I actually have felt, as my predecessor did, that that's the absolute core of the office. It's a very major education exercise at the end of the day.
I'll give you two examples of ways in which we know we shifted the system or made a major contribution.
The first one was a big piece of work that we did in 1998 looking at cities and their people. That was in fact an unpicking of the way that we were investing in and thinking about the cohesion of the place where 85% of kiwis now live. What we discovered, amongst many things, was, for example, that there were lists on about $1 million New Zealand going through the public science good funding—which at that stage was about $380 million—into what we would call the systems research of cities and settlement. That seemed extraordinary. We knew a lot more in New Zealand about how ryegrass grew than about how our cities were growing.
The result of that and of a number of other parts of that report was to place a major emphasis—and there has been a major growth to many tens of millions of research—on the place where most of us live. So that really shifted the system.
Another piece of work whereby we've created a major dialogue is our examination of the intensification of farming in New Zealand. Our land-based industries basically pay the bills in New Zealand. Through that piece of work, we've created an enormous conversation and debate. It's been pretty rigorous. What it has done is to get many people in the public and private sectors to look at the strategic direction of the primary industries of New Zealand, which are fundamental to our economy and fundamental to our well-being. That's because we got out there and very strongly told our story.