With all due respect to the Christchurch technology sector, and I have a great deal of respect for it, think of the inefficiency and waste involved if we’d had to develop and maintain our own Microsoft, meeting only New Zealand needs, our own Boeing, our own Vodafone.
And equally, the prospects for our own innovators – Tait Electronics or Aoraki Corporation, say – would have been bleak had they been limited to New Zealand sales alone. As a nation, we turned inwards in the late 1930s, taking the protectionist route to development. The advocates of that change were unquestionably well-motivated.