One week after Prime Minister Christopher Luxon riled the small business community with his commentary in Rotorua, another suit-and-tied Chris was on the ground to try to capitalise on the opportunity.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins was in Rotorua on Tuesday, speaking with local small businesses about what his party had to offer as questions swirled about Luxon’s leadership.
Hipkins announced new funds for startup assistance and AI support for small businesses. One local business says the support is welcome, but on the AI front, small businesses want to see strong, principled leadership – not an eagerness to ride the bandwagon.
Hipkins and his entourage took questions outside the Rotorua isite. A group of teenage boys in balaclavas and hoodies milled just out of view, honouring their promise to keep quiet in exchange for front row seats.
Earlier, one of them paraded in front of a news camera with a message to “stay in school, kids, make good decisions”. One of his friends said the local skate park upgrade was “pretty sick”, but didn’t have much to say about small business.
As the boys enjoyed the camera, local man Paul Khan took a seat on a nearby bench. Khan said he was at the small business meeting Luxon spoke at, and said the best thing the Prime Minister could do at the moment was resign.
Khan didn’t have a rosy view of what the opposition had to offer, saying the only constants in life were death and taxes. Khan said “honestly, it’s fuckall political parties can do for small businesses – the job of political entities is to collect as much tax from businesses as they possibly can”.
Khan also thought “fixing the basics is going to be a big ask because there’s so many endocrine disruptors within the natural environment that he’s literally gone and chemically castrated the next two generations of humanity”.
Hipkins thinks there’s more he can offer.
Labour recently announced it would restart the apprenticeship boost programme, giving $500 a month to small businesses to take on an apprentice for the first two years. Now, Hipkins says the party will roll out or expand a suite of funds to support small businesses in other ways, including a focus on AI.
The new proposed fund offers small businesses $2 million a year to “get ahead” with AI. Labour also wants to boost general AI adoption, extend the AI advisory pilot funding to $3m a year, and increase the founder and startup support programme by $4m a year.
Most of the questions that followed were about the other Chris, who had called an emergency caucus meeting earlier in the day to discuss his leadership. Small business – which started the current leadership crisis – played second fiddle.
The standup followed visits to local small businesses, and was followed by one more of the same. Hipkins and his entourage travelled to Bossit and Top Gear to chat with staff and tour the facilities.
Bossit is a small business upscaler, helping other businesses get off the ground and avoid some common mistakes. Top Gear makes custom enclosed trailers.
As Bossit’s co-founder Miriam Hewson takes Hipkins on a tour, the other half of the operation, Glenn McLeary, tells Newsroom about what small businesses really want out of their politicians, and out of the AI boom.
McLeary is friends with Rotorua Business Chamber chief executive Melanie Short, who moderated the discussion which led to Luxon’s “parent-child mentality” speech to business leaders, and subsequent apology.
McLeary says he wants to see politicians get on the ground and talk to real people, to give them some reassurance. Business owners “aren’t looking for handouts, they’re just looking for some confidence that they can employ people”, he says.
McLeary gestures towards the Top Gear garage. Hewson is the business development lead here, and the garage shares a building with Bossit. McLeary says the business is expanding to Australia, because the market there is more confident.
The business community is in a state of uncertainty, McLeary says. The pandemic threw things into disarray, and when they came out of it, the entire business world was disrupted by AI.
When it comes to AI, McLeary says you’re “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. He says the offer of support is helpful, but what he really wants to see is strong, principled leadership: someone to say: “Okay, we’re heading this way, and this is how we’re going to do it.”
McLeary thinks New Zealand has an opportunity to have “another nuclear free moment”. He thinks we can stand up to the big tech companies and say “we can build data centres, but we’re only storing ethical data”. More than that, he wants the government – whoever it is – to stand up for small businesses and their data.
“A lot of small business are just shitting themselves. They’re just going, ‘well, we’ve built all this technology, we’ve developed these amazing products, but somebody can come along and steal it, and what can we do about it? Nothing’.”
He’s talking about big tech companies mining creative works for data to feed their algorithms. It frustrates him to see countries and governments all jumping on the AI bandwagon while the creative industries which feed the technology fall by the wayside, without compensation.
McLeary says, at the moment, everyone is saying “let’s just ride this AI wave”. Where, he asks:
“into oblivion?”
McLeary doesn’t want to see New Zealand become “another cog in the machine” of big AI, and says he wants to see a leader tell those companies that if they want to set up shop in New Zealand, they’ll have to pay for all the local industries they’ve disrupted: creative works, design studios – even news media.
“We’ve got to make a stand, because no one else is going to,” he says. In the meantime, Labour’s promise of AI support and National’s hunger to roll it out nationwide are not enough.
