1984 Quiz Result
(Pinky Agnew's speech was accompanied by a series of video clips. The placement of these clips is indicated in the speech. The clips are not available here)
Welcome.
Thanks Sir Paul. Good morning and welcome to the short sharp shock start to your morning. Today's conference is about facing the future, and how the Public Service can evolve to meet the challenges ahead. We're looking ahead to 2020 - like me, a nice round figure. That's 18 years from now. To put that into context, we're also going to be looking back 18 years.
Some years are so significant that we use the year as shorthand for a significant event or set of events that happened then - 1951 was such a year, so was 1981, and so, in its turn was 1984, which became synonymous with the social and economic change we call Rogernomics.
It's hard to look back at the past without our memory lens being vaselined by nostalgia.
Billy Collins encapsulated this in his poem Nostalgia.
The poem starts:
Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance
called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the colour craze of the decade.And the poem finishes:
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of
the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of the
stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future,
that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot
imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.Let's start with a quick look at the dances we were doing in 1984, by having a quick quiz on some of the events from that year. Your quiz question sheet is in your pack. Whip them out now. This is a short session and we'll have a couple of activities woven into it, so you'll have to be quick when I give you something to do. To quote that great icon of the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, "Just do as I say. It saves time." We're only playing this clip once, so do pay attention.
(Quiz video clip)So where were we all in 1984? I don't know about you, but I was wearing glasses as big as dinner plates, I had hair the size of a Volkswagen, and I had a knitting pattern for Naomi's pink cardie.
The next thing we'll be looking at is a video with a mixture of clips, of what other people were doing in 1984, and some comments from what today's people on the street think was going on back then.
(Then and now historical footage video)Interesting that all the sports we won gold medals for - canoeing, yachting, rowing, equestrian - were done sitting down. There's hope for me yet. There have been other huge changes in the past 18 years. For a start we look different, thank goodness.
(Statistics video)Statistics video script
These are pictures of me and Trevor Mallard back in 1984, us today, and what we might look like in 2020. That's a 36-year span, which started when the population stood at 3.29 million. This year we've almost cracked the four million mark. But don't expect the growth rate to keep going. Statistics New Zealand predicts a slowing down, with the population reaching only 4.35 million in 2020.
To be honest, some of the statistics for 1984 and 2002 involve a bit of guess work on our part, because there wasn't a census in those years. But we've made it as close as we can.
Life expectancy is improving. If you were a baby boy in 1984 you could expect to live 72 years and 77 years if you were a girl. Boys born this year should be good for 76 years, girls 82, and by 2020 newborns will have a life expectancy of 80 and 85.
The population's average age has been getting older. The bulge moves upwards as more people get older. In 1984 there were 320,000 New Zealanders over the age of 65. This year there are 420,000, and by 2020 it's estimated 700,000 will be aged 65 or older.
The ethnic mix is altering. The percentage of Pakeha shrinking from 82% to an estimated 65.8% in 2020.
There's been a change too in where we all live. The big growth areas have been Auckland, Northland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Wellington, Tasman and Canterbury. Declining numbers are found in Gisborne, Taranaki and Southland.
Family types have been changing, with a steady increase in couples with no kids, and one-parent homes. In 1984 55% of families had two parents. That has now shrunk to 42% and no one's brave enough to predict how many two-parent families will be around in 2020!
Not surprisingly prices have gone up a bit. A litre of milk in 1984 cost 50 cents. Now the least you'll pay is a $1.65. A seat at the movies has gone from $3.27 to $12.00. A packet of cigarettes is up from $1.37 to $8.50.
Our GDP has grown from less than $80 billion to more than $108 billion. The GDP per person increased from less than $21,000 to more than $28,000. The value of our exports has more than trebled. We're getting more qualified. Twice as many people now have university degrees.
It's safer on the roads, with the road toll down from 668 to 455 last year. But less safe on the streets, with the murder rate up from 40 to 67 for the fiscal year ending this June. How safe will we be in 2020? (end of video script).
So what have the big changes been for you since 1984? You may think it's hair loss and butt gain, but dig deeper. I want you to share your ideas on what the biggest changes you think there have been since 1984 - for yourself, for society.
Shortly I'm going to give you time to tell each other. I'll split you into pairs and give you one and a half minutes each. I'll ring this bell when it's time to swap over. You've got a minute and a half to share your ideas on what you think have been the biggest changes since 1984 - for yourself, for society.
(Biggest changes exercise)A lot has changed since 1984. So what about the future? Making predictions is always hard. Even psychics never seem very confident, so they always predict the inevitable - like earthquakes, tidal waves and celebrity divorces. We asked some secondary school students what they think about what it's going to be like in 2020.
(High school students video clip)Billy Collins has it right. The future is a dance we cannot imagine, a dance whose name we can only guess. When we try and imagine the future we often latch on to the technology, as several of the Wellington High School students did; robots that look like humans, cameras as small as dust motes.
