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Middle class Aucklanders are becoming "disenfranchised" by the cost of housing in the city, according to prominent businessman Michael Stiassny.Stiassny, who is chairman of Vector and senior partner of KordaMentha, told an Auckland University Business School panel on Monday that Auckland's property market is undermining the sustainability of the city.
"The middle class is being disenfranchised and disappearing," Stiassny said.
"We need nurses to be able to live and work here. We need teachers, police, we even need office workers at Vector.
"This is one of the fundamental issues: making Auckland a place where the middle class can afford to live and want to live because without them we are not going to be sustainable."
The panel event was organised by the Business School in the lead-up to the local body elections.
Stiassny said he had just returned from a conference of directors in the United States, and he felt the directors there were ahead of their New Zealand counterparts.
"These people have embraced 'conscious capitalism' in a wider sense – they are far clearer about their obligation to sustainability than the average New Zealand director."
Supporters of the concept of "conscious capitalism" describe it as a style of capitalism in which trust, compassion, collaboration and value creation are as essential as competition and freedom to trade.
Stiassny said that in the United States and many other countries, people were losing faith in political and business leaders, and governments were losing their legitimacy.
"There is a vacuum and when there is a vacuum something fills it – populism."
Businesses in the United States seemed to appreciate they need to fill that void with conscious capitalism, he said.
"The real question will be, can the businessmen and the directors of New Zealand appreciate that obligation and step up and do it, because they will need change to do it."
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