Financial Planners & Insurance Advisers Assn Of NZ Conference

Tuesday15th June 2005

Welcome to Christchurch and what is effectively a two Mayor greeting. Your Master of Ceremonies is Mayor of Banks Peninsula, I'm the Mayor of Christchurch and both of us understand facing change.

Since Bob took the helm over the hill he's looked at the economies of scale and led the charge to abolish his Council and fold it in with us. On this side of the hills in recent years I've presided over changing city managers, key executives and chopping the number of councillors in half.

Let this be proof that even the old saying that turkeys don't vote for an early Christmas can be proven wrong. We did. Because it was the right thing to do.

My point here is that when even famously action packed places like local government start making massive changes you can be sure major change is also taking place in the rest of the world.

My understanding is that within your own industry the winds of change are also blowing fast and furious. It does sometimes seem that very few sectors of our world are immune to this process of what looks like constant change and evolution.

This may well be because actually we are still in the very early stages of what history will show to have been as huge a change as the original industrial revolution.

We may have accepted computers as part of our daily world, but I do not think even the best of us has the slightest real idea of how huge the impact of new technology will turn out to be. It is a profound change that when you contrast it to the first industrial revolution has been surprisingly uneventful so far.

What new technology has done is take away some of the traditional rules of power and management. In civic affairs in the old days those at the top of the information pyramid held access to much better data than those at the bottom. Now you often find that your person on the street with access to a modem can come up with just as good information as you can.

The playing fields of power have been levelled. Old power systems that met the needs of the nation state don't work so good in the age of the modem.

Much like the trading city states of the European Renaissance modern cities do best when they do their own trade and economic development work. City to city and region to region ties are becoming just as important as traditional diplomatic ties.

Then there are the environmental issues like climate change to deal with. The insurance industry is already under heavy pressure from the effects of climate change. Governments, both central and local, will also have to move to deal with this huge new set of problems.

In Christchurch we became a triple bottom line Council a few years ago. That means that we have to look at the environmental and social costs of our decisions, along with the fiscal costs. It is a fascinating process to go through. With all these myriad major changes also come many opportunities.

I hope you hear of some of them during the next few days.