New Zealanders are very nice people. This fact has been internationally highlighted with a recent study on world generosity. Australian and New Zealanders are the most giving people in the world.
Philanthropy and community have become cultural buzz words, something we strive for. The highest forms of compliment are being considered generous, kind, humble and loyal.
While it is hard to fault people for being nice, it can make them less able to question other people’s integrity and this is amounting to huge economic problems.
The other day my sister told me a story which summarised this issue well.
She said a man was hovering around her at the ATM and she didn't feel comfortable, but didn't cover her pin, because she felt it would be rude. Even with strangers, we don't want them to feel we mistrust them, to the point we take financial risks rather than cause them some slight embarrassment.
In business, even big business, like South Canterbury Finance Company, this problem remains the same. Alan Hubbard has lived an admirable life. He's lent and given money based on trust and goodwill, and built a legacy of people who owe their success to his generosity.
But more rigorous checks and balances on behalf of investors and loan takers could have meant taxpayers weren't left so out of pocket. Through poor business practices, and (I imagine) reluctance to be rude or disrespectful to a man who inspired prosperity in the region and cut a lot of people a lot of slack, New Zealanders have ended up footing the bill for Hubbard's generosity.
If we are playing on a global economic platform, then the costs and consequences of bad business have a nationwide effect. Bankruptcy hurts a lot of people - it is generally followed by divorce and, in the worst cases, suicide.
The concern surrounding rural New Zealand's niceness is not new. In August, KPMG’s agribusiness partner Ian Proudfoot said he was concerned about trust based rural management meaning fraud wasn’t being detected in the agricultural sector.
For a community that prides itself on being the backbone of the economy, it seems our rural trusting nature is creating a negligent and insecure framework for the nation’s economy. There are people who spend years learning how to look after money. But commerce degrees and business people have a stigma associated with them. In New Zealand, it's not nice or respectable to openly crave more money.
One of the big cultural differences between New Zealand and Japan was that over there it took years for them to get to know someone well enough to do business with them.
It's not that they don't like you, or that they're rude, it's just you don't trust just anyone with your livelihood - to them it’s common sense.
Years might be extreme, but I can’t help but wonder if people were a little bit ruder and asked tougher questions and were a little less trusting, some of the problems we are having in the rural financial sector could be deflected early on as the aftermath of business failure is quite the opposite of nice.
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