Crux Podcast: Dunedin self confidence and Queenstown destruction

In a wide ranging Crux podcast Dunedin City councillor Jim O'Malley has identified "self confidence" as the missing ingredient for Dunedin to achieve its full potential. Councillor O'Malley also tells Crux that if Queenstown "really wants to destroy those valleys - keep going".

Councillor O'Malley is the influential chair of the DCC's infrastructure committee with a strong background in academia and the international pharmaceutical industry. He told Crux that his former employer, Pfizer, at one stage cut staff from 300,000 people to 100,000 people. "Two thirds of the staff got laid off."

"Large pharmaceutical companies are not immoral. They are amoral. To some extent amoral is more dangerous than immoral. Big organisations become less efficient and rely on bureaucracy to function. I worked on an important drug for five years that would have helped people all over the world, but it got cut at just one marketing meeting."

Crux asked if there were any lessons for local councils from big corporations.

"In order to exist as an entity, the big corporations have to be very bureaucratic. And so the challenge of a bureaucracy is that when you get down to the lowest level of management, have you cared for humanity? That's really what it is.

"In the case of the council, if you can let a unit perform properly and do its thing, they'll be happy in their job and they'll be doing their job well. Most council workers, I would argue, are at the council actually, because they have a sense of social ethics.

"The bureaucracy has to be enabling and cannot be in any way getting in the way. I've always watched the bureaucracy, and this is probably the role of the council, in my opinion."

Councillor O'Malley reckons that Dunedin is in the middle of a renaissance.

"We've been in a renaissance period for about four or five years. The Dunedin businesses that are emerging are high productivity businesses. They're bringing a decent amount of money into the city. We've been a medium growth city now for about six years. The sense of death and decay that was here in the 90s and the early 2000s is largely gone. And I would also say that the people who were perpetrating that myth are also gone, thank God.

"A lot of people will say in Dunedin, there are two personality types. There definitely are, in my opinion. There is (one) progressive. Let's make the city as best we can. The city can be amazing. And there's another group (two) saying don't spend a cent. The city's dying. I don't want to do anything. And that group dominated the 1990s and early 2000s and they almost killed the city in my opinion. We've been investing in ourselves continuously since then. And it's visible now."