Sir Robert plans next reform step

Press, 29 February 1984, Page 3

Sir Robert plans next reform step

NZPA staff correspondent New York

The next big step in the campaign for a review of the world’s trade and payments system will be the mechanics of setting up a committee to study possible solutions and prepare the way for an eventual conference to decide on changes.

the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, told N.Z.P.A. yesterday. The campaign began two years ago, producing results at a Commonwealth Finance Ministers’ meeting in London in September, 1982, which set up a committee to study the idea and report back, which it has since done.

Sir Robert has been plodding the route ever since, modifying his ideas from time to time to take account of “political and economic realities.”

After reiterating his ideas in Washington, where he talked with senior Administration officials, Sir Robert is now in New York meeting businessmen, ambassa : dors to the United Nations, United Nations officials, and American journalists in a bid to gain wider acceptance for the proposal in the United States and to swing developing countries round to his point of view. One problem now is that Sir Robert has come to believe the only politically viable way to begin is by setting up a committee such as the International Monetary Fund’s interim committee, which has 22 members, wherein powerful countries such as the United States have single representation, and smaller countries are represented by spokesmen for groups, with the voting accordingly weighted in favour of the big countries. Sir Robert feels this is the only formula countries such as the United States will accept, but he admitted yesterday that many of the developing countries still favoured a system which would begin with a big international conference rather than end with one. From here, he says, “We have got a Commonwealth (Finance) Ministers’ meeting in London at the time of the O.E.C.D. council meeting in early May, and I think that what we are really aiming at is the London summit (of the seven big Western industrialised countries) in June. “If that summit can consider this issue seriously I think we would be looking at putting the thing together at the Commonwealth Finance Ministers’ meeting in Toronto and the I.M.F.-

World Bank meeting (in Washington) the next week,” Sir Robert said. “The United Nations people are rather keen to have a greater input than would occur if it is done that way, and this is one of the things that I want to discuss with these people,” he said. Sir Robert said that “over a period of two years it has moved away from being a personal initiative to being a Commonwealth initiative” with parallel work being done by developing countries at the United Nations and the non-aligned group. The consultations between officials set up by the Williamsburg, Virginia, summit of the seven big Western countries were producing some technical papers, Sir Robert said.

“I would say they are moving fairly slowly, but obviously their target would be to come back for the June summit.” Sir Robert said he believed that Third World countries which did not yet accept the idea of starting with a committee “will have to, or the thing won’t get off the ground.” Tanzania was the country, besides New Zealand, most actively promoting the reform concept, he said, but even Tanzania had not yet accepted the idea of starting without a full conference.