Fran O'Sullivan: Yearning for the past no good for the future

I can understand why Douglas Myers didn't bother to show up to deliver his latest epistle to New Zealand's big business club. The expat New Zealander, who spends a fair swag of his time in London these days, was a brilliant businessman - in his time. We could do with a few more of his intellectual ilk and clear passion for New Zealand back here right now, once again working to focus minds on the crucial externalities that affect our place in the world.

But the speech Myers asked his fellow tax exile Alan Gibbs to deliver on his behalf at the Roundtable celebration of two decades in business last weekend was not a patch on some of his previous stellar epics.

The problem is that Myers has allowed himself to be portrayed as focused too much on the past.

It would be simple to say that that was what Roundtable executive director Roger Kerr had asked him to do: Think back to how New Zealand was 20 years ago; about the Business Roundtable's role in the changes over this time; and how New Zealand looks from an overseas perspective.

So, inevitably Myers delivered a mutually back-slapping address over Roundtable and Kerr's part in the 1980s reform process. But it wasn't within cooee of what Myers might have delivered if he had been given a more challenging brief.

Okay, I wasn't at the Friday night address - and thus not able to smother a derisive snort at the predictable jibe against the apathetic and often hostile media that had failed to do its bit to promote an economic reform agenda. The speech published in the Herald's Perspectives Page last Thursday was enough.

What did concern me (for Myers) is his tale of a youthful - well, okay, mid-40s - chief executive who was exhilarated by the 1980s economic revolution and thrilled to play his part, alongside the somewhat confused older Roundtable CEOs who were confused by the changes but, in the main, supportive if often silent.

The problem is the revolution Myers barracked for faltered in 1993 when former National Prime Minister Jim Bolger fired Ruth Richardson as finance minister.

In Myers' book nothing of any real worth has happened since. There is plenty of unfinished business. But the Business Roundtable must keep the faith and raise the awkward and difficult issues and keep them before the public, media and politicians.

It's a familiar syndrome and one that, unfortunately, also afflicts some journalists and editors who cut short their own effectiveness by constant references to their heydays - reliving their gladiatorial clashes with former National Prime Minister Sir Robert Muldoon, or the jokes and the love affair of his successor Labour Prime Minister David Lange - but not moving on to confront the policy issues that affect New Zealand today.

If Myers had spent a bit more time in New Zealand this year he could have touched base with Prime Minister Helen Clark and Finance Minister Michael Cullen before portraying the former as still focused on reform fatigue.

Both politicians are painfully aware that New Zealand will slide further economically if there is not a switch to a regime of continual policy changes at Government level to try to ensure the country becomes more internationally competitive.

They are trying to couch their switch but doing a pretty inadequate job so far in relation to the externalities that affect New Zealand.

Myers pointed to big developments that were positive to New Zealand: Europe being eclipsed after 500 years of hegemony; the imploding of the EU's common agriculture policy and its handsome subsidies, which will clearly benefit our more competitive farmers; and the growth of China.

Coupled with supportive government policies these big developments would propel New Zealand into the top half of the OECD pretty easily. But that was as far as he went on the issues that matter.

I suspect that if Myers put himself back into his earlier revolutionary shoes he would have schemed up an exciting speech which challenged the good and great who gathered to hear him.

Some fulsome encouragement from Myers to Clark/Cullen to make the public switch away from the reform fatigue rhetoric and examine just what part the Government could play in the exciting times of 2006 (not 1986) may have gone a long way to re-establishing the collaborative partnership between big business and government that he laments.

But opportunity was lost. On this score I would take issue with Myers on one point: that the Herald was guilty of lobotomising attempts to portray a rosy state in New Zealand's Eden when much of the evidence (to Myers) was clearly to the contrary.

Lobotomising, as anyone familiar with the psychiatric and neurological trades knows, implies that the (usually) bent individuals carrying out that particular barbaric practice intend that their subjects should emerge as docile, apathetic characters following their operative experience.

Such intended outcomes could hardly be good for building readership, audience numbers or advertising dollars.

But it is true, nevertheless, that a summer pall did descend over the New Zealand body politic (including the nation's news media) in the holiday period.

Unfortunately Myers' last effort does little to remove that pall. It's time to move on.