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Hawaii's long-term economic trajectory and civic leadership were at issue in this February 1994 programme, featuring George Chaplin, editor at large of the Honolulu Advertiser, and Herb Cornuelle, a retired businessman and former Campbell Estate trustee. Both had co-chaired a conference two decades earlier to project Hawaii's economic future; the question was whether those projections had held and what might now be done. Both guests agreed that Hawaii had become more dependent on tourism than the conference had projected, largely due to the expansion of jet travel. Chaplin argued that tourism could no longer be taken for granted and that environmental degradation, including the deterioration of Waikiki, had eroded the product. Cornuelle said the state had grown too reliant on government employment while private-sector jobs contracted, and that the replacement of local business ownership by absentee mainland management had weakened community leadership. Both identified the public school system as the single most urgent problem; Cornuelle proposed removing principals from the union as a first step. Neither was prepared to say whether tourism had peaked, but both viewed the absence of capable civic leadership as the central obstacle to any course correction.
Transcript
Read or download the full transcript (.txt). Speaker labels were assigned automatically and may contain errors.
Companion newspaper commentaries
Commentaries by the guests, published in The Honolulu Advertiser around the broadcast.
