads and sorry guys but you have to go down a different street for the next couple of weeks just to see if it works."
The way you could do it was to put on a festival event in that road, call it a festival. Really what you were doing was checking whether that road could sustain pedestrianisation, whether the other roads could do it. It is a very good way of checking whether your traffic management system works.
An innovation index
I’m intrigued in New Zealand that we are all very familiar with levels of GDP and CPI and the SE40 and the level of the Kiwi dollar. We’ve all become very financially literate. We don’t have anything that is an innovation index. I would love us to have an innovation index and I would really love Treasury to run it because I think they would run it superbly. We would know exactly how we were doing in the innovation stakes.
In the weekend and on Wednesday there was an ad in the Christchurch Press and no doubt all the dailies for the Chief Executive, the Secretary for Internal Affairs. There are a lot of things that this person has to have: strategic leadership, managerial expertise, a million other things. But there was no mention of any capacity to innovate. It is quite an innocuous department, it doesn’t usually get into much trouble, and yet, if you think about it there is a lot of the stuff and symbols of nationhood that belong in that sort of a mishmash of a department called Internal Affairs.
Think about some of the opportunities that we’ve lost just in recent weeks. On September 11th - or 12th here - we needed an opportunity as a nation to mourn together. We didn’t take that opportunity. We lost that opportunity. There wasn’t a national moment or a national ten minutes or however long it takes. But we wanted to do something. We were all feeling somewhat lost and as New Zealanders there was a tremendous opportunity, just a very simple thing to do, something like that.
I think that we all wanted to make some gesture as New Zealanders towards the New Yorkers who were just in shock as well and who affected us all. As a country we wanted to make some sort of united gesture, whether it was naming a highway or a park or whatever, or gifting some public thing to the fire fighters of New York. It doesn’t really matter. But we didn’t take that opportunity for our own nation to do something really significant. We didn’t take some opportunity publicly and as a nation to ensure that Moslems here were not going to be treated badly, to make some symbolic embrace of other religions here. We haven’t adopted yet even the Australian idea of an Australian of the Year or the idea of a New Zealander of the Year. We haven’t done those sorts of things.
One of the things that lags somewhat behind and could do with a little dose of innovation is the New Zealand flag. It might well do to express more about what this country is now than to have a flag that looks very similar, confusingly similar, to Australia’s and with the Union Jack stuck in the corner.
There is another opportunity in Internal Affairs. Take citizenship ceremonies. They have very sensibly been shifted as a cost from central government over to local government. They now affect thousands of New Zealanders every year, thousands of New Zealanders literally. Citizenship ceremonies can be incredibly moving, but it is way hard to make the oath that those people take to become a New Zealander a deep and meaningful moment.
The worst moment in the ceremony is the letter from the Minister, usually because it is really really bad and boring. The only way to get through the letter is to edit it, but it is difficult to edit the oath. Here it is just for those of you who will remember that many of these people have got English as maybe their second, third, fourth, fifth language.
"I swear," or you can affirm if you want "that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of New Zealand." Somewhat difficult for most New Zealanders, especially for Republican New Zealanders to take this. "Not only to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of New Zealand, but also her heirs and successors." Really difficult for the people in the audience to say heirs. It is a hard word, it always comes out as her hairs and successors.
I have to say that as a New Zealander even swearing allegiance to her heirs and successors is really, really hard. I mean this is a dysfunctional family. This is really hard. Then we swear this. "According to law and that I will faithfully" (again) "observe the laws of New Zealand and fulfil my duties as a New Zealand citizen. So help me God." Only one God here, no options.
It’s a really boring oath. If you think about it, if we wanted to do something that actually embraced the fact that these people have chosen New Zealand as their country that they wish to be in, it is a really important decision for them. Even saying something such as, "I have chosen New Zealand as my home and I will respect the people, the laws, and the land," would be much nicer. Or, "I will seek in my own way to make New Zealand an even better place for all our children," or whatever. Just something that actually took into account the amazing voyage that most of those people have made often with incredible hardship to choose New Zealand as their home. Instead we just make it so boring and it is totally unfair to those people to have to put up with that.
So even a department like Internal Affairs has tremendous capacity to effect change. If we are to continue on this voyage of innovation and discovery as the Reserve Bank has suggested I see no choice other than that the Public Service is quite clearly on that same voyage, on that perpetual voyage of innovation and discovery.
Lastly, don’t wait for permission. Don’t ask anybody. There are things you need to deliver. It doesn’t say necessarily how you need to deliver them and sometimes there is a better way than the present. Sometimes that just demands a little bit of innovation.
