The New Zealand Paradox

The rise of China is profoundly altering the balance of power in the Asia-Pacific region. This report examines these issues and suggests the course that New Zealand should chart to ensure that its interests in the peace and stability of the Asia Pacific are maintained.

The kea, a crow-sized parrot that lives in the rugged mountains of New Zealand, is considered by some a playful comic and by others a vicious killer. Its true character is a mystery that biologists have debated for more than a century. Judy Diamond and Alan Bond have written a comprehensive account of the kea's contradictory nature, and their conclusions cast new light on the origins of behavioral flexibility and the problem of species survival in human environments everywhere. New Zealand's geological remoteness has made the country home to a bizarre assemblage of plants and animals that are wholly unlike anything found elsewhere. Keas are native only to the South Island, breeding high in the rigorous, unforgiving environment of the Southern Alps. Bold, curious, and ingeniously destructive, keas have a complex social system that includes extensive play behavior. Like coyotes, crows, and humans, keas are "open-program" animals with an unusual ability to learn and to create new solutions to whatever problems they encounter. Diamond and Bond present the kea's story from historical and contemporary perspectives and include observations from their years of field work. A comparison of the kea's behavior and ecology with that of its closest relative, the kaka of New Zealand's lowland rain forests, yields insights into the origins of the kea's extraordinary adaptability. The authors conclude that the kea's high level of sociality is a key factor in the flexible lifestyle that probably evolved in response to the alpine habitat's unreliable food resources and has allowed the bird to survive the extermination of much of its original ecosystem. But adaptability has its limits, as the authors make clear when describing present-day interactions between keas and humans and the attempts to achieve a peaceful coexistence.

"New Zealand had the fifth highest GDP per capita in the OECD in 1960; today we are 27th. The standard explanation for what went wrong involves some nonsense about commodity prices, Rob Muldoon and distance to markets. In The Pine Tree Paradox Michael Parker argues that our economic decline stems simply from our continuing reliance on agriculture. Today, developed countries get richer by capitalising on good ideas, not by growing things. Pine trees grow faster in New Zealand than anywhere else in the world. Yet, pine trees have not made us rich. However, because of the bounty of our land, we continue to believe that agriculture - goats, kiwifruit, venison, wine - will save us. The problem is not with our trees. The problem is that we live in the 21st century. The Pine Tree Paradox sets out a vision for New Zealand driven by innovation, not agriculture. While "being innovative" is orthodox economic thinking in New Zealand today, our approach is not nearly bold enough. A clear-eyed review of our national strengths reveals that we are well-placed to transform our economy into a global centre of innovation. What is required is a world-class university: Stanford on the Waitemata. Parker contrasts our economic experience with that of Northern California and asks: why not us? Building this future will be slow and costly. But - as the last 50 years have proved - not as costly as doing nothing"--Book jacket.

In an interrelated and increasingly complex, dynamic and globalised security environment, New Zealand faces a range of complex and multifaceted non-traditional threats. They range from trade insecurity to terrorism and transnational crime, disputes over the control and exploitation of resources, and tensions linked to ideological, cultural and religious differences. The volume's contributors include local and international academics alongside experts who have extensive New Zealand security-sector expertise in defence, diplomacy, national security coordination, intelligence, policing, trade security and bordermanagement.New Zealand National Security: Challenges, Trends and Issues situates New Zealand within its broader political and regional security context and the various great and minor power tensions occurring within the Asia Pacific and South Pacific regions. It looks at how to protect New Zealand's border and the zones where its interests meet the world; it examines alternative ways of thinking and doing New Zealand's national security; and it looks at looming national security questions. It aims to provide New Zealanders with a critical awareness of the various salient security trends, challenges and opportunities to initiate a &‘whole of society' discussion of security.

Biogeography and Evolution in New Zealand provides the first in-depth treatment of the biogeography of New Zealand, a region that has been a place of long-enduring interest to ecologists, evolutionary scientists, geographers, geologists, and scientists in related disciplines. It serves as a key addition to the contemporary discussion on regionalization—how is New Zealand different from the rest of the world? With what other areas does it share its geology, history, and biota? Do new molecular phylogenies show that New Zealand may be seen as a biological ‘parallel universe’ within global evolution?

In a brilliant intellectual adventure that ranges from David Ricardo and Adam Smith to economic geography and the science of complex networks, Shaun Hendy and Paul Callaghan explore how New Zealanders can learn to live off knowledge rather than nature. The key to increasing New Zealand’s prosperity, they argue, is innovation in high-tech niches. To catch up with the countries that lure young Kiwis away, New Zealand needs to start innovating like a city of four million people; it needs to start taking science seriously; it needs to start seeing its people as people of learning, not just of the land. Get off the Grass provides a readable introduction to a wide variety of ideas including economic geography, network theory, and complexity theory; offers unique insights into the New Zealand economy and its long-term prospects; adds to current debates worldwide about innovation, science, economic growth, and networks.

What would a history of New Zealand look like that rejected Thomas Carlyle’s definition of history as ‘the biography of great men’, and focused instead on the experiences of women? One that shifted the angle of vision and examined the stages of this country’s development from the points of view of wives, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts? That considered their lives as distinct from (though often unwillingly influenced by) those of history’s ‘great men’? In her ground-breaking History of New Zealand Women, Barbara Brookes provides just such a history. This is more than an account of women in New Zealand, from those who arrived on the first waka to the Grammy and Man Booker Prize-winning young women of the current decade. It is a comprehensive history of New Zealand seen through a female lens. Brookes argues that while European men erected the political scaffolding to create a small nation, women created the infrastructure necessary for colonial society to succeed. Concepts of home, marriage and family brought by settler women, and integral to the developing state, transformed the lives of Māori women. The small scale of New Zealand society facilitated rapid change so that, by the twenty-first century, women are no longer defined by family contexts. In her long-awaited book, Barbara Brookes traces the factors that drove that change. Her lively narrative draws on a wide variety of sources to map the importance in women’s lives not just of legal and economic changes, but of smaller joys, such as the arrival of a piano from England, or the freedom of riding a bicycle.