 te manu ki no錒a kapa, te karaka Te Kotcasesa kgumiefrodatii yōtua, te te wumbanaranga, te marua, te iataaive. rangatira ma tēnā koutou katoa. Ngā rangatira o te EIJF tēnā koutou katoa. Ngā manuhiri o te au, no mai, no mai, haere mai ki Aotearoa nei. Kia ora, everyone. Ko, Nigel Bickel, tako ingoa, te kai whaka haere tua whenua. I'm Nigel Bickel. Great pleasure to be here. Really grateful for the opportunity of talking with you all. As Joseph said, really cool relationship with the Edmund Hillary Fellowship and the Global Impact Visa. What started as a pretty interesting conversation in a smaller environment than this out in Whitemans Valley a few years ago that could never have imagined would evolve into this as it stands today and store a really exciting future in front of us. So to all of the fellows, can I say congratulations and good on you for wanting to be here to try and change the course of humanity from New Zealand. We're really excited to have you all and pretty inspired every day by the power of entrepreneurship when it's combined with the values of truly believing that we can solve some of the biggest problems facing the world by this sort of way of working. So I'm here first time talking to New Frontiers in a new job other than being the head of immigration in New Zealand. And my new job is the head of what's called the Provincial Development Unit and the centrepiece of the new coalition government's agreement called the Provincial Growth Fund, which is a $3 billion fund that I want to kind of give you a little bit of information about today. But before we do that, I'm just going to play a quick little video. The provinces have hit in gems that haven't been discovered yet and unless we evolve and develop, New Zealand will never reach its true potential. People sometimes forget how much talent there really is in Provincial New Zealand. It's definitely been challenging trying to start a business in Northland. I felt a bit isolated and there wasn't as much resources and help for me. The regions of the gats, the kidneys, the lungs of the whole country and the cities of the brains, and just like in a body, we all need each other. We've never seen a regional collaboration at this level, so it does present the opportunity for all of our collective will and minds to come together to solve some of the broad challenges. The Provincial Growth Fund is really going to help those regions to unlock the potential that they've had sitting there waiting. We can now identify the opportunities and have a fund and government support to help back those regions up and achieve outcomes which are going to be fantastic for New Zealand. What I want to say now is, nai hewhai kōrero o te rangatera Norman Kirk i tine wahai rungo mot tātou katoa. E-46 tino hiehia ko te aroa tōrahi, te tōroa he mahi tahi, te tōrō, te whānau mot te whare, te tōa whā kiawhai tūmana kō te reanga. So, there was a leader in New Zealand, a Prime Minister in the 1970s of New Zealand, Norman Kirk, the late Norman Kirk, who said, you know, when you bore it all down, the things that matter for New Zealanders and therefore New Zealand, it's actually pretty simple and Kiwis don't actually ask for a lot. They ask for someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work, and something to aspire to for their families and communities. Now, I think it's a pretty cool encapsulation of the cope-up of what we're trying to do here. And the reality is, in a New Zealand context, 40% of the people of New Zealand live outside of our urban centres. And for a whole lot of reasons, some of our regions haven't done so well. And groups of populations in our country, whether we're talking about 80,000 kids that aren't in education, employment or training, or some of our population, whether it be Māori or Pacific that don't enjoy the same level of employment as New Zealand European, all the sort of, say, wages in the economy. And you overlay that also in terms of all the global drivers that you guys understand, is our economy is also transitioning as we have to think about some new futures in terms of whether it be as a primary producing nation or in terms of the production of energy or future focus on food, energy that's different from the economy today. A more digital economy that's changing the nature of work. Now, these transitions will happen over a period of time, but really the fund is a $3 billion investment fund over the next three years that's looking to achieve a number of things. It's looking to be very focused on the regions, so it's investment that's not going to go into our main urban centres, that looks to enhance economic development opportunities, looking to creating sustainable jobs, boosting social inclusion and participation, trying to build resilience in our communities, and also looking to contribute towards the aspiration that the new government set around a carbon zero economy. And so what are the things that we can do to help support that programme? So what we're really looking to do with the fund that was announced five weeks ago is $3 billion of investments to make over the next three years. There are three tiers to the fund where we're looking to invest in regional initiatives and capacity building to invest in sectors. This will include the forestry sector and the government's commitment to planting 1 billion trees over the next 10 years. And in the sorts of remedial infrastructure that will go to supporting our regions to grow, to help transition some of our sectors, to leverage some of the undoubted potential and capacity that we've got in our regions, but that is ultimately about creating economic activity not in an end in itself, but economic activity that will create more and better jobs that we deliberately want to move some of our young rangatahi, our neat population, those 80,000 kids that aren't in education, employment and training, and some of the people that haven't benefited from the growth that's incurred in New Zealand into some better opportunities for themselves and their families. Over the last few years we have had a programme of workers not the first time a government's thought about how do we support the regions to develop and thrive. So a lot of our regions have well thought through regional action plans that look to leverage what they see as their comparative economic advantages. I guess the challenge that I was really excited about talking with you all today is the opportunity to, as entrepreneurs and innovators that have bought into the whole excitement about this co-papa of making the world, and I guess the opportunity in this context is New Zealand and our regions a more equitable place, is how do you potentially get to collaborate and co-create with some of our regions and sectors a set of propositions where there is certainly my first time as a public servant of 30 years the first time that I can remember where the government has actually allocated $3 billion to invest. So we are going to be looking to have a multiplier effect here. This isn't $3 billion of government grants we are looking to get alongside and for co-funded co-funded ventures with the private sector, local government with sectors of the New Zealand's economy that is about creating those opportunities to grow the performance of some of our regions. So I just wanted to make the opportunity known to you today. I've got a bunch of collateral that you can pick up about the fund where you can find out some more information who you might want to talk to but I think that there is a huge amount of opportunity here. What I know about the cohorts that have come through the Edmund Hillary Fellowship and this goes to things around our environment some of the transitions that have been driven by climate change digital economy, the different types of initiatives that we want to in terms of skills and capacity building in our region. So from an education point of view, so there is a real opportunity I think for you as fellows to think about how you might get alongside some of the partners in regional New Zealand to come up with some investable sort of propositions that go to our sort of shared interests. So that's probably all I wanted to say today was to once say it was a pleasure to be here to congratulate you on your selection as fellows to make you aware of the cope-upper of this program the $3 billion provincial growth fund and to leave you with a challenge around if you want to help change the course of humanity and make the world a more equitable and beautiful place in the New Zealand context. That is about certain groups of our population and certain regions of our economy and without knowing where everyone's come from, I know one of the things that became sharper and more important for me in terms of having an international liens through my immigration work as we ignore that stuff at our peril and when I've looked at what's happened in Europe or the United States in terms of people going well actually I'm not buying into around the benefits of globalisation and trade when I don't have a job anymore or I'm working twice as long for less money or what we're doing to our environment. That is the massive opportunity in front of us with the focus of the next three years and $3 billion so I'm really excited about what we might be able to do together and so I'm basically, as I always have with the Global Impact Visa and the Fellowship, I'm looking to be inspired by what you guys sort of can do. So that's it from me. Pleasure to be here. Kia kaha, Kia mana whenui and lot forward to spending the afternoon with you. Kia ora everyone.