Businesses going global

Max Douch, Shanghai.

How long have you lived offshore?
I have been offshore since 2007.

What do you love most about Shanghai?
I love the different cultures here and the ease of getting around.

If someone was coming to visit the area, what are two places you would recommend them to visit and why?
I would recommend the French Concession, because there are some amazing old buildings and
lots of small cafes to sit down and relax. I would also recommend some of the old water towns,
because they have interesting local shops selling products you won’t see downtown.
Watertown’s are also great places to take photos especially during sunset.

What’s the best thing about being a Kiwi offshore?
The best thing about being a kiwi offshore is that people know and love our country. We are
seen as polite and respectful people abroad.

What do you miss the most about New Zealand?
I miss the quiet of New Zealand. I miss being able to walk down to the local reserve and having
a swim in the mountain river during summer time.

What advice would you give to your pre-offshore self/What would you have liked someone to tell you before you travelled?
I would advise anyone thinking about coming to China to find the locals, be it expats of Chinese
residents and find out what apps they use. There are so many good apps that make living in
China so convenient.

How do you remind yourself of home on days when you miss New Zealand? I have many items around my home to remind myself of home from a plush kiwi to coasters with
pictures of camper vans and local birds.

Pauline Autet, Paris

How long have you lived offshore?
I was born in Dijon (France), arrived in Aotearoa as a teenager with my family who moved a lot at the time, and lived there for 12 years before moving back to France in 2016.

What do you love most about the place you’re living in right now?
I love how compact Paris is, because I can get around anywhere on my bike and everything is accessible, unlike other European cities that are more spread out, so it reminds me of Wellington for this reason. Paris is also a well connected city which is important because the fast-paced busy urban life can get overwhelming!

If someone was coming to visit the area what are two places you would recommend them visiting and why?

My first go-to is the Contemporary HUM website, where the Calendar section will tell you what exhibitions to visit if you want to see work by Aotearoa New Zealand artists abroad! You can add a filter by city to know what is on where you are. The Palais de Tokyo has a great programme of contemporary art – Kate Newby was included in Reclaim the Earth in 2022 – and the Centre Pompidou too – with Lisa Reihana and Nandita Kumar presenting work in Cosmopolis #2 in 2020 for example. But there are lots!

What’s the best thing about being a Kiwi offshore?
Being able to connect NZers overseas and their creative projects to an international network – NZ is so much broader than its borders (as the size of the expat community can attest to!), and this makes it very exciting to be in the middle of this wide and intertangled web, including sharing stories of the diaspora through different countries and cultural contexts. Being here and having access to top international art events such as the Venice Biennale and documenta, it is so clear that artists from Aotearoa are in the top level of excellence and achievement, so to work with them to amplify and make visible projects that would otherwise be limited by the small size of the art world at home feels very meaningful.

What do you miss the most about New Zealand?
The best part of my work with Contemporary HUM is that it keeps me connected with the culture and art community from Aotearoa, however I do miss my family and friends a lot and wish (eco-friendly) time travel was a reality!

Zaman Toleafoa, New Jersey

How long have you lived offshore?
I’ve lived offshore for close to twenty years now. Before moving to the US in 2017 with my wife, Kate and three kids, Lulu, Ethan and Mason, we had spent fifteen or so years in London.

What do you love most about the place you’re living in right now?
New Jersey is a hugely underappreciated state (no, really). The schools are excellent, there’s tons of green space and the community we live in is idyllic and inclusive. Whenever friends visit they are always surprised about how “picture postcard” nice our town is. And it’s a 30 minute train ride into downtown New York City to boot. Oh, and no sales tax on clothing and shoes is nice too.

If someone was coming to visit the area what are two places you would recommend them visiting and why?
I’d take them to Arturo’s Pizza, a pizza restaurant in our county, and that is one of the best in the country. I’d then get them in the car and head out to Cape May on the Jersey shore for a couple days. It’s a good beach spot with a bohemian vibe.

What’s the best thing about being a Kiwi offshore?
Kiwis have such a great reputation that people tend to accept you more readily just by saying you’re from New Zealand. It’s also remarkable to see how many New Zealanders are doing well on the world stage across every industry. It punches above its weight in so many fields. Being a rugby snob is fun too.

What do you miss the most about New Zealand?
It’s hard to describe – it’s just a sense of being. The incessant sounds of cicadas in summer. The sudden, cool breeze on the beach on an otherwise sunny summer’s day. The feel of flimsy flip flops in the sand. Traffic jams on the way to the Mount (are they still a thing?). Being a JAFA. Eating a fast-melting mint choc chip ice cream at Mission Bay. Ripping open the newspaper to stop the fish and chips from steaming. I could go on..

