Speech Notes
Mayor Of North Shore City
George Wood

DATE: August 30, 2007
EVENT: ENS Business Awards

Acknowledge:
Joint Principal SponsorsSponsor Westpac and Enterprise North Shore + twelve+ category sponsors
Enterprise North Shore ChairmaenENS Chairmen, Trustees and Staff
Judges, Finalist businessessFinalists
Our host, the North Harbour Stadium
Members of the media
Ladies and gentlemen

Firstly, congratulations to ALL finalists for this extra special 10th anniversary Westpac Enterprise North Shore Business Excellence Awards.

We are here celebrating 10 years of excellently supporting excellence.

Tonight’s venue, our North Harbour Stadium, is also turning ten this year: Congratulations Reno, Dianne, Derek - and all trustees past and present - for the contribution you’ve made to our community.

On a personal note, I would like to pay tribute to all North Shore businesses for the amazing work you do every day to make this city such a great place to work and live.

You’re a credit to our City and I salute you.

Our economy is strong

We’re in good heart

But, we can’t rest on our laurels and we can do better.

We must aim higher – like being in the top half of the OECD rankings for instance!

Strong dairy prices are great for the heartland and the balance of payments but, back on the Shore, the cows have left Smales Farm.

Our future is in technology, in high value products and services and in OUR highly skilled people.

The tertiary education facilities and, particularly, the e-centre are our farms - and they feed our knowledge economy.

As many of you have told me over recent years, we have a skills shortage in critical areas and it’s slowing our progress like a dial-up dis-connection.

High speed, highly educated, high performing: that’s what we deserve.

I’ve been lobbying the Government, the Tertiary Education Commission and tertiary institutions across the region to provide the courses needed to develop the human resources that will fuel your growth.

I’m increasingly frustrated that the organisation that funds our institutions spends more time and money conducting repeated feasibility studies than taking action to authorise the courses that will actually produce the skilled graduates we need. This is particularly in the sub-degree – trade training areas.

Just this week the Department of Labour’s Deputy Secretary for Work Directions issued a statement saying skill shortages will be a long-term feature of New Zealand's labour market.

Sorry, but we’ve been raising that flag ourselves for quite a while now and I do NOT accept that skill shortages are an inevitable consequence of strong economic growth.

Rather, they are a symptom of a failure to plan and prepare for success.

Since when have Kiwis had to accept that we can’t grow our own? We’ve been doing it for years but we need the funding to allow academia to play its part - and fast.

Our secondary schools are among the best in the country and we have two tertiary campuses on the Shore.

What we do not have are the facilities for sub-degree – trade training areas.

We have the raw talent resident in our city and many smart migrants strengthening the labour pool.

Our working environment is hard to beat too so we have many advantages our competitor cities can only dream about.

I urge you to make your voice heard in Government and in the halls of learning and tell the educators what skills your business needs to prosper. It’s the best investment we can ever make in our future.

Once again, congratulations to you all and I wish you all the very best.

© Scoop Media