View on economic success

Press, 31 July 1984, Page 6

View on economic success

PA Wellington

New Zealand’s economic success could rest on its people accepting a few simple economic lessons, said Fletcher Challenge’s chief executive, Mr Ron Trotter, last evening.

Mr Trotter, head of the country’s biggest company, has been appointed by the Government to steer its planned economic conference.

Mr Trotter has just returned from Australia where he investigated the way the Hawke Government ran its economic summit meeting after it won the election early last year, and whether a similar conference would work in New Zealand. He will be chairman of a steering committee of

officials and representatives of sector groups, including the Government, management and unions, to establish an agenda for the conference.

Mr Trotter said the Australians had shown that a summit meeting could work. Industrial disputes and inflation were down and productivity and employment up. Some of that was because of their meeting. “We’ve got different problems, but if we can make some contribution towards this need for growth and development, to get off the bottom of being the slowest growing economy in the 0.E.C.D., it seems to be a pretty good objective for a start,” he said. “It’s what comes out of

the conference that matters.” Mr Trotter warned that people’s attitudes would have to change.

“Right now we’re coming out of a freeze, we’ve just had a devaluation, we’ve got a lot of restructuring (to do) and if we each go our own way, you could get an explosion of inflation and We’d all finish up worse off.

“There are some simple economic lessons we’ve got to get across to the people of New Zealand and if we’re as good as the Australians were at their conference, those messages will get to a lot of people — not just those at the conference.” Mr Trotter said he bad a stake in making the economy work because the pros-

perity of his company depended on the prosperity of New Zealand.

He believed the unions trusted him, although they might not always agree with him, and accepted him as a man of integrity. -Td like to help influence them to give this conference support.”

Mr Trotter said he had talked to many “hard-nosed businessmen and tough trade unionists” in Australia and they had been sincerely convinced by their meeting. “I’ve come back really struck by the emotional content that came out when an objective exposure of the country’s position was made and people said, ‘We’ve got to stop fighting about things and get cracking.’”