Pip Marlow

Pip has had a long and distinguished career in the tech industry, she is the former CEO and EVP for Salesforce Australia, New Zealand and ASEAN. Prior to Salesforce, she was Chief Executive Officer Customer Marketplace at Suncorp and before that worked at Microsoft for 21 years. During her time at Microsoft she held a number of roles across Australia and the USA. This culminated in her role as the Managing Director of Microsoft Australia for 6 years.

She is a strong advocate for women in technology and is passionate about advocating for equal rights and experiences for women in the workplace and challenging bias for female leaders.

Pip has served as a non-executive director of the Rugby Australia (ARU), has sat on the Vice-Chancellor’s Advisory Board at UTS, is a member of Chief Executive Women (CEW), and is an Executive Ally for Pride Diversity. She has also sat on the boards of several charities including the Beacon Foundation and the Australian Business Community Network (ABCN). Both of these charities are focused on working with students at disadvantaged schools and providing programs to help them.

Mark Rocket

Mark is an Internet and aerospace entrepreneur and the current President of Aerospace New Zealand. After founding two successful internet companies in 1998 and selling one of them in 2006, Mark entered the aerospace world as a seed investor of Rocket Lab.

He served as a co-director of Rocket Lab from 2007 to 2011 and has worked with the Government to develop a space strategy for New Zealand. In 2018 he founded his own company, Kea Aerospace. The company’s first project the Kea Atmos is a solar-powered, zero-emissions unmanned aerial vehicle which will capture aerial imagery and collect data from the stratosphere. The Kea Atmos aims to revolutionise the practice of aerial imagery, with the goal of continuing to gather crucial information that will assist the world in combating climate change.

Mark is a passionate supporter of the global aerospace industry and is the President of the industry body Aerospace New Zealand. He was on the board of SAFE For Animals, New Zealand’s leading animal rights organisation, from 2012 to 2021

Miles Kirby

Miles is a chef and restaurateur and the chief director of Caravan, a well-known group of seven restaurants and three brew bars across London. He has over 21 years experience in the hospitality industry and is credited with leading London’s all-day casual eating movement when he opened Caravan in 2010.

Miles has worked under New Zealand chef’s Al Brown and Peter Gordon and in 2023 was named a finalist in the UK New Zealander of the Year awards. His signature, seasonal menus of ‘well-travelled’ dishes are based on his own travels and the Caravan brand is known for its sustainability and commitment to the planet. Caravan Coffee Roasters donate 1% of their annual revenue to environmental causes including Project Waterfall’s work in coffee growing communities affected by climate change.

Miles is passionate about mentoring young up and coming chefs and hospitality workers and ensuring a future for the industry. During the global pandemic Caravan worked hard to keep all 500 of their workers on staff despite eth lockdowns. Miles says passing a love of hospitality onto everyone else is what motivates him.

Anne Wyllie

Anne is a microbiologist and research scientist in epidemiology with the Public Health Modeling Unit at Yale University. She was the lead author of a 2020 research article which led to the development of the SalivaDirect PCR method of testing saliva for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. SalivaDirect is open source, meaning it requires off-the-shelf materials and techniques that most biomedical health labs should have in stock or can access easily. Despite the opportunities for monetisation the product was designed to be as cheap as possible to allow access for all communities.

In 2021 she was invited by The White House to participate today with global leaders from government, academia, industry and elsewhere in the White House 2021 Global COVID-19 Summit: Ending the Pandemic and Building Back Better to Prepare for the Next. She has lectured at various conferences around the world and received several grants and awards for her work.

During the pandemic Ann volunteered with schools, churches and community groups internationally to set up robust testing programs for the safe re-opening of their communities. She is an active mentor for Women in Science – through Yale, Infectious Disease Society of America, ASM Future Leaders in Microbiology, and Girl Boss NZ programs, and has organised and chaired a number of scientific meetings, particularly advocating for the promotion of early career researchers.

Peter Hillary

Peter is a mountaineer, philanthropist, and writer. He has achieved two summits of Everest, an 84-day trek across Antarctica to the South Pole, and an expedition guiding astronaut Neil Armstrong to land a small aircraft at the North Pole. He has climbed many of the world’s major peaks, and on 19 June 2008, completed the Seven Summits, reaching the top of the highest mountains on all seven continents, when he summited Denali in Alaska.

