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- Future events and activities
- News from the World of Manufacturing
- Other News of Interest to Manufacturing
- Fun Facts
Future events and activities
Join MAKE│NZ for Coffee for Makers—six informal morning catch-ups celebrating Made in New Zealand week.
It’s a chance to connect with others in the sector, share what’s happening at your business and get to know the people making things in our community.
Choose whichever venue suits you:
☕ Monday 23 November: Artisan Bakery by Rangiora Bakery
☕ Tuesday 24 November: Untouched World Kitchen (Harewood)
☕ Wednesday 25 November: Cafe Fix (Bromley)
☕ Thursday 26 November: Allpress Espresso (Addington)
☕ Friday 27 November: Organika – Honey and Coffee (Rolleston)
☕ Monday 30 November: Columbus Coffee Hornby
All catch-ups run from 7:30–8:30 am. Pop in for 10 minutes or stay for the hour.
For MAKE│NZ members, coffee’s on us. Non-members in Manufacturing are very welcome too, with a half-price coffee to enjoy while we catch up.
Invite your neighbouring manufacturer or pass this invitation on to a business mate who could do with a coffee.
The more local manufacturers we can bring together to celebrate Made in New Zealand, the better!
Bring your business card and come say hello—we’d love to see you there.
Swell have reached out to let us know about an upcoming event for manufacturers –
Innovation Funding on Tap
It’ll be a relaxed afternoon exploring innovation funding opportunities for Kiwi businesses, including the R&D Tax Incentive. We’ll also hear from Mars Bioimaging about their R&D funding journey, followed by drinks and networking on us.
You can find more details and RSVP here – Innovation Funding on Tap – Christchurch
News from the World of Manufacturing
•Phew – it’s over and done with, finally!
It is.
We may not know the outcome yet but it is fixed in terms of the number of votes cast. We trust the barrage of pre-election policy announcements and poll results didn’t unduly distract you from the business of meeting customer expectations and making money in your manufacturing operations.
You may – or may not – be happy with the outcome. But that doesn’t really matter (anymore). What matters now is to make whoever will (eventually) take up the portfolios of key interest to manufacturers aware of what manufacturers need to play their part in making the boat (NZ, Inc.) go faster. Because that’s one thing they all promised to have as a top priority – growing New Zealand’s economy. Which won’t happen without a contribution from a strong manufacturing sector.
We suggest that key portfolios from a manufacturer’s perspective will be:
Economic Development
For an overall strategy on how to grow our economy and the contribution of different sectors to that growth. This needs to go well beyond just “doubling exports from more primary industry products and tourism”
Finance / Treasury
For a reform of the current accelerated depreciation scheme (Investment Boost). From the ‘small benefits to all’ (scattergun) approach of the current scheme to providing much larger benefits for a carefully targeted set of investments in sustainable improvements in productivity
Vocational Education and Immigration
For a coordinated approach to meeting future needs in terms of skill sets and sheer number in the face of demographic challenges
Energy
For a long-term plan, supported by government and the opposition on the day, to provide energy reliably from sustainable sources and at a cost that allows New Zealand manufacturers to remain globally competitive
R&D / Innovation
International comparisons keep showing New Zealand as a country that is much better at inventing things than at taking them to the market at scale. And yet current support schemes still very much favour the ‘inventing things’ part
Trade and Procurement
Change from an approach that appears to be governed by the principle of adhering to the very last letter of the WTO Rules to an approach that acknowledges that the rules of the game have changed and that New Zealand must – albeit carefully, because we are usually at the short end of the stick – adjust its approach to fit a world where trade is more subject to geopolitical realities than WTO Rules.
MAKE│NZ will be hosting a roundtable discussion with senior Canterbury business leaders on November 23rd to work out what key pain points for manufacturers the new government can and needs to address. If you think you fit the bill and are keen to attend, please let us know: dieter@makenz.org
Other News of Interest to Manufacturing
•Two very different approaches to answering the same question: Given that we are going through a major change in our workforce, driven by the introduction of new (digital) technologies, what will the outcome be – what will the future of work look like?
The first attempt to answer is to look at a historical parallel – a study looking at the impact on jobs when new production technologies were introduced to boot making in Victorian England. The other one, which will present next week, attempts to predict what the impact will be of increasing automation across a range of industries and professions in the US over the next ten years.
