No-Sentiment Tasman Trade Urged

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31323, 20 March 1967, Page 3

No-Sentiment Tasman Trade Urged

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, March 19. New Zealand’s trade mission across the Tasman has made it clear to the Australians that this country wants a no-sentiment business relationship.

In an interview on his return to Wellington last night, the mission’s leader, Mr H. W. B. Patterson, told New Zealanders to “stop sniping” at Australia and get on with hard selling. He believed New Zealand would now get a fair deal under the Free Trade Agreement. “I told them we were there for trade,” he said. “We were a hard-selling team, not a soft-selling one. “We were not on a social tour or sheltering under the Anzac umbrella.” The success of the mission’s three-week visit was shown by hundreds of thousands of dollars in orders, Mr Patterson said.

New Zealand had every chance of arresting the trade gap (now at £51.2 million in Australia’s favour) and even of reducing it. “There is no longer any fear that the Australian market cannot be penetrated,” Mr Patterson said. In Sydney, the mission’s first stop, Mr Patterson had reporters on the carpet for uncomplimentary newspaper reports.

From then on, he said, the mission got very favourable press treatment. Business in Brisbane was good and there was a chance of a big timber export deal to Queensland. “Tot many New Zealand businessmen have gone to Sydney thinking that this is the only place where they can get business,” he said. “They get knocked back there and get discouraged.”

He recommended an aggressive and persistent approach to the Australian buyer, and a special export publication listing every New Zealand product available. “There is no need for an inferiority complex or to go to the Australians with an apologetic complex,” Mr Patterson said. “I was determined to get this out of the system.”

To Mr Patterson New Zealand has now arrived as a manufacturing nation. Most of the orders taken by members of the 18-man mission were for manufactured goods, some of the largest purchases being in carpet lines.