Peter now devotes most of his time to fundraising in support of his father’s (Sir Edmund Hillary) Himalayan Trust, which was established in 1960 to fund capital projects in the Khumbu Valley region of Nepal. He is also a director of the Australian Himalayan Foundation and a patron for the Everest Rescue Trust, a non-profit, independent trust set up to operate and manage a self-funding rescue helicopter service for the high altitude regions of Nepal.

Since 2017, Hillary has also been the Patron of the Kea Conservation Trust, a Charitable Trust set up in 2006 to support conservation and research into New Zealand’s Alpine parrot, the Kea.

For Dame Margaret the news she had been awarded one of science’s top honours came out of the blue, so much so that she almost missed the congratulations email which was flagged as spam by her email server. 

“I just happened to be clearing some junk emails while I was waiting at the airport and one of them was from The Royal Society telling me I had won The Davy Medal, which is a huge honour. To even be considered you need to have a very high level of standing as a scientist and it’s very rare for the Royal Society medals to be given to scientists outside of Europe. I can’t believe the email almost ended up as spam.”

The award comes just five years after Dame Margaret was inducted into The Royal Society London as a Fellow, something she felt, at the time, was the pinnacle of her career. 

“I was inducted into The Royal Society in 2018, the same year that Elon Musk was inducted as a fellow. So I was in the same room as Elon Musk and Angela Merkel’s husband and a few Nobel laureates in my field. That in itself was a really big occasion that very few Kiwi’s get to experience, so afterwards I thought, that’s me done, that’s the highlight of my career.”

Dame Margaret has been awarded the Davy Medal for her outstanding contributions to organic chemistry, an area she has had a keen interest in since her early days at Massey University. After living and working in Australia she returned home to New Zealand to raise her daughter and she is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Auckland where her research program focuses on the synthesis of bioactive natural products and peptides as potential new medicines. Across her career she has published more than 650 papers and is an inventor on almost 50 patents. 

Recently a molecule her team synthesized for the first time over 20 years ago, formed the basis for a breakthrough neurological drug, Trofinetide/DAYBUE^TM. In March this year this became the first ever New Zealand-discovered neurological drug to win FDA approval and the first treatment for Rett syndrome, a condition which causes symptoms similar to cerebral palsy or autism in an estimated one in 10,000 girls.

Upon hearing about the Davy Medal, Dame Margaret says the first people she celebrated with were her students. 

“My students are the only people around me who really understand my work and what I do. It’s great to be able to celebrate this honour with them and show them what it means to have your work internationally recognised and just how important that is. They are at a stage in their careers where they are only starting to learn how big the world of science is. I want to show them that you can come from somewhere small like New Zealand and achieve big goals but to do that you need to have credibility and you get that from getting your work published in prestigious international journals and by setting high standards and maintaining an international focus.”

“I’m being presented with The Davy Award for contributions to science throughout my entire career so I really want to thank all of my students, research fellows, collaborators and others I have worked with over the years. Science is very collaborative, so everything I have achieved has only come about because I have had a wonderful team of people working with me.” 

Despite her recent accolades Dame Margaret says there is still plenty she wants to achieve in her field and she is looking forward to what the future holds. 

“There are a number of areas of work I am focused on right now. We have a second drug molecule NNZ2591 which is in phase two clinical trials for four different neurodevelopmental disorders. We are working on discovering new generation antibiotics – both by finding new antibiotics and modifying existing ones to help with antimicrobial resistance.  We’ve also been collaborating with a kidney specialist at the medical school, to create antibiotics which are not as damaging to the kidneys as some of the ones currently available. There is always something to work on and always more that you would like to discover.”

During his career Simon has worked for a number of big global organisations who typically recruit in high volumes allowing him to work with automation and machine learning tools from their early inception. 

“A few years ago I worked for a company which used virtual video interviewing as part of fully automated recruitment process. The candidate wouldn’t speak to a human until they spoke to a hiring manager. They would ask and answer questions in a video interview format and then those videos were sent to the hiring manager for review and then we only ended up interviewing three to five high quality candidates as opposed to interviewing 12 to 20 in order to get to that number. During the last six months, things have really accelerated and the ability to use machine learning and now true AI is very much a part of the process.”

Despite what some may think Simon says AI isn’t removing the personal aspect of hiring for a role, rather it just takes out some of the more manual early work such as sorting through CVs from people who may not have the right skills and also allowing businesses to be able to go out and look for suitable candidates proactively.