Starting with boot making:
In what looks like an incredible diligent and exhaustive piece of research, the author analysed what happened to boot making in England between 1851 and 1911, with the change from artisan to industrial production setting in around 1861 after the use of sewing machines for boot making had been introduced a few years earlier. Here’s what the numbers look like:
At a very high level, overall employment changed little, even increase a bit, but the skills profiles changed dramatically. Between 1851 and 1911, approximately 153,000 artisanal jobs disappeared and 140,000 new, more specialised jobs emerged.
What happened at the individual-worker level? For the men, almost 58% remained in artisan boot making, with only a very small number finding employment in the ‘new’ industrial boot making businesses.
For the women, only a small proportion stayed in boot making and of those who left, the majority – exactly half of the original workforce – ended up in unemployment. In parallel to the changes in who was employed in boot making businesses, there was also a major change in the location of these businesses:
The author of the study summarises his findings thus: “Incumbent workers did not simply move from the old jobs into the new ones. Nor, for the most part, were they displaced. Male incumbents experienced very little displacement and continued in the traditional bespoke work for which they had trained, although the experience of female incumbents was markedly different.
Instead, adjustment operated primarily through young cohorts. On the destruction side, as mechanisation drove a decline in demand for artisanal labour, there was a collapse of entry into the profession. Young men became substantially less likely to enter, and would have borne meaningful costs had they persisted. On the creation side, the new and more specialized jobs were also taken up predominantly by young workers, and overwhelmingly by those born in the counties in which the new work emerged. Adjustment on both sides of the transition – destruction and creation – therefore operated via young cohorts. However, while bookmaking became a less viable option for young people across most of England, the new opportunities were concentrated in only a few counties. If technological change generated inequalities in this transition, it did so primarily by tilting young people’s access to opportunity.”
One final note, also mentioned in the study: mechanisation vastly improved productivity in boot making. In 1911, the same-size workforce (more or less) as before produced at lot more boots overall than the artisanal workforce before. On the other hand, boots made in the new factories were considerable cheaper, growing the number of people able to afford them.
Fun Facts (some of them not so funny)
•If the following sounds like it’s taken straight out of a 101 Statistics course, we apologise. It’s just that one might question the merit of a lot of focus of the media and the commentariat on polls, the purpose being to predict the outcome of the recent election. We are, of course, too late with this – keep it in mind for 2029. Below we focus on the data from one particular poll, and the two largest parties:
As you can see, the 95% confidence intervals for the two parties overlap for all but the April poll. The 95% confidence interval, in the poll results presented as their ‘Margin of Error’, shows the range of point estimates of the vote share that the true value would fall into in 95 out of a 100 times, if you repeated the sampling on a given date in the same population 100 times. For the National Party, the point estimates for all polls except the one for mid-October fall into more or less the same confidence interval; for the Labour Party the same is true for all the polls at least since August.
What does that mean? Quite unscientifically – we don’t have access to the data to perform the necessary statistical tests – we can still say with some confidence that there is no significant difference in the point estimates for National since June – apart from the mid-October poll, and the same would be true for Labour at least since the August poll. Equally, we’d be on fairly safe ground to claim that there is no significant difference between the estimates for National and Labour since August, again except for mid-October. Compare that to the lively debate among journalists each time a new poll came out “National is down by 1.5%, what might that mean for the election?”
There is nothing wrong with the polling as such. The question is where the value is in the high frequency (weekly) six weeks before the election, and spending so much airtime on commenting on them – other than grist to the mill for journalists. It’s a little bit like children in December waking up every morning wondering what presents they will get from their parents for Christmas. It may be exciting and entertaining, but they will still have to wait until December 25 to find out. As our Prime Minister repeatedly said: “The only poll that matters…”
•On of the items on the agenda for the new government will be whether to proceed with the contract for building a floating LNG terminal in New Plymouth as per the current government’s plans. There are many factors to be considered in this decision, future global market LNG prices being one of them. These are high at the moment because unlike the situation with oil where much appears to be now coming through the Strait of Hormuz again, there is little LNG being exported from the Gulf region. In contrast to that, the mid-term outlook is much more positive, irrespective of the outcome of the current Gulf war:
•Q3 employment numbers in the US have come out (much) stronger than expected – with an average of an additional 137,000 jobs added each month. October was particularly strong, with 165,000 additional jobs created. Not all sectors showed the same upward trend, though, with manufacturing – like other major contributors to GDP – remaining pretty much flat:
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