THE PRESS SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1981. Foolish, lonely trade ban

Press, 14 November 1981, Page 14

THE PRESS SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1981. Foolish, lonely trade ban

The president of the Federation of Labour, Mr W. J. Knox, turns out to be poorly informed about the decisions and sentiments of his colleagues across the Tasman Sea. On Tuesday Mr Knox told a meeting in the Bay of Plenty that there was no possibility of the ban by the F.O.L. on trade with Chile being lifted. He said that in Australia the Seamen’s Union and the Waterside Workers’ Union were refusing to work ships with cargoes for, or from, Chile.

Unfortunately for Mr Knox, a week before he spoke the first ship for eight years to pick up cargo openly for Chile had berthed in Sydney. The Australian Council of Trade Unions, the Australian F.0.L., has lifted its ban on the trade. Australian seamen are maintaining their own ban. Australian watersiders have lifted their ban, although men in the Sydney branch have said they are working the ship for Chile “under protest.” Australia, it seems, has joined almost every other country in • the world in abandoning the ban on Chilean trade. Token gestures may still be made there, as they are in Britain by some unions; but Australia is now in a position to recapture trade which may be worth as much as $4OO million a year and which exporters have estimated could produce up to 10,000 more jobs in Australia.

The F.O.L. ban leaves New Zealand in an absurd position, virtually alone in maintaining a ban which has never had the consent of more than a handful of New Zealanders. If the ban hurts anyone in Chile it is likely to be those who could benefit from imports of cheaper food from New Zealand, surely people whom the F.O.L. might have been expected to want to help. In New Zealand the ban costs significant export earnings. Some estimates of this cost go as high as $lOO million a year. It is also costing New Zealanders jobs. New Zealand’s once flourishing trade with Chile has been badly set back in spite of the efforts of some exporters to keep up

token shipments through circuitous and expensive channels.

The people who have benefited most from the ban are the Communist countries of Eastern Europe which have built up a flourishing trade with Chile in foodstuffs, in spite of the assertions by their Governments of hostility to Chile’s military regime. A cynical observer might be tempted to think, wrongly of course, that the F.O.L. ban was motivated more by a desire to help New Zealand’s international competitors than by any espousal of high principles.

Perhaps the example of what has happened in Australia will at last tip the balance in New Zealand after seven years. A member of the national council of the F.0.L., Mr Michael Cullen, will be going to Chile next February, at the invitation of Chilean unions, to determine if the reasons for the ban still apply. Any effort by a senior member of the F.O.L. to see for himself conditions in Chile must be applauded, but Mr Cullen will not necessarily be able to persuade his colleagues to lift the ban on his return. He has spoken previously against the ban. Perhaps more hope can be placed in the assertion by the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Mr Lange, that if Labour became the Government, trade with Chile would resume before, next June. The Leader of the Opposition, Mr Rowling, has said a Labour Government would send a small team to Chile to examine conditions and would hold early discussions with the F.O.L. on the ban. Perhaps a Labour Government would turn out to have greater powers of persuasion than does a National Government in dealings with the F.O.L. on this question, though it is difficult to think of any example of a contentious matter on which the Labour Party has been persuasive in the high councils of the federation. For all that, it is high time for the federation to acknowledge that it has painted itself into a sticky corner and has benefited no-one.