Where everyone gets a bargain

New Zealand is a strange country in a number of ways, one of which it is the fact that it largely lacks a manufacturing sector. Ever since the 1984-87 liberalization of the economy, manufacturing has been bleeding to death, except for food manufacturing and some small niches. Agriculture is the chief export industry, while most people are employed within a domestically-focused service sector. There are, of course, remnants of manufacturing: carpets and clothing here and there, some metal fabrication, etc. Cars haven't been assembled here since 1990, when the Holden plants in the Hutt Valley closed.

There were peculiarities associated with import-substitution manufacturing, of course. Televisions were built in Japan or Korea, disassembled, shipped to New Zealand, and reassembled. Costs were high, and quality was mixed. (On the other hand, it led to distinctive local innovations, as Kiwis have a practical culture that extols the virtues of getting more done with less. This is a sort of national myth - the bloke tinkering in his shed, fixing it with number 8 wire, etc.)

Wellington itself is situated within a strange regional economy. The city center itself is largely an administrative hub. It contains some corporate headquarters (although most have now drifted to Auckland or Australia) and many government departments. People tend to be employed either in government - in a puckish mood, I introduce myself to people by asking what ministry they work for - or in the burgeoning culture-and-cafes service sector, which is itself a recent invention. There is also a dockyard, and a movie colony in Miramar. It's a post-Fordist city.

The city contains the leftovers of a time when things were built and made there. My favorite cafe, Ernesto's, is located in what appears to be a former clothing factory. If you go down to Newtown, the more proletarian end of the city, you run across what used to be small factories: Milford Engineering, French and Colonial Door Factory...

On the whole, though, Wellington has always been a place where paper was pushed. It was, however, integrated within what seems to be a regional division of labor. If Wellington is an administrative center, Lower Hutt and Petone, which sit at the far end of the harbor, are still blue-collar towns. Storage tanks for oil and chemicals sit at the east end of the shorefront, and the other side of the road is filled with panelbeaters and machine repair places - the poor relatives of machine-making - and a few factories. It is - or possibly, was - a light-industry town.

Today, we took the train up to Lower Hutt for an afternoon of mini-golf and liquor - a great success, although nobody will ever see some of those balls again. While returning on the bus, we passed through the rougher streets of Lower Hutt, down the motorway that sits on the continental fault, and out near the Wellington docks. This last section gave me pause - for today, it's composed entirely of warehouses and big-box retailers. Furniture and mattress sellers seem particularly common. Many of the retail warehouses are obviously former factories. Machines emptied out to be junked or sent overseas, bright colors painted on outside, and shipping containers fresh off the docks disgorging their wares inside.

(The most odd example of this was a former wool-processing factory Anne and I saw on the coastal walk from Oriental Bay to Hataitai. It was weatherbeaten, long out of its manufacturing prime, and had been reclaimed as a huge shop selling wool products at outrageous prices to tourists.)

That dislocation of purpose - from production to consumption - strikes me as particularly important. (Perhaps it's just my Protestant ethic outing its prejudices!) I suppose the question is this: Do we measure people by what they do, or by what they consume? New Zealand, like the United States, has a consumption-driven economy. But does dignity reside in new consumer electronics, shipped halfway around the world, or do we find it in the eight hours (or more) that we spend every day in wage-labor?

New Zealand currently has a surplus of shipping containers. Essentially, a much greater volume of goods enters the country than leaves, and the spare boxes stay here. At the same time as this surplus has been accumulating, a disaffected human surplus has been building up in the prisons. Recently, the government floated a trial balloon: How about converting the shipping containers into cost-effective jail cells for the growing "dangerous classes"?