“To search for people manually is a big task, you have to interpret whether that person has the skills or diversity you are looking for and that’s up to the individual so they miss a lot for a start. Which means you can’t get as many people or the right people, whereas AI helps you get there a lot quicker, it’s not so much about filtering the candidates that apply for a role but about going out proactively to the market and finding the right person. If you have a human doing this there is a bigger margin of error as you have to approach a bunch of people and some of them will not be right for the role so you are then potentially getting their hopes up and wasting their time.”

For candidates looking for a role, keeping your social profiles updated with the latest information so that you can be flagged for possible new roles is important. If you are proactively applying for a role, Simon says the way AI will read your CV is quite different to past techniques. 

“You don’t have to provide the same structural data that you once might have. The inferences that can be made now by AI are quite remarkable. For example AI could look at the company you used to work for and figure out from information available online that between the years of 2003 and 2005, that particular company had a major transformation taking place. So if you had a candidate who was a transformation leader at that company during that time they are probably going to have some really exceptional skills, more so than someone who has perhaps been doing that role for a company during a much more stable period.” 

Simon says AI will also help cross check your work history against internet data, such as people endorsing you on sites like LinkedIn, which could be helpful to employers in an age when giving references is becoming less and less popular. 

“What we are seeing more and more is that a lot of organisations don’t want to provide references. In some countries, if you provide a reference in any way, shape or form as a manager, you can be personally liable for the feedback that you’ve given on that reference, even if it might be positive. If that individual doesn’t get the job and they request all the information that was gathered together as part of the application process, and you’ve said something that the person could perceive as the reason they didn’t get the job, then you can be held accountable. Hence a lot of employers will only give the bare minimum such as dates and job titles now.” 

Unlike when Simon started in the recruitment industry, technology advances in recruitment are no longer just for big businesses, with many smaller companies adopting the tools to save their staff time and money. Simon says these changes will allow job seekers to be better matched to specific roles but also offer them options to put themselves on the radar of companies they aspire to work for. 

“In the future I think we will see a much better candidate experience when applying for roles. Job seekers will be able to complete screening which will lead to recommendations of the types of jobs organisations might have available and if there are none, they will then be offered programs or qualifications they might like to do to be considered in the future. AI is going to really change the way we match people and businesses and that will be a really positive thing.”

Scrutiny of the rolls
To begin the official count, the Electoral Commission conduct a process called “scrutinising the roll”. They compare every copy of the electorate roll in each electorate to identify voters who may have voted more than once. If they detect that a voter may have voted more than once an investigation is conducted. If someone votes more than once their voting papers are not included in the official count.

Processing and checking special votes including those cast offshore
Voters make a “special” vote when they’re not on the printed electoral roll at the voting place – for example if they’re voting outside their electorate, voting from overseas, are on the unpublished roll, or if they enrolled close to election day.

Before special votes are counted they are returned to the electorate they were cast for. The Commission then checks every special vote declaration to make sure the voter is enrolled and eligible to vote. Special votes are only added to the official count once these checks have been done.

Rechecking and recounting voting papers
During the official count, the Electoral Commission rechecks and recounts all of the voting papers that were counted on election day. As with the preliminary count, the official count is conducted by hand. They do not use vote counting machines. Because special votes are now included, and because any invalid votes have been removed from the count, the preliminary results and the official results are not directly comparable. Once the count is complete for each voting place during the official count, the totals are recorded on a certificate of results which is signed by the returning officer and a Justice of the Peace.

How many special votes were cast and when will the count be finished?

This year, there are a lot of special votes. In fact, there are 567,000 special votes (or about 20% of the total vote) The deadline for the Electoral Commission to count the special votes is Friday, November 3. So despite the result that shows National and Act can govern alone, it is highly unlikely that there’ll be any substantive coalition talks before then.

There’s an understanding across all parties that special votes tend to favour the left parties. Last election, Labour and Te Pāti Māori picked up an extra seat from National once special votes were counted. National’s campaign chair Chris Bishop said the party was expecting to see some slim National electorate seat wins returned to Labour after the special vote count, and was anticipating one less seat for the party overall. This time, National or Act losing a single seat would make the difference between being able to govern as a two-party coalition or needing to call Winston Peters to “lend a hand”.

Who is the current Government while the votes are being finalised?

Labour will remain at the steering wheel in a caretaker position until the final count is released on Nov 3rd. However while Labour will still be in charge, outgoing Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has said that should any large decisions need to be taken during this time, then he will defer to Luxon and the incoming government.