Between the lines: Honours list a slap for business

By JIM EAGLES

There's obviously not much honour in running a successful business as far as this Government is concerned.

That's the logical conclusion to be drawn from the latest New Year Honours list which acknowledges just two people for their services to business.

Graeme Lowe, managing director of Hawkes Bay's Lowe Walker Group, is made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the meat industry and the community.

Murray Sturgeon, managing director of Nelson Pine Industries, a subsidiary of Japan's Sumitomo Forestry, becomes an officer of the order for services to the forestry and export industries.

Apart from them, it seems none of the folk who run the country's 280,000 businesses, provide most of its jobs, sell its exports and generate its wealth have contributed anything to the nation worth acknowledging.

Now it is reasonable enough for the Government to take the view that honours should not be handed out to people just for doing their jobs.

But why, then, have so many honours been given to people in other areas of endeavour, like the arts, rugby, education, the public service, the law and politics, for doing what are only their jobs (and, by the way, jobs which are often quite as well remunerated as running a business)?

Maybe the answer is that the honours are supposed to acknowledge excellence in different fields.

If so, the make-up of this honours list suggests the Government considers New Zealand produces people who demonstrate excellence in almost every area but business.

By contrast, when the Business Herald team got down to deciding on its Business Leader of the Year, we ended up with 15 finalists, all people who have done an outstanding job in the past year.

Perhaps what the honours list really shows is how poorly the Government rates business operators in comparison with the likes of judges, potters, bureaucrats, university professors, painters, rugby players, politicians and teachers.

It also suggests that the Government has forgotten who it is that, in the end, must generate the wealth to pay for these other apparently more worthy areas of activity.

*