Stephen Jennings: belief

Transcript context

…At least for a while, the New Zealand business community seemed to be strongly behind reforms for your markets, free trade. That’s fairly exceptional. Was that just luck, or are there organic forces behind that? I think fundamentally, we’d had quite an entrepreneurial society. People went to New Zealand; Indigenous people went to New Zealand. It was an easy place. They had to build their lives. They had to build communities. They had to build infrastructure. They had to be pioneering in nature. They had to be, in some sense, entrepreneurial. And New Zealand ended up as one of the richest countries in the world with one of the best education and one of the best health systems in the world. It’s in the facts. But at some point, we put our feet up. Probably you have to go back to the ’60s and ’70s, and complacency crept in many dimensions. The most obvious one is education. We had objectively one of the best education systems in the world. Kiwis were leading thinkers in many areas. They were successful internationally. But we have one of the worst and most unequal education systems in the OECD today. We have third-world levels of educational attainment for subsectors of our community. Do you have a sense of how to reform that?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.