Alan Gibbs Interview

This is a really terrific seventy minute interview with NZ businessman Alan Gibbs. There is also a thirteen minute documentary spot with short snippets from the interview, but worth watching first to get some of the context of who Gibbs is and what he has done.

The interview is wide ranging. It starts off perhaps a little slowly, with talk about art and Gibbs' holiday property on the Kaipara harbour, but eventually gets into a lot of great insight and retrospective analysis of what was happening in NZ in the 60's and 70's, how NZ was transformed for the better in the 80's and early 90's by successive Labour and National governments, and how that transformation has not only benefited the country but has become so much a part of the Kiwi mindset that it is politically impossible to roll it back (though Helen and Jeanette are fiddling around the edges).

It is inconceivable that the vibrant Silicon Welly environment in which I now find myself could exist if not for the restructuring brought about twenty years ago.

Most of the people I'm working with now will have no memories of things ever being any other way. I have few enough myself, having emerged from the usual sheltered life in school and university just four months after the 1984 election, right into the thick of things.

I must have already gained some clues by then though: in 1981, my first election as a voter, I'd done the typical feel-good socialist thing and voted for Social Credit. By 1984 I'd actually read the Social Credit monetary theories, and not only understood them but realized they were a crock. I'd read a few other things by then too, such as Friedman's "Free To Choose" (1980) and Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" (1944). Even Hofstadter's philosophical and mathematical "Gödel, Escher, Bach" (1979) had caused me to seek out Alexrod's "The Evolution of Cooperation" (1981 paper, 1984 book) which had obvious bearings on economics.

All of this left no choice but to vote for Bob Jones' "New Zealand Party", and then sit back in astonishment as 90% of their policy was implemented by Labour of all people!

As Gibbs says in the interview, this was one of the rare moments in history where politicians cared more about principle and doing the right thing than about getting reelected (even though they did, until Lange's infamous "cup of tea").

And thank goodness for that.