Kurashiki, 30th Ceremony

August 2003

Mayor Nakada, officials and representatives of Kurashiki .... greetings on this our 30th anniversary as Sister Cities.

Only Adelaide, Australia, comes before you as a foundation Sister City with Christchurch.

It is between our two cities, both of which are part of small island nations with much larger neighbours, that the deeper journey of mutual discovery has taken part. Whereas for the Mayor of Adelaide an invitation to an outdoor barbeque would have the distinct taste of home, it proved a more novel experience for Mayor Nakada when he took part in one at my Christchurch home.

I must say how sorry I am it has taken me so long to get here. When I looked up the records I found that Christchurch’s Deputy-Mayor, Lesley Keast has visited Kurashiki at least three times.

I was also reminded that the last time she was here she noted that this, the 21st Century, is also the start of the century the history books will eventually recognise as the dawning of the Pacific century.

In the Pacific Rim neighbourhood we are all having to adjust to the accelerating shift in the focus of world economic and political power in our region.

I believe Lesley Keast made the point that there is a huge shift going on that will for the first time place increasing responsibility on us all to show that there are more progressive and positive ways of conducting our affairs emerging.

The need for us all to build on our links of friendship and peace with other Pacific citizens is more important than ever. The close links Christchurch and Kurashiki have developed provide a model of how this can be done.

For Christchurch, building and maintaining these links is more than a matter of aspiring toward making a valid contribution to

improving world peace. While this is a goal I fully support, there is also a serious economic dimension to this pursuit of open, fruitful ties between our cities and nations.

Christchurch is very much a trading city. Probably more than any other major New Zealand city we are intimately involved in the emergent global economy, as exporters, as providers of superb tourism experiences and as consumers.

Christchurch and Canterbury are exposed to the currents of the global economy to such an extent that economic activity in our region is closely monitored to show where the rest of the nation is likely to head.

We are the warning light on the dashboard of the New Zealand economy, for both good and bad changes. This means that our economy and society has a huge, vested interest in making sure that we keep trade as open and dynamic as we can.

Far from our Sister city ties being an optional extra, they are in fact a
core part of our overall strategy for conducting our own direct relationships with the rest of the world. We are proud of taking a lead role as active traders, and increasingly, on city to city levels, showing our willingness to act as economic brokers for our region.

A few years ago we reviewed our Sister city links and concluded that they provide us with an ideal platform for economic and social growth, and this platform will become increasingly important in the future.

Personally, I believe that one effect of the massive changes to the world economy and social order of recent years has been to provide us with a powerful incentive to learn new ways of working and trading. Older nations such as Japan are often better than newer lands at taking lessons from the past and applying them to modern situations.

In this case I believe some of us in the West have managed to learn well from our own distant past of economic development.

When European civilisation was just starting to emerge into fresh growth after the Middle Ages and started what is now called the Renaissance it was the cities that powered this new burst of life.

Nations were either still forming or too slow moving to provide effective ways of trading and conducting diplomacy. It was the city states that blazed new trails, got trade going and generated wealth and opportunity for their people. I believe we are in another period where the city state will prove to be a key way of doing effective business.

We are again in a time when cities have to become willing to be the architects of their own destiny, at least economically and

socially. The Sister City programme is an ideal vehicle for developing these ideas into practical realities.

City to city we are responsible for the future of our society. Country to country things tend to be talked about as generalities. City to city it is much easier to identify and develop specific programmes of action.

In the context of our own Sister city ties it is worth noting that Christchurch and Japan in general enjoy strong, established links diplomatically, commercially, culturally and most importantly, on a person to person level.

We in Christchurch believe that a healthy social and cultural climate is vital for building strong economic health. We have recently taken the giant step to commit to becoming a triple bottom line city. This means a city where all our major decisions have to factor in the economic, environmental and social impacts they are likely to produce.

This is, we believe, a more ethical way of managing our stewardship of our land and resources for this and future generations. I believe it is also part of a broader set of challenges that both our cities and nations face as we head into our mutual future.

Humanity is realising that if we are to manage and conserve our natural wealth we all have to be willing to work together more closely in future. Again it is an area where the Sister City model will prove invaluable for us all.

I have spoken today of some fairly major issues - economic survival, the pursuit of world peace and the need for us all to work together to conserve and restore our natural wealth.

To put this in perspective I would like to share a saying our native first people, the Maori, have in our region about what is important in life. They say it is people, it is people, it is people. So too

with our Sister City links. Started by people, developed by people to people contacts and deepened by respect and friendship between our two peoples. Christchurch and Kurashiki have joined together on a wonderful shared journey which I believe in another 30 years will be seen as even more valuable than it is today.

Happy anniversary to us all. I look forward to greeting Mayor Nakada again later this year in Christchurch.