N.D.C. Priorities ‘Worry’ Dr. Sutch

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32037, 11 July 1969, Page 12

N.D.C. Priorities ‘Worry’ Dr. Sutch

“I am quite worried by the recommendations in the National Development Conference documents, because I feel there is insufficient stress on manufacturing and the rate at which it should expand,” Dr W. B. Sutch, a former Secretary of Industries and Commerce, said last evening in an address in Auckland.

There was also insufficient emphasis on the means of obtaining the great increase in manufacturing output and exports that New Zealand would need in the next decades if it was to go ahead as a country which one day might be comparable with the

present status of Denmark or Switzerland. New Zealand’s industrial development was at too early a stage to decide that there was a specific list of manufactured items which New Zealand would specialise in exporting for the next decade or so.

“It is clear,” said Dr Sutch “that New Zealand has looked far too long at the past and it has not considered sufficiently the needs of our future economy.” In spite of good prospects in minerals, fishing and tourism, it was manufacturing that would have to take the main burden of New Zealand’s economic future.

• Dr Sutch said he saw no reason why New Zealand J should not be able to deve- > lop shipping facilities like • Norway’s In the next 50 years, • and the building of ships of ■ special types. ! It was only in recent years that New Zealand had started

to become a food-processing country, and the field there was enormous. The textile industry in New Zealand was unbalanced and underdeveloped. Inevitably, New Zealand would also have to have a sector of its industry devoted to plastics and synthetics. The chemical, biological and pharmaceutical industry required expert examination,

both to promote greater use of skills and to become a major exporter of specialised commodities. In electronics much more thought should be given to supplying the purchasing needs of the Government for electronic apparatus from New Zealand sources than in the past, and it would be found that in specialised areas New Zealand would be an exporter of electronic equipment on a significant scale. Dr Sutch said that New Zealand must also envisage the expansion of the metal-pro-cessing industry. Mechanical engineering was a repository of some of New Zealand’s best skills, and these should be developed to the point where they were producing more.

New Zealand’s export future, said Dr Sutch, lay in its possession of high skills, high aptitudes, flexible workers and good knowledge of the custom-made job. New Zealand could design equipment for the particular needs of the many countries which could not afford, use or need the highly sophisticated equipment of Germany, Japan Britain or the United States. Many of these countries bordered the Pacific.