O.E.C.D. Ministers ‘complacent’—P.M.

Press, 19 May 1984, Page 8

O.E.C.D. Ministers ‘complacent’—P.M.

NZPA staff correspondent Paris The Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, has chided Ministers from developed countries for being too complacent about world economic problems. This “dangerous complacency” was entirely unwarranted, he said.

Sir Robert was speaking at the annual Ministerial meeting of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris.

His comments came in an off-the-cuff intervention when Ministers from the 24 member-countries were discussing trade matters. “I believe, and I’ve listened carefully this morning, there is still a dangerous degree of complacency that some of us in various governments have,” said Sir Robert. “It is, in my view, entirely unwarranted.” Deep structural problems would persist unless governments did more than they were doing now to deal with them, he said.

“Can we be complacent or, indeed, confident that those massive structural problems are going to be solved by anything we can see in front of us at present”?

The problems were essentially political, Sir Robert said, and the question was how to create the political will to deal with them, and how to sell it to the electorate. Sir Robert suggested the answer lay in getting a “sensible political forum” to tackle world economic problems which needed a mandate for some kind of action. Sir Robert told New Zealand journalists after the first day’s discussions that some Ministers appeared to be satisfied that the upturn in the United States economy would gradually permeate the economies of the other O.E.C.D. nations.

“That I regard as complacency,” he said. “What they should be saying is: There is an upturn which gives us a little more time to tackle the underlying structural problems.” Many countries did. in

fact, share this view, he said. Sir Robert said the first day’s discussions, devoted mostly to trade, were “somewhat rambling.” He thought Ministers were trying to make up for the fact that last year "everyone solemnly pledged to roll back protectionism and there’s little sign of it (being rolled back).” Sir Robert does not know yet whether he will be seeing the French President, Mr Francois Mitterrand, while he is in Paris. The President returned yesterday from a visit to Sweden. Sir Robert, who is due to leave today for Canada, said in London that he might try and see President Mitterrand or the French Agriculture Minister, Michel Rocard, to get them to use their .influence on Ireland over the New Zealand butter question.