Dialogue: Cullen's battle for a rapport

By JOHN ROUGHAN

When Michael Cullen spoke to a packed business breakfast in Auckland the other day there was not a murmur. Even when he called for questions. Not a murmur.

He looked troubled about that and he probably should be. The gulf between the Government and those who make most of the country's economic decisions has never seemed greater.

There is always a political divide, naturally, between business and a Labour Government. But this is more. This is cultural.

In previous Labour cabinets, people with a small business behind them, or at least a lawyer's acquaintance with commerce, have been to the fore. This one is led by academics, predominantly from one corner of the academy at that.

Helen Clark, Michael Cullen, Phil Goff, Steve Maharey, Trevor Mallard, Margaret Wilson - all came straight from universities or polytechnics to Parliament. For most of them that was 10 to 20 years ago, but the attitudes, tastes, jargon and limitations of the social science school are in their blood.

For a long time in Opposition Helen Clark could not get over the fact that National's Minister of Social Welfare, Roger Sowry, used to be a shoe salesman. It is a measure of the cultural divide that she thought he would be stung by that.

Nobody has made more strenuous efforts to cross the divide than Michael Cullen. It is almost painful to watch him curbing his verbal agility and straining for the gravitas that business audiences expect of a Finance Minister.

For the most part, Cullen's speeches are lucid, though somewhat idiosyncratic, interpretations of recent economic history. But he cannot help the occasional outburst about "ideologues of the right" and "extremists" of one kind or another.

He should leave that stuff at party conferences; most people don't think in those terms. Business people certainly don't. When they hear a Finance Minister talking about ideology they worry about his.

They worry anyway about the steps the Government has taken purely for political applause from the left. And they seem to see Cullen as Dr Strangelove from the social laboratory.

If they studied political positioning they would know that, after the giants strides of the past 15 years, this Government's retrograde steps are really a soft-shoe shuffle. And without Cullen they might have been much worse.

It is forgotten how long he has been Labour's finance spokesman. Mike Moore gave him the job when Ruth Richardson was Finance Minister, the Budget was still in deficit, unemployment high and MMP was just one of four options in a forthcoming referendum.

He has seen off Richardson, Sir William Birch and Bill English.

More important, he has kept Labour committed to open trade and orthodox monetary and fiscal policy throughout that time. It cannot have been easy.

In their hearts, Labour MPs agree with the Alliance. Cullen had to appeal to their heads. After successive elections - 1990, 1993 and 1996 - a fresh intake to the Labour caucus had to be persuaded of the merits of an independent Reserve Bank directed to tackle inflation before all else, of fiscal responsibility and the discipline of economic exposure.

It must have been a constant and thankless task, one that Cullen might dearly like to describe to the business audiences and bank analysts who distrust him today.

Maybe in boardrooms, on the smoked salmon offensive he and Helen Clark have undertaken, they can tell them about it.

But they probably prefer to outline their real mission now: to restore trust in the political system. There is a lot to be said for fulfilling promises this time, even economically unsound promises, to recover some public trust in government.

That, though, assumes the Government can recover the trust of people who dislike the direction of the past 15 years which Labour is not going to greatly change. When the fearful and disaffected realise that this Government's new direction is merely rhetorical, we may be no further ahead.

The tragedy then would be that Labour could have turned its academic character to the country's advantage.

It is education, particularly tertiary education, that can do most for the economy now. The Budget due the week after next will no doubt boost education and training in the name of high technology and a more skilled workforce. But those are not enough.

Not everybody needs advanced computer skills - now or in the future. The quality this economy and every other needs in greater abundance is entrepreneurial knowledge. That is, the ability to spot unmet needs or even undreamed of desires and know how to organise a business to meet them. Not many know how because the education system is geared to employment, not enterprise.

Labour - possibly only Labour - can change that.