Billion dollar export drive urged for N.Z.

Press, 10 December 1983, Page 36

Billion dollar export drive urged for N.Z.

PA Wellington Two special reports on the country’s precarious financial position and the way ahead in the next decade should be compulsory reading for company directors over Christmas according to the Export Institute. The institute’s president, Mr Brian Service, claims New Zealand needs an extra $1 billion of exports each year to reverse the decline in the standard of living. The only way he sees to earn that extra cash is for the country’s bigger companies to increase their exports. To do that, he believes a national export strategy should be developed to guide companies. His comments followed up two reports released by the Planning Council which he said were a “poignant reminder that we still haven’t got our exporting act together.” The reports are “Foreign Exchange constraints, Export growth and Overseas Debt” and “Towards 1990: Patterns of national and Sectoral Development.” The Planning Council’s two reports showed “ . . . We have not developed our

exporting as quickly as we need to in order to maintain our standard of living. They also show . . . that we have no over-all strategy,” he said.

“The directors of every large organisation in the country should be given these two reports as compulsory Christmas reading and it should be a national corporate priority for new comprehensive export strategies to be evolved during 1984.” Mr Service said the pastoral industries which had supported New Zealand for 100 years could not be expected to provide the revenue needed to maintain the country’s standard of living, and while the country’s entrepreneurs had lifted their exports significantly in the last decade, it was not enough. “The answer really lies with the big companies,” said Mr Service. “We need 50 companies to increase their exports by $2OO million each.”

To achieve that he envisaged a national strategy aimed at tripling the country’s manufactured exports in the next 10 years.