There is a story in a book by Roger Douglas about how New Zealand established a television assembly industry.
When they went to the Japanese to obtain the parts, the order was so small that the Japanese found it cheaper to take assembled televisions off the end of the production line and disassemble them again and put them in a box for New Zealand.
No, that isn’t a statistic from South Korea or China. It is New Zealand in 1963.
My in-laws live in Waihi and whenever we are up there I point out to the children the old television factory, just off the main road, and give them a little reminder about the bad old days when New Zealand destroyed value by manufacturing and assembling television sets. Somehow I must have been under the impression that there was just one television manufacturing factory in New Zealand.
But browsing in a second-hand bookshop the other day, I stumbled on Electric Household Durable Goods: Economic Aspects of their Manufacture in New Zealand, an NZIER Research Paper published in 1965. There is 15o pages of analysis, statistics and discussion – not everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it fascinating.
It doesn’t just have information on manufacturing. There is an interesting reminder of just how many…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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