Stephen Jennings: belief

Transcript context

…If you look back on the New Zealand asset sales of the 1980s, 1990s, how well do you think they went? What did we learn from that experience? I think — clearly, I’m biased. I think they went extremely well. You have to judge that by the productivity improvement in the likes of telecoms, power, forestry. These were incredibly poorly managed assets, hugely wasteful, [with] very low levels of innovation and archaic levels of technology, and [the asset sales] unleashed a lot of value creation. I think societies that can’t take the medicine generally don’t perform very well. New Zealanders are still obsessed with the fact that the ’80s reforms, there were so many things wrong with them, notwithstanding the fact that virtually every change has withstood the test of time and hasn’t been reversed. You see it in the same — Thatcher’s to blame for so many things that are wrong in the UK, but if it’s so bad, just go ahead and reverse everything she did. I think countries that have been successful, they have wave after wave of reform, change, innovation and they’re good at it. The change is painful. There’s structural adjustment costs. But if you’re good at absorbing that, understanding that, and moving on to the next round of change, as the Chinese have in some ways, that’s a huge strength. If you can’t do that, it’s a big weakness. 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?…

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