We're not very big on foresight in my family. My mother's family, the Dicks, thought they had it made when they got the franchise to remove and sell all the horse manure from the streets of Edinburgh. Unfortunately this was in 1910. "Aye hen, who could'a predicted that yon motorcar would catch on?"
I remember when I was a little girl back in Port Chalmers, imagining what the future would be like in that magic year, 2000. First I worked out how old I would be - 45. So I thought I'll have died of old age by then. In fact being 45 in 2000 meant that I was, statistically, the exact median age of the population. You might say I put the "median" into comedian.
In my day - I love that phrase, don't you? It assumes two things. Firstly that you had a day, and secondly that it's now over. But when I was a little girl, we had glimpsed the future by then in films and on TV shows, like Star Trek, and Lost in Space. Very futuristic, with little silver jumpsuits and a robot that clanked about waving its arms and intoning "Danger, Will Robinson, danger!"
Literature, film and television, God help us, even songs - who could forget the Zager and Evans classic - In the year 2525 - all predicted future technology, and were often quite astute in doing so. Satellites, cell phones, space travel, test tube babies were all predicted by science fiction long before they happened.
And so by 1984 we were comfortable with predicting technological change. If someone had told me then, that by 2002 I would have a little personal phone I could chat into at any time, it would seem plausible. But could I have predicted the social impact of cell phones, for example, how they make it easier to cheat on your spouse? "I'm at the office!"
If someone had described e-mail to me in 1984, I would have believed them. But what I probably would not have been able to predict was how e-mail would bring my family closer together by enabling us to chat to each other every day even though we are separated by distance, by age and by profound deafness. Neither would I have been able to predict that Internet technology could be used by teenage entrepreneurs to distribute child pornography, that it would revolutionise dating.
It's not the technology that's miraculous, it's what we do with it that is miraculous. Even those great prophets Zager and Evans didn't predict new birth technologies happening quite so soon. They didn't have us picking our sons and daughters from the bottom of a long glass tube till 6565. Zager and Evans aside, most morons could have predicted birth technologies. But could we have predicted the impact new birth technologies would have on ordinary people, suddenly making them decision-makers.
We have to decide if it's OK to screen fetuses for potential deformities. And if so, then is it OK to screen for sexual orientation, or for beauty? We have to decide whether life at the other end of the spectrum can keep on being extended, whether it's OK to stitch ten thousand pounds worth of new titanium hips into a one-hundred-year-old Queen Mother. We have to decide whether it's OK to clone a favourite dog, and if it is, then is it OK to clone a favourite husband?
When we look forward we need to look back at the same time. Remember not so much the things we used to have, but the things we used to believe. Do you remember believing that all these VDUs we saw earlier, this new technology, would give us more leisure time? Do you remember believing that it would give us paperless offices? And yet here we are, the sixty-hour-a-week work generation, knee deep in paper, triplicated and exhausticated.
Do you remember Dad telling you, "Get a job as a postie. They'll always needs people to deliver the mail." We didn't envisage that there might not always be mail!
Do you remember Mum telling you, "Get a job in the Public Service. There will always be a Public Service." But will there? Nothing is certain except death and taxes. I'm not so certain about either of those now.
If we do still have a Public Service in 18 years, what will it look like? Will DOC tracks be maintained by robots that look like human beings? Will Inland Revenue keep us on the straight and narrow with cameras like dust motes?
We ask ourselves today not just to predict what we will have, but we ask ourselves a much trickier question - what will we do with it?
The other unknown is who the electors will inflict on you as law makers. It's all very well, as we know, having a progressive and well-organised Public Service, but along comes a rogue politician who captures the public's imagination by promising to stop crime, cut benefits, and always have something decent on TV. Three years later you're all left mopping up the mess, and, to add insult to injury, you're being blamed for it all, by the very same people who voted the buggers in.
Today you're not just public servants, strategists, analysts, and advisors, but you're bookies, predicting what's going to be happening and taking policy bets accordingly. They're already laying odds that little Romeo Beckham will be playing for Manchester United in 2020. Are you betting people?
So my questions for you are not what will we have in 2020, but what will we do with it? Not where will we live, but how will we live?
I want you to quickly now get out the post-it note pads in your packs and write three things on three separate notes. At the end of my session this morning, you'll hand these notes down to the end of the row and they'll be collected and stuck up for you all to have a look at in the breaks. Don't worry, you don't need to put your name on them!
I want you to spend a couple of minutes thinking about what your expectations, hopes and dreams might be for life in 2020 - what kind of world might it be for you, for your children, for children you know. Write three ideas down for your 2020 vision, each on a separate post-it note.
(Post-it note exercise)Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for doing this early morning stretch of the imagination. I can't wait to see what those post-it notes say, and I hope the rest of the conference is stimulating.
In 1984, even though I was a Kiwi, a feminist and a socialist, I was grooving to that year's hottest hits - Born in the USA, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and Madonna's Material Girl. I wonder if you can guess, as Billy Collins wonders, the name of the dance we will be doing in 2020?
Thank you.
