N.Z. TRADE WITH AUST. DISCUSSED

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30682, 23 February 1965, Page 2

N.Z. TRADE WITH AUST. DISCUSSED

New Zealand’s production, particularly for export, was too similar to the Australian pattern for New Zealand to expect a spectacular development of two-way trade across the Tasman, said the president of the Canterbury Manufacturers’ Association (Mr R. G. Pearce) last evening.

Mr Pearce was speaking to the Christchurch Federated Business and Professional Women’s Club on its world-wide theme for 1965, “Our Role in the Development of World Trade.”

He, personally, could not see why Australia should look for an open market in New Zealand for her manufactured goods when she would not consider taking New Zealand’s efficiently produced butter and other dairy products and maintained deliberately prohibitive tariff barriers against New Zealand quick-frozen vegetables, he said.

Mr Pearce said that New Zealand bought from Australia £6lm worth of goods a year and sold £l7m worth there.

This trade imbalance, he laid, would be at least partly corrected by a reduction of goods New Zealand imported rather than by sensational export sales by New Zealand across the Tasman. Mr Pearce said that New Zealand might have to rely less on overseas trade in the future than in the past.

"But an appreciable drop in overseas trade a head is some distance off,” he said. Mr Pearce said that New Zealand could not expect to prosper by feeding a starving Asia.

“What we want to happen is for living standards to rise throughout Asia,” he said. “And as they do, markets will open up for our produce and also other items.” BETTER SHIPPING

An important feature of such trade, he said, was that it would lead to better shipping services. It was regrettable, he said, that New Zealand, dependent as it was on sea transport, was not in its own right a

great maritime nation such as Norway. Mr Pearce said that for strategic reasons the highly industrialised countries did not want to slide into the position of not being able to produce most of their basic food requirements. “This is a powerful weapon for protection used by their own agricultural and pastoral producers,” said Mr Pearce.

“It creates an element of insecurity to the markets for our produce.” New Zealand manufacturers, said Mr Pearce, had been subjected to a lot of illinformed and damaging criticism down through the years about both price and quality of their goods. “REASSURING STATEMENT” Mr Pearce quoted to the meeting what he described as “a warmly reassuring statement.” This was included in a report by the farm costs working party last year to the agricultural development conference, that said: “There is no conclusive evidence that the price of any major item entering farm costs which was locally manufactured was excessive in relation to that of a similar imported product.”

Mr Pearce said that the report of the working party showed that manufacturers were giving the farming industries the assistance they needed.

This type of support, he said, was not limited to farm inputs. Customer countries, especially buyers of food products, could be exacting in their requirements. For example, a Hamilton i manufacturer had recently developed plastic containers which had enabled New Zealand frozen cream to win a nlace in North American markets.

DISTINCTIVE N.Z. STYLE Mr Pearce said that he hoped and expected that New Zealand would develop an already existing trend for a distinctive New Zealand style and pattern of manufactured product, combined with high quality. “This will help us to build up an increasingly valuable export trade 1 in specialty products.” he said. “There is no ceiling to the returns this can earn.”

Examples of specialty products that New Zealand was already exporting, said Mr Pearce, included butter churns, milking machines, vats, tankers and milk-cool-ing tanks. They also included rotovators, rotary hoes, scrubcutting and trenching machines, ploughshares and disc harrows. Other New Zealand manufactured goods being exported, he said, were plants for making carbon dioxide, forklift trucks, marine engines, gear-boxes, engine valves, stoves, washing-machines, I automatic dryers and refriglerators.

A New Zealand company, said Mr Pearce, recently won a contract for supplying roadmaking machinery to Australia. Orders for a New Zea-land-made all-sky camera, which photographed the whole of the sky in a single negative, had been received from more than half-a-dozen different countries. N.Z. FASHION

Mr Pearce told his audience that, in the world of fashion, New Zealand exports were also making their mark. “Our exports of clothing and footwear to Australia have doubled in the last two years,” he said. “Last year, they earned more than we spent on imports of those items from across the Tasman.”