THE PRESS MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 1988. Mr Moore’s ripple of hope

Press, 28 November 1988, Page 12

THE PRESS MONDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 1988. Mr Moore’s ripple of hope

On the evidence of his speech to the Canterbury Chamber of Commerce on Friday, the Deputy Minister of Finance, Mr Moore, has lost none of his crusading zeal. Mr Moore, it will be remembered, was given this deputy posting, in addition to his principal duties in external relations and trade, to enable him to oversee the birth of a compact between the Government, the unions, and employers. This was a distant echo of the Economic Summit meeting called by the Government in 1984. It bounced off the Labour Party conference last September. In his speech on Friday, Mr Moore for the first time expanded publicly on his hopes and intentions for such a compact. It was stirring stuff. Mr Moore considers the time is now right to forge a new relationship between what he labelled, perhaps a trifle grandly, as the “commanding heights of the economy.” The battlefield allusion was borrowed from the British Labour politician, Aneurin Bevan, then advocating nationalisation of industry in the 19505. Mr Moore was converting it for an industrial peace movement. The current economic climate Mr Moore described as a time of maximum danger and maximum opportunity for both the Government and the country, and in this he might well be right. Nonetheless, it offers the chance to break the mould of old, confrontational industrial relationships and to create a partnership that will provide opportunities for investment and for jobs. It is this chance to which Mr Moore is wedded; it is this chance he calls the “ripple of hope.” He would make a tsunami of the ripple. Those people who are frightened of getting their feet wet attract scant regard from Mr Moore and he believes a sustainable growth iii jobs can come only through the compact he champions. It is plain that the training and the job schemes offered by the Government are woefully inadequate to deal with the ever-rising number of unemployed. The only other remedy offered by the Minister of Employment, Mr Goff, is to wait for the economy to “come right” and trust in the hoped-for growth to take up the slack. This simply is not a solution that will satisfy the electorate. With precious little else being offered by Government Ministers as a way out of the morass of unemployment, unions and employers will have to look closely at what Mr Moore intends. He hopes to present his detailed thoughts to the Cabinet before the Council of Trade Unions conference next September. Though studying the way these things have been arranged in Australia, Austria, France, Sweden, and other countries where unemployment is lower and growth in gross

domestic product is higher, Mr Moore says his proposals will be uniquely New Zealand, drawing on the experience of these accords and “social contracts,” but not conforming to them. This is logical. New Zealand’s industrial relations have developed in their own way, with their own vagaries and own vexations. A transplant of an alien solution would stand little chance of success. It would not connect with New Zealand’s resources of wealth, style of management, work habits, or distribution of labour and industry. Yet the models will provide lessons. Though it will be some months before we know — and probably before Mr Moore knows in any detail — what shape his proposed compact will take, he has spoken clearly on what he intends it to do. Its prime purpose will be to allow investors to invest with certainty in "industries with a vast potential for growth. This cannot happen, he says, when a steel mill, for example, is budgeted to cost $1.5 billion and ends up costing more than $2 billion. New Zealand’s forestry resource could be capable of a $7 billion-a-year export industry from processed products by the year 2015, he says; but this would require $6.5 billion in investments, starting now, in the processing industries. Mr Moore quoted a figure of 30,000 permanent jobs in these forestry processing industries, secure because they would be globally competitive; but he wondered if the investment would be forthcoming. He asked two pertinent questions: “Which brave investor will make the move, knowing that in the past we haven’t been able to build an oil refinery expansion, a steel mill, or even a bridge and a bank building on time, on budget, and with co-operative determination? Which brave union leader is prepared to guarantee, in our present system, that it is possible?” No ready answers spring to mind and Mr Moore admits that he is no longer prepared to talk boldly to investors without firm guidelines on how their investment can be productive in profit and in jobs. Here is a clear exposition of the challenge. Mr Moore’s tasks now are first to find the appropriate response to it and then to persuade the players in the game to agree upon the rules. The second stage might prove the more difficult, but Mr Moore has a valuable if unwelcome ally. The high unemployment dogging the country benefits no-one. When one person in 10 is unable to find work, it makes casualties of all in the community. Mr Moore coined a happy rallying cry for his crusade when he urged on Friday, “Let’s get on with the job; and the job is jobs.” It is a sentiment the country clearly endorses.