The Big OE
Auckland University
Business Review

   
Our national bird the Kiwi is endangered by predators and diminishing natural habitat. Concurrently its eponymous human namesake has been disappearing, growing wings and flying from the nest to pursue lives around the globe. Urban myth has it that there are half a million Kiwis in Australia, and a couple of hundred thousand in England. Start adding the rest of the globe, from New York to Newfoundland, from Stockholm to Salt Lake City (did you know there are 3000 Kiwis in Utah?) from Rochester to Reykjavik, from Dublin to Dubai, plus all the other Kiwis on their short term OE, and you’ve probably got another few hundred thousand. Very soon you’ll get close to a million lost Kiwis. 

Associate Professor at Auckland University's School of Business, Marie Wilson, has conducted a survey of the 900 Kiwis who responded to Richard Poole's late-2000 "Generation Lost" e-mail to flesh out the details of what the overseas enticement is for these mostly young, mobile professionals. Yvette Adams, a freelance writer and traveller currently living in London has written a thoroughly researched account of why young Kiwis are herding overseas. The case studies provide compelling and real reasons why Londoners no longer count sheep to fall to sleep, but Kiwis. Click here for "the Concerns and Issues of the Generation Lost" and here for Adams's "Doing For Themselves What Their Country Cannot Do For Them". 

One of the motivating assertions of NZEDGE is that New Zealand has to find a way of recognising and affirming the quarter of its population that lives beyond its geographic boundaries. And, for whatever reason (earning power, opportunity, the Kiwi wanderlust gene) this population is increasing by the day. Young New Zealanders make up the majority of the exodus (one in twenty leaving permanently every year). Events such as the recent Knowledge Wave conference, the gathering of prominent ex-pat Kiwi movers in London organised by Korn Ferry Recruitment, newspaper editorials and government attention are indications that NZ at large is beginning to recognise what NZEDGE has championed from its inception: that a national issue pivotal to identity, talent retention and our economic future crucially deserves more attention than a sound-bite framed by a cat-in-a-tree story and an item about Jonah's car stereo. 

At NZEDGE we’re talking about growing the New Zealand population by at least 25 percent in one swoop, by connecting with the swelling mass of Kiwis who live "off-island", by emotionally repatriating them as it were. There is Kiwi wealth, influence, innovation, ideas and goodwill swimming around the world and as a country we want it!   

Talent spores
Happy few we may be but Kiwi talent punches above its weight in every sphere of endeavor, in commerce,   science, the arts and culture, taste, style, sport. Spores of zeal, some who have grown roots on-island, others who have made their way across the globe and fertilised in unexpected and unacknowledged soils. Perhaps unshackled from what historian Jamie Belich memorably calls the "muted egalitarianism" latent in the New Zealand psyche, but equally equipped with the ready optimism and can-do perspective that coming from the antipodes imbues us with - edged with a bit of Split Enzed rugged individualism - Kiwis have made their way from the bottom of the world to glisten prismatic like paua-shell in international necklaces. 

Forget forgotten silver, here's some ex-pat poppy-pushing up over the Earl's Court two year working visa: Atom splitters, rocket scientists, first flyers from a country that doesn't make rockets, let alone planes; short-story modernist, an avant-garde kinetic sculptor and pioneer of music video before the technology was imagined, reformer who introduced gung-ho into western idiom, white mouse leader in French Resistance during WWII, Opera's best known diva, Everest conqueror, DNA Nobel winner, Pianos, Gattaca, Once Were Warrior princesses and Hollywood gladiators, fusion food innovation from summer-times of barbies and pav. Cultural incubation of indigenous and gender affirmation, Kiwis are and have played leading roles in international organisations from directing the United Nations Peacekeeping Efforts, to running the City of London Corporation, MTV Europe, the National Bank of Bosnia, Saatchi & Saatchi, Leo Burnett advertising, Elizabeth Arden Cosmetics, heading British Post, leading the Metropolitan Opera, founding Glaxo, directing the James Bond franchise, oxymooronically heading the World Trade Organisation and holding the banners for Greenpeace Artic Activism to CNN's voice in Baghdad, (plus of course the greatest rugby footballers of all time). The New Zealand Edge is the articulation of this advantage. See the NZEDGE Heroes page for the historical elaboration.

An important part of the Kiwi offshore community is what we call the "doctoral diaspora" – academics, researchers and students pursuing graduate careers at many of the world’s most prestigious overseas universities. How they contribute to New Zealand’s edge, now and in the future, is crucial; how the umbilical cord between home and away sustains them cuts straight to the real heart of any debate on that nebulous term: "the knowledge economy". Richard Easther at Brown University, Rhode Island, USA, has gathered together a group of New Zealanders in the academy to form a brain-drain discussion group. Check it out – if the knowledge economy is to have substance New Zealand must affirm and nurture proactive networks such as these. 

