After hearing about a Christchurch cafe getting shafted by a rival mail-order coffee service based offshore, entrepreneur Ben Kepes started thinking about the "uneven playing field" Kiwi companies are forced to operate on due to our free trade position.
Photo: Mads Schmidt / Unsplash
It's time we had an honest conversation about the tradeoffs that come with New Zealand's liberality towards overseas businesses trading here, he tells Jesse Mulligan.
While it isn't easy for a New Zealand business to set up overseas, it was very easy for this overseas-based company to pose as a Kiwi-based company, Ben says.
"[The coffee company] looks to all intents and purposes like a NZ company with a NZ internet address and all that sort of good stuff but it's not. It's a dude sitting somewhere else - in this case, Melbourne, but it could easily have been Madras or anywhere else in the world."
Photo: Supplied
Ben's Kiwi-owned and operated clothing company Cactus Outdoors is forced to compete with overseas brands that either describe their gear as 'Made of NZ' (when it's not) or feature New Zealand scenery on their packaging.
If New Zealand wants to build a resilient and vibrant economy, it's crazy to give over our unique intellectual property - in the form of images - to non-New Zealanders, he says.
"We're a little economy that's trying to pay for our health, social welfare, all the good stuff that the government needs to do and at the end of the day… we shouldn't be leading the way in making it that much easier for people to do stuff here when they're not supporting the stuff we need to do as a society to build equity and keep people safe."
It's time New Zealanders took a hard look at the tradeoffs that come with free trade, Ben says.
"At the end of the day a country of 5 million can't change global economic models so to try and do so by being the most liberal of all is just self-sacrifice.
"We should liberalise trade at a similar rate to what our competitors liberalise trade. That's not to say we should be a follower, but we should be going lockstep with them."
To find out if a business domain (website) is New Zealand-owned, people can look up a company URL (web address) on the WHOIS website.
