He's a very thoughtful and convincing man and his vision was described as 'seductive' by someone I spoke with afterwards. I had to agree.
What I liked about Sir Paul was his plan to get this little country's economy performing to our social and environmental expectations.
The crux of his plan lies in shifting our effort into industries which can trade our intellectual capital on the global market.
We are a nation of clever people and we should make the most of it from our own shores and not let our brightest slip away. When he put up the OECD stats on how well our education system performs I was surprised that we rank so highly.
Other surprising realities for me were our current focus on tourism (and to a lesser extent our niche viticulture industry) not measuring up when it comes to the productivity of our country. They just don't bring in enough revenue to the country per person employed in these sectors to make us a wealthier and more liveable nation. He argued that if we continue to focus on tourism we'd become poorer (because we'd have more people working in low-wage jobs) and we'd be overrun by tourists at the expense of our environment.
Where the dairy sector does perform well on this productivity measure (around 3x better than tourism); the country is still working to find the right balance between it's economic contribution and environmental footprint.
I guess for him agriculture can only ever take NZ so far economically before the environmental trade-off is too great; and if we're to do better for ourselves we've got to find other random niches where we can trade on a resource that pays well and one that's not limited by our land - our brains.
Sir Paul's alternative is to give the entrepreneurs, the scientists and the 'crazies' a fair crack at diversifying our economy and finding those global niches. Investment in wide-ranging science and technology programmes from government is something we desperately need to give his vision a kick-start.
For me he struck a perfect balance between a society's needs for environmental, social and economic sustainability. He has undoubted vision, a thoughtful plan to get there and charisma to boot. I was enchanted and convinced.
He tells it better than I do so watch his theory here:
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