South Island State Highway One – Here We Come

I have had the idea to promote South Island State Highway One
for some time. This includes the main rural towns of Ashburton, Timaru and Oamaru. Timaru is the largest town situated in the middle of the other two so it needs to become the main City for all the other rural towns.

There are 6 groups of people we need to sell our services to in these areas namely businesses, clubs, organisations, urban residents rural farmers and tourists. Trading needs to be encouraged between these 3 main towns and if that happens the smaller towns will automatically grow.

How do we do that?
The first thing we have to do is introduce some unity amoungst
the various organisations that are already promoting their own patch.
The next thing we have to do is protect ourselves from the overseas manopoly companies that take millions of dollars out of these rural communities each year and put very little back.

Telecom
One of those manopoly companies is Telecom. They control the
majority of telephone numbers in New Zealand including the phone books.
In the white pages of the Ashburton phone directory there are approx 20,000 phone numbers plus another 5000 phone numbers repeated in the yellow pages. All those that have more than just a standard name address & phone number pay Telecom for an advertisment.

2 Years ago the cost of a full colour page advertisment in the
Timaru/Oamaru phone book was $20,000. Based on their charges to advertise in the yellow pages alone we estimated that they took about $10 million out of South Canterbury and North Otago that year.
Their charges are crippling some small businesses who have no choice but to advertise with them.
These are just small rural towns can you imagine how much money Telecom is making from phone books throughout New Zealand.The small print of their phone numbers and their not so user friendly electronic system is proving a problem with many people and in particular the elderly whose eyesite is not as good as it once was.

Telecom also seems to be struggling to get good rankings with popular search engines such as google and as a result they are buying into sponsored links
The telephone book is the main communication tool we have with the outside world and as a community we need to take control of it and use it as a tool that is both user freindly, affordable and serves the community well.
Our goal is to do just that but we must do it as a team not as individuals Over the next few weeks I will be spending some time in Ashburton Oamaru and Timaru in an effort to intoduce unity between the main towns on state highway one.

If we can get that unity between people we will then be able to pool our individual talents and recourses and take on the Telecoms of this world.