Building as a Mental Health Hazard

I've recently been reading comments about wanting to: "live in a society that has plenty of jobs in manufacturing, production, food supply, retail, repairs and maintenance, transport, offering secure jobs that provide enough income to pay the bills and keep a roof over our heads."

There's a very broad range of different markets there, that all have very different characteristics. 

Maybe we should concentrate on places we can add local advantage to employ people.

To separate out consumer good manufacturing and retail - our market size and distance from others precludes ever having the ability to competitively produce most consumer goods, and the majority of those enterprises now import from efficient high volume manufacturing concerns. What sites like Ali Express, Amazon, Etsy, Temu and the rest have allowed consumers to do is disintermediate a lot of the consumer supply chain that, in New Zealand, adds very little value and simply can't offer the consumer choice available overseas.

Should jobs that are essentially ticket-punching be subsidised by consumers?

In industrial products, similar applies: we simply are not big enough to efficiently manufacture anything that isn't a high value add, and low freight cost. So: software, and maybe high technology products - although we are not geologically stable enough for a semiconductor industry. The markets for things like building products and motor vehicles are broken, and cost add has hugely outpaced value add: why do we need large bricks-and-mortar retailers for commodity items like framing timber, plasterboard, Corollas and the like? The moves by people like Tesla, where everything is in-house, are positive, but we have too few dominant players invested in a complex status-quo where no-value-add is the norm.

Maybe we need to stick to areas, like software, agro/bio-technology and the like where distance isn't such an issue and where we have a local advantage.

Transport already employs a lot of people, but our systems are not efficient becasue our transport infrastructure is degrading, and there's no prospect of coordinated, evidence-driven action from government to change that. It's being left to the market and the market is dominated by road-freight interests.

Short of a complete change of mindset and policy that pries vested interests away from our transport practices, I have no ideas.

We do have a local advantage in food and agricultural products and that would be a great opportunity. However: we keep exporting commodities, rather than adding value here. As to why, I'd suggest: historical reasons that have led to the control of this sector by a particular mind-set that sees it as so much simpler and adequately profitable to export commodities and that there are too few large players of that mind-set, investment in physical product value add is hard to come by as the property market is a privileged investment vehicle that soaks up money, and our regulatory environment's complexity and multi-authority nature is inimical to innovation.

The regulatory environment to grow competitive local industry is problematic. I was doing supply chain in industrial manufacturing in the days when import substitution regulations to protect local industry were in force. The degree of regulation made it painful and expensive to make anything here using any imported content. Consumer goods were worse, where stiff tariffs were imposed to protect local industry who had no incentive to produce good quality products, and the bureaucracy around the heavy-handed regulations was mind boggling. It doesn't help that the government organisations tasked with running our industrial policy are largely made up of professional public servants, who mostly have no experience of what they are trying to administer.

As a historical example of where we've come from: in the 1970s my father wanted an evaporative (swamp) cooler for my grandmother, who suffered in the hot, dry summers on the Canterbury plains. The nearest place to get one was Australia, but to be allowed an import licence we had to (among other things): demonstrate we had access to foreign exchange, collect a letter from her doctor to demonstrate need, and stump up nearly half the price of the cooler again in duty becasue there might be a firm in New Zealand to protect (there wasn't). The duty exemption process was Kafka-esque. You had to write to all the possible local manufacturers and importers to demonstrate that there wasn't a local business you would disadvantage: essentially looking for proof of non-existence. My father just coughed up the money.

Do we really want to go back to that kind of protectionism to protect areas we can never be competitive in?