Dialogue: Echo of an old familiar cackle

It is hard to believe now, but the Business Roundtable began as a clandestine organisation that barely acknowledged its own existence.

Those were the days when public debate carried a personal career risk, and we had it on the Prime Minister's authority that we wouldn't know a deficit if we fell over it.

Chief executives of the country's largest companies - names that never appeared in the news except at their annual report - were rumoured to meet from time to time as the "Business Roundtable," shake their heads and mutter in unison at the country's decline.

If they came to any conclusions they kept them within the corporate circle. No public comment was issued, nothing said on the record.

When the press tried to check out their meetings we were liable to be met with: "What round table? Where?"

That changed, like everything else, in 1984.

The heavy hand was removed. Treasury briefings were published for general scrutiny. The Lange Government invited Sir Ron Trotter to chair its consensus-seeking conference. The Roundtable decided to open up with the economy.

They recruited Roger Kerr from the Treasury to turn their tiny secretariat into a veritable think-tank of market liberalism.

Nobody needed to ask the Roundtable's views any more. They came, wanted or not, filling the mailbox of anybody deemed alert.

The material has been coming now for 15 years, in the form of pending speeches, submissions to parliamentary committees