Good choices for economic wellbeing

We all want interesting, high-quality jobs for ourselves and our children, and I believe the Council has a key role in fostering the kind of business environment where this can happen. To help build a vibrant city we need to build vibrant businesses.

I have great ideas and support for expanding and enhancing our city's economy in the areas of business through technology and business forums, fair trade, and harnessing our natural marine energy as well as continuing support for the creative sector.

Broadband

Instead of seeing ourselves as a tiny country at the bottom of the world, let’s play to our strengths – technology means we are awake while much of the world sleeps.

To participate on a world stage, we need cheap, pervasive and reliable Internet connections in the form of ultra-fast fibre optic-based broadband. Better broadband has significant advantages for small nimble companies, especially in the creative sector.

Council can facilitate this through supporting micro-trenching for fibre access and with IT skills development, especially for those who’ve grown up without computer literacy. We can also work collaboratively with central government on its ultra-fast broadband initiatives.

One of the early innovators in fibre broadband is Wellington company CityLink, which was spun off from Council and was responsible for making us the most wired downtown in the country. So we have a long and successful track record of merging local govermment seed funding with private sector innovation to grow world-class infrastructure. But we can’t simply trade on the successes of the past – our InfoCity plan must be refreshed for the 2010s.

ICT leadership forum

So if you elect me as mayor, I’m pledging to convene a forum of business, IT and community leaders to investigate how we can foster innovative companies and lead in IT again, for e-democracy, e-business and continued reduction in the digital divide. Grow Wellington, our economic development agency, will be a key player. So too will Wellington ICT, TUANZ, CityLink and we'll invite individuals and start-ups too.

All options will be on the table, including free wifi, including Council seed funding for great concepts, and including those off-the-wall entrepreneurial ideas that New Zealanders are famous for.

Making public data available more easily will be an important start.

All I ask in return is that business and Council share the task – and the risks, and the rewards – of building a more vibrant local economy together.

Fair trade

Of course, there’s more to having a prosperous city than broadband and the public sector. We can’t macramé our own computers so we do need to trade. But let’s make it fair trade and let’s not trade off the environment.

As a country, we know that milk sales at the expense of clean rivers are not the way to go. As the capital, we have opportunities to address these and other problems being experienced by other countries and other cities around the world.

Marine focus

Wellington is the epicentre of the fifth largest marine realm in the world. We have a range of institutions such as NIWA, Victoria University and GNS, and working together with a marine focus can create enormous economic advantage as well as advancing our scientific knowledge. Sponge extracts are already being examined for mainstream medicinal purposes.

Pursuing marine energy from the awesome forces in the Cook Strait is a good choice for us to become more energy independent, and may be a key export industry in our carbon-constrained future. It will be my job as Mayor to help these companies succeed.

As a capital city with two marine reserves close by, tourism opportunities can include our wild water sports too.

The waves around Wellington must be at least as powerful as South Australia - see The Power of the Waves story.

Cleaner fuels

The combination of skills at Weltec and international fuel knowledge at Veranis, means Wellington's air could be much cleaner. Emulsified fuels clean up diesel.

Bus engines are running a computer-aided trial of emulsified fuels! A student journalist who came to my launch met Leigh and wrote up this new trial:  newswire.co.nz/2010/07/green-diesel and more recent information about Veranis.

There are also opportunities to link with Pacific countries and explore biofuel from coconuts instead of unsustainable oil-palm plantations.

STOP PRESS: The regional economic development agency, Grow Wellington, is to be congratulated on achieving a Clean Tech Centre of Excellence in Kapiti. When I was on the board of Positively Wellington Business, its precursor, I was emphatic that clean technologies can provide goods at the same time as solving environmental problems.