"Help me! Help me! ... HEYYY GIRL!" - Aisha

3/13/2012 - Wellington, NZ

Today was full of interviews. Jason and I met with Paul Kilford at the Department of Inland Revenue and Tim Clarke and Brendan Brown, respectively Public Policy and Tax partners at Russell McVeagh. We learned basically the same thing from everyone; that NZ has a very simple tax code that seeks to treat everyone as if they were on equal footing. As a result, there isn't any lobbying for tax breaks or special treatment. This is very different from our tax codes, in which our biggest corporations can lobby for loop-holes and wind up with a very small tax bill.

The other interesting thing we learned is that there was a lot of NZ investment into Fiji during the real estate bubble 5 years ago. NZ bankers repackaged the loans into mezzanine level securities, so when the bubble burst, all of the development projects became insolvent. (Similar to what happened in the States between 2007-2008.) While any projects that were finished were able to go into receivership, any unfinished projects were abandoned. As a consequence, Fiji is full of expansive tracts of land that are half developed, empty, or (as Mr. Kilford referred to them) resort "ghost towns."

This afternoon we took a trip into the country for white water rafting. It was my first time and I expected it to be a lot more fast/dangerous than it was. As it turns out, most of the trip is rafting down still water, and getting through about 8-10 rapids around some bends. Which is not to say it was boring – it was ridiculously fun. We even saw a random cow on one of the embankments. It was all of us to four boats, and I think ours was the only one that didn't flip over. No one was seriously hurt when the other boats flipped, though Leah does have a black and blue nose that she bumped on a rock.

Tonight we ate at a restaurant called Big Dog, which was a 20 minute walk from our hotel, straight through downtown Wellington. The town reminds me a lot of Berlin because it has one restaurant next to another, next to a bar, next to another restaurant. The shopping is in one area of town, which is abandoned at night, and dining is in another, which is, as you'd expect, bustling.