‘State of the City’ speech
MAYOR’S COLUMN
When I did my yearly talk with Rotary South on the State of the City recently, I also learnt some good lessons about how keen the public is to know what is really going on.
One of the biggest problems for a publicly owned multi-million-dollar business like the Christchurch City Council is getting across to the public what we are doing, and why. A tried and true way of talking directly to the public is through speeches and public talks.
It is a method I enjoy and have made a point of using a lot over the years. With this year’s Rotary South talk I decided to run a modest experiment and give the audience as extensive a look into where I think the city is as I could.
Thanks to my staff I ended up with a presentation that mixed Power Point with speech notes and took up over 70 pages when printed out. It added up to a major snapshot of where we have been, what has taken place in the last year, our challenges for the future and some of the big issues of the present. It took just under an hour to deliver.
I was delighted to find that the audience paid close attention all the way through.
It’s impossible to cover the scope of the talk in a single column, but I can report that people were most engaged when the topic took in some of the more major issues of our times.
When I got onto peak oil and the idea that we may have to prepare for a world where oil is $100 or even $150 a barrel, the audience was keen to hear about the implications, one of which is that the commuting lifestyle block way of life may well turn out to be a very brief interlude in our history as a city. People appear well aware that it may be an idea we can no longer afford.
You could also feel the same intense level of interest and awareness when I touched on our challenge as a city to give up on profligate levels of rubbish production.
Some records we really should not be proud about. I showed the audience the grim figures for how much rubbish per person we are throwing out each year.
At 764kg of rubbish per person we are world leaders; the average in America, the home of the consumer culture, is less at 760kg. Even Auckland, at 720kg, is less. In Britain it is 560kg and Japan 410kg.
The audience seemed to appreciate that with production figures like that we are up against a credibility problem as a major city in “clean, green New Zealand”.
On the bright side, I was also able to show them how, by trapping the gas from the old Burwood landfill, we are able to save millions and heat QEII pool. Not that this is an energy source I want to encourage for the future.
People were also very keen to hear more about how I believe in the modern globalising economy cities and their leaders need to actively push their own city barrow. It is all too easy in a beautiful and benign city like ours to forget that the world owes us nothing.
Cities that are succeeding are cities that have leaders who get out and about and help their business leaders promote the merits of trading with them. Christchurch is a trading city, perhaps more so than anywhere else in New Zealand.
One of the great challenges for our future is to make sure we keep the city infrastructure both high-quality and up-to-date to help meet the challenges of the modern economy.
We also need to be aware that we are going to be competing with the rest of the developed world for our children as the labour force of the future. One estimate I have seen is that in the next 25 years as the 70 million baby boomers gradually retire, the group that will replace them may be as low as 5m. That adds up to massive competition to attract and retain skilled workers.
We face some major challenges in the years ahead. As I said to the Rotary group, the good news is that face these challenges as an unusually cohesive and strong city.
One of the good things to come out of recent bird `flu briefings was to find out that Christchurch coped especially well in the 1918 flu epidemic. Why? Because it showed strong collective community spirit to meet the challenge. I think that this community spirit is still intact. Otherwise why would an audience like the Rotary group pay such close attention to a politician for nearly an hour?
Mayor of Christchurch
The Mayor presents Avonside Girls High School’s Ice Team with an award for commitment at a regional awards ceremony for the Lion Foundation Young Enterprise Scheme. The Council’s economic development arm, Canterbury Development Corporation, is the main regional sponsor of the scheme. CDC supports it as part of its Outside The Square Youth Enterprise initiative to encourage enterprising attitudes among young Canterbians. The over-all Canterbury regional winner was La Vie Sienne, from St. Thomas of Canterbury College, for their Envirotech product. The runner-up was O.L.D. from Christchurch Girls High, with Burst Vitamins.
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