OPINION: Like most New Zealanders, my colleagues and I found it a blow last week to be moving backwards in the Covid alert levels.

But if there are any lessons, one is that we had perhaps got a little too settled and complacent, even as we were aware that other locations, the likes of Melbourne, Hong Kong and Vietnam, had all faced similar setbacks.

It’s a testing time, and one we hope will end quickly and allow us to return to more normal lives. My own view is that thinking we will go “back to normal” is understandable, but essentially wishful, thinking. Permanent economic and societal changes are happening.

It was also a reminder that these are extraordinary times. We need to take the opportunity we have to do some long-term planning for New Zealand’s future, not our greatest strength, as I have argued before.

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For the first time in living memory, the political debate is not about whether the Government should spend money. Both major parties agree on that. The question is: Spending on what?

In Parliament’s next term, it is set to spend about 17 years’ worth of discretionary Government funding to help with economic recovery from Covid-19. So, getting it right is crucial.

Reading recent news coverage of skills shortages across the country was pretty dispiriting. From Southland to Northland, concerns have been raised about skills shortages in a diverse range of occupations, au pairs, tractor and heavy machinery drivers, and construction workers, to name just a few.

We have heard that a manager for a $1.2 billion wastewater project in Auckland had returned home to Italy, and that Watercare is worried it won’t have sufficient foreign technicians to operate a German tunnel-boring machine when it arrives later this year.

Most New Zealanders will have long ago accepted, perhaps grudgingly, that our country doesn’t have the manufacturing capacity to compete with major international players when it comes to big stuff like trains and machinery.

After all, the heyday of Dunedin’s Hillside Railway Workshops, which produced thousands of train wagons in the twentieth century, is long gone. Here in Wellington, our trains now come from Korea and many of our electric buses come from China.

But it’s a shock to realise that New Zealand, with its eight universities, doesn’t have enough home-grown technical skills to ensure that critical infrastructure projects stay on track.

Building tunnels, bridges, roads and looking after young children are not what we normally see as cutting-edge technology. These industries have been around for a while; indeed, we recently built some pretty good tunnels here in New Zealand.

During my time in Seoul in the 1990s, South Korea decided it needed a high-speed train between its two largest cities. French, German and Japanese companies were all bidding.

What fascinated me was that while quality and price were important, the hardest bargain the Koreans drove the various bidders was on the technological transfer of knowledge.

Now, some 30 years later, South Korea builds trains for the world, including New Zealand.

Technology transfer from other countries, alongside a hefty investment in research and development, has helped South Korea grow from an agrarian nation (until 1976 it received food aid from New Zealand) into a global leader in innovation.

It now ranks second only to Germany in Bloomberg’s 2020 Innovation Index (Singapore came in third place; New Zealand came in at number 29), and in fact topped the list for the previous six years.

Technology transfer helped Asian economies grow, and it continues today with North Asian countries transferring their knowledge to Southeast Asian ones. Despite a common sentiment this knowledge was ‘stolen’, a lot of it was ‘bought’ during big infrastructure spends.

Now, before a Rogernomics theologian reading this accuses me of wanting to go back to the good ol’ days, or to turn New Zealand into a version of self-reliant North Korea, no, I do not. But we do need to think about whether the current model of contracting-in expertise is the most prudent to have. It’s not a binary choice between totally open and totally closed.

As New Zealand taxpayers contribute $50b of funding for Covid-19 recovery initiatives, including infrastructure projects designed to keep people employed, it seems reasonable to at least consider that we extract as much intellectual property as possible in the contract process.

And that we use some of our excellent taxpayer-funded tertiary institutions to focus on New Zealand’s development needs.

Given that Asian countries have undertaken massive infrastructure developments in the last decades, and seen a commensurate rise up the value and innovation chains, they may be able to teach us a few lessons on how to ensure the taxpayer ends up with the most value for its money.

And in this case, value doesn’t necessarily mean cheapest.

– Simon Draper is the executive director of the Asia New Zealand Foundation Te Whītau Tūhono