The strange bird with the inquisitive beak. Annecdotal evidence hints that large chunks of the most successful, intelligent and affluent sector of the New Zealand population are living offshore -  you can't walk around the Silicon Valley hallways of Apple, the Human Genome Project, IDEO design studio or a laser lab in Sunnyvale without bumping into a Kiwi. An awareness of this presence is behind Berkely economics professor David Teece and Warehouse founder Stephen Tindall setting up a database of Kiwis working in the knowledge industries of California to provide links back to New Zealand people and companies.

Compatriation
Of the New Zealanders that Yvette Adams has interviewed and those who responded to the Auckland University survey, some walked out of Godzone and into the world "impolitely" slamming the door as they left. When trans-tasman satirist John Clarke was asked by Kim Hill in a 1996 interview if he left New Zealand with ill feeling towards the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. He replied: "No, not at all. I had ill feelings before I left."

Maybe its part of our nation’s growing up process? A rite of passage? A necessary journey of self-discovery? That New Zealand has felt a need to exile and expatriate is, from the Edge, strikingly counter-productive. There are some views that you can’t get from the bottom of the world. At NZEDGE we recognise this, but rather than punting people out of Auckland Airport on the full with barely a stamp on their passport, we’re engaged in a process of repatriation, actually it’s more than that - it’s compatriation.

We call the New Zealand community that doesn’t live in Aotearoa "NEONZ". The Network of Overseas New Zealanders. If you’re Jewish or Chinese or Irish you will immediately understand the concept. It’s simply called connecting the dots between the points of presence, and no one has tried to do it with New Zealand in a meaningful way, until now.

Trace Hodgson NZ Listener June 3, 2000

All drain no gain?
Professor Richard Bedford of the Population Studies Centre at the University of Waikato believes that the whole notion of permanent migration is becoming an anachronism. In a Mike Revington New Zealand Listener article, "Exodus", Bedford looks at why it's not necessarily all drain no gain: "We really shouldn’t get hung up on the idea of people leaving a place permanently. The poor, and those with limited skills, can’t move as freely, but there is a huge global demand for skilled labour. Our university lost an entire section in fuel cell technology because they were bought out by a big company in the United States. I think it’s a natural and healthy thing. We have networks flowing back to New Zealand from all over the world."

Today New Zealand is one of the most wired countries in the world, jacked into a global village that is opening up to new definitions of identity and knowledge formation. The communications technology explosion has meant that terabyte rivers of information have surged into New Zealand. An edge connection with the origination of the information age is Kiwi rocketman Sir William Pickering, leader of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that was the tipping point in the US space programme: launching the first western satellites into orbit and sending explorers out to redefine the fringes of our universe. In doing this the JPL team recieved the first satellite television images, and were amongst the first to successfully utilise digital transmission and microchip technology. 

That a New Zealander was involved in leading space exploration is edge theory in action. Of course the most ubiquitous unintended consequence of cold war technological innovation is the internet. These innovations, now everyday and species-changing, are to the great upheaval of our time - the Communications Revolution - what steam was to the Industrial Revolution. When Pickering decided he wanted to be a rocket scientist he had to leave the shaky isles to do it. Now, countering the perjorative associations of the brain-drain, the internet and electronic communications represent a massively important channel for information flowing in, and out, of New Zealand - making geography "virtually" less important. 

There may be run-off but the storage tank is filling up too: Auckland University's Matthew During in a joint programme with Jefferson University in the United States is conducting revolutionary gene research that could solve many of the world's most significant health problems, including developing vaccines that might protect against stroke, epilepsy and even depression and obesity. The brains behind behind some of the most exciting and innovative consumer products in international design, from television sets to trains, mobile phones and yes, even an udder stimulator that improves the production of milk from New Zealand cows, is Kiwi Simon Fraser. He has recently traded in a position as head of Porsche Design in Austria to return to New Zealand and teach as Professor of Industrial Design at Victoria University, Wellington, bringing back his overseas experience to benefit an area of developing and underestimated local talent: "Design education must continue in this country" Fraser lamented on a lecture tour to New Zealand in 1999. Now the flow down the drain is gurgling back up the plug-hole. 

The image of stuff, unexpected, creative, matted and hairy, gurgling up from the u-bend is one suited to home-spun horror of Alison Maclean's "Kitchen Sink" or appropriately Peter Jackson's Kiwi-schlock flicks "Braindead" or "Bad Taste." Nowhere is the drain's backwash seen more vividly (wide screen at the Embassy) than in the creation of middle earth from the edge: at US$270-million the second largest movie project ever undertaken, and directed, written, produced and filmed in New Zealand. That Kiwi auteur Peter Jackson was able to convince Hollywood studios to invest and film J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings", accepting the challenge of the cinematic translation of the 20th Century's best loved story, in New Zealand, is testament not only to Jackson's vision and maverick talents, but to the capabilities, ingenuity, creative and technical skills, gung-ho and geography of Aotearoa. 

