Back in June an article entitled "From a C Lister, to the CEO of NZ Inc" was published in the ODT.
In it, entrepreneur Sir Ian Taylor took Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to task for describing himself and other successful New Zealand entrepreneurs as "C-listers".
Since then, he has also taken Luxon to task for his limited understanding of the place of the arts in human endeavour.
Luxon, as in his recent assertion about the unimportance of the arts in education, has a penchant for getting out of his depth in off-the-cuff statements.
We need to step back a bit and ask how and why this narrow understanding of our economic and social potential keeps surfacing.
In Luxon, we have the embodiment of the heavily promoted idea that only a businessman can run a country.
Yet, scant attention is usually given to the range of knowledge and ability to be found among business people.
High flying tech-entrepreneurs and humble retailers are all lumped together as though a uniformity of advanced ability is conferred simply by entering the fraternity of business.
Ironically, Luxon has not only drawn our attention to the existence of a range of abilities in business, but he has also, by denigrating some of our best business people as "C-listers", invited attention to what grade should be assigned to him.
Where does he fit into the pantheon of entrepreneurial business people?
The answer is, probably not at all, and this is not to denigrate him.
He simply belongs to a set of people in the business environment who make their careers in large corporate entities.
If they were government employees, we would describe them as bureaucrats.
Luxon, by education and inclination, is a corporate bureaucrat and this is a class of people in business who are not normally the gifted and driven entrepreneurs that build businesses up from scratch.
An earlier National leader, John Key, had a rather more entrepreneurial history.
As well as this he had an expansive personality and, as Sir Ian noted, included entrepreneurial people in his delegations whom Luxon would probably not consider worthy.
Perhaps, it was that Key recognised qualities in others which had made him successful, while Luxon, not having those qualities in himself, neither recognises nor values them in others.
We also seem, to be witnessing the rebirth of the Russian Empire in a form that Katherine the Great might have approved of.
Not to mention what is currently happening in India.
Moreover, we have seen the baton of Anglo-Saxon imperial globalism pass from the British to their American offspring.
This is from whence our own history draws its influences.
Along with other colonies, we were created to be an extractor of raw materials and a grower of food for the Empire.
This, with a minimum of processing, so that value could be added back at the hub of Empire for the concentration of wealth in the hands of an oligarchic and aristocratic elite.
And here we are, still following our colonial DNA.
With a long history of governments that default to an economic understanding unable to move beyond growing, extracting and exporting to where others process and add value, instead of us.
Seen in this light, Luxon makes sense as a man in the colonial administrator mould.
Our role is not to be competing for a place in the world, but to support the established order in the way we always have.
And, "in the way we always have" is the DNA at the heart of conservatism.
There is a further irony revealed in Sir Ian’s experience.
Governments of the centre in New Zealand are cast as "anti-business" by those most enamoured of Luxon’s world view.
Yet, the centrist, Clarke-Cullen and Ardern-Robertson governments have been revealed to be strongly supportive of business innovation and diversity in the wider context.
What Luxon has revealed with his "C-listers" comment is an underlying antipathy to technology-based, entrepreneurial businesses that might upset the established order.
He needs to decide whether he is a colonial governor or the CEO of NZ Inc.
• Glen Morgan is a retired teacher and former short-term member of the Greymouth District Council.
