Wage-price freeze is working, says P.M.

Press, 13 September 1982, Page 2

Wage-price freeze is working, says P.M.

;NZPA Ottawa ■ The wage-price freeze is 'working, and since it was ■imposed on .June 22 "food prices have remained precisely stable." says the Prime Minister. Mr Muldoon.

■ Speaking at.a news conference in the New Zealand High Commission in Ottawa, he said that the list of 574 price rises in the last month produced by the Shop Assistants' Union was "very small” in relation to the number of individual prices on shelves. Included were factors such as increased Government and import charges and increases that were in the pipeline.

' “It doesn't disturb me in the slightest," he said. "I would have expected that number."

Mr Muldoon said the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Mr Cooper, would take up his call ’ for a full-scale international conference to reexamine the world’s banking system when he addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York next month.

One question flummoxed him. A Canadian financial

journalist asked why the number of work days lost through strikes was so small compared with a number of other countries. "I really don't know." he said. "We 'didn't even have a love-hate relationship with the trade unions in NewZealand. it's just total hate.

"There is no specificreason. We pursue a fairly hard line industrial policy as a government. I wouldn't attempt to guess. I think it would be foolish of me to guess. I don't know- the answer."

On the Reserve Bank

warning in its report to Parliament, that if the Government pursued expansionary fiscal and monetary policies for growth, they could destroy New Zealand's economic prospects. Mr Muldoon emphasised that the warning was conditional. He said the Government was not in fact pursuing such policies a and had "a very tight hold on the money side and a slightly less tight hold on the fiscal side, but certainly at a level that I believe is sustainable.

"We could tighten up very considerably on the fiscal side and we would throw the patient into a state of shock." he said. "We do not need to do that and we are not going to do that."

It was correct, he said, that money and credit expanded too’ rapidly in about the second quarter of last year, “but I made this clear probably six months ago and we have instituted systems to ensure that that does not happen again."

Mr Muldoon broadened his call for a re-evaluation of the world's banking system, suggesting a re-examination

of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

G.A.T.T. "seems incapable of dealing with agricultural protectionism and all the new and virulent forms of non-tariff barriers on industrial goods and services." he said.

On energy. Mr Muldoon said it was natural for New Zealand to look to Canada because Canadians had technology which was often appropriate for New Zealand conditions. "In some cases your companies have taken up what is essentially United States technology and refined it to a scale we can cope with — predigested technology, if vou like." he said.