Producing the most sophisticated digitally generated characters, environments and visual effects from his Weta workshop, Jackson has managed an immigration of Hollywood and Hobbits, transforming the Wellington suburb of Miramar into "Wellywood." The gushes from the rushes have been unanimous: the production company might be called Three Foot Six but ... "This will be the biggest movie of all time" ... "I've never met or worked with a director with a more comprehensive artillery of qualities for a big project like this than Peter Jackson"  ... "Trust me - it's magnificent" Sir Ian McKellen ... “It’s a really, really incredible group of people and a very brilliant, talented group of artists who were massively, massively passionate about what they were there in New Zealand for. It was a real honour.” Elijah Wood. A brain exchange whose return to NZ and Hobbit fans world-wide will be the eagerly anticipated release of the first installment of the trilogy for Christmas 2001.   

Overseas Edge
From one story of an epic journey made by a little group  people to exotic lands, to another: Remarking on the sea-faring abilities of the Polynesians in making the voyage across the Pacific, historian Jamie Belich at the Knowledge Wave wryly describes Sir Peter Buck's characterisation of New Zealand's first settlers as "Vikings of the sunrise" as "over-praising the Vikings." The great colonial reach of the British Empire made equally expansive journeys of settlement and civilisation, ruling over the world's oceans and a quarter of its land mass. As Belich goes to point out New Zealand exists at the intersection of these cultures. From waka to steamer to 747, travel and adaptation and the relays between these great originating migratory cultures are part of the history and present of living on a gathering of geographically isolated islands at the bottom of the world. 

As at ease swooping across the globe as an Albatross hanging its great wingspan along air-currents off Taiaroa Head and embedded with the same instinct for home post winging-it over seas, most New Zealanders as Belich remarks, are "historically well equipped to be national and transnational citizens." The colonial experience delivered cultural hybridity and the Pacific cultural renaissance that NZ is undergoing at present, through rhythms of decolonialisation, will deliver the distinctiveness. The process is not easy, involving a challenging and traumatic questioning of national identity, origins, geography. Roots. Reinvention. As Janet Frame wrote, New Zealanders travelling overseas end up examining "not the place of arrival but the place of departure."  

Embracing global citizenship risks threatening local identity, but at NZEDGE we believe in the ties of fraternity that bind together New Zealanders, on and off-island. A network, the hongi its masonic greeting, bound by blood, landscape, heritage, myth, arrival and departure, homing instincts. It's why you're here, virtually, even if not geographically.

Professor of Management Studies, Kerr Inkson, writes in the University of Auckland Business Review that overseas experience, OE (we call it the overseas edge), short and long term, is a way of increasing individual and national competitiveness. Inkson focuses on the standard year or more of travel and work, and urges that rather than simply seeing OE as a rite of passage it can also be viewed as a source of competitive advantage for the travellers and their employers - indeed for the nation as a whole.

Opening the debate further, Professor Bedford continues, "the one thing that’s never been done is to try to assess to what extent that [overseas] population adds value to New Zealand. Do they contribute goods, finance, services back here? How do they assist with other New Zealanders moving and travelling overseas? Are they communities that help foster the much wider linkages that New Zealand has into the world economy and other societies?."

Kiwi Professor Robert Wade of the London School of Economics, speaking at Knowledge Wave, articulated some responses to these questions, urging that New Zealand adopt brain-drain halting diaspora and immigration policies. Citing models like Taiwan and Korea, Wade advocates the establishing of networks of skilled expatriates and offering them inducements, encouraging them back on-island to take part in regular networking sessions with a view to drawing talent back or providing help with the country's development abroad. Experience and instinct tell us that an astonishing number are prepared to do what they can to connect with and assist their homeland. Imagine a metaphorical gathering place, a virtual hui, or farm gate if your calendar is country - the Kiwi version of the Irish Pub.   
     

Safe Under the High Ball
Our intention here at the New Zealand Edge is to own the channel to this audience. Own it, drive it, create advantage through it, make a network, add a city the size of Auckland to our effective population and market. We are driven by imagining the benefits to the country of signing these people up again as active Kiwis. Of endowing this network with a compelling story they can tell about the Edge they are from (a story so much deeper than the All Blacks and the scenery). Of enlisting these people as advocates. Of inviting them to invest back into their home. 

Beyond the enthusiastic endorphins that events like the Knowledge Wave pump into the national blood-stream, NZEDGE is about giving New Zealanders a reason to re-connect, a narrative heart to bolster the sentiment. A space in which we can expatiate about what it means to be from Aotearoa.      

That’s pretty simply what we’re doing at the New Zealand Edge. It’s about storytelling, it’s about conversation and its about community. 

This is our response. Our cluster-gathering. We hope that Yvette Adams’s article "Doing For Themselves What Their Country Cannot Do For Them", positive redefinitions by people such as Robert Wade and Richard Bedford, the Auckland University Business School's "Generation Lost" survey, Teece and Tindall's Silicon Valley conclave, Richard Easther’s network of third culture digerati, and the links to media coverage provide the seeds for at least a constructive debate. We hope you’re engaged. Participate. Bugger irony, New Zealand is too small: clasp your hand to the silver fern on your chest, feel your heart stir and let us know whether you’re in or out.

PAUL WARD
COPYRIGHT NZEDGE.COM IP HOLDINGS LIMITED 1998-2005.
EXECUTIVE EDITOR: BRIAN SWEENEY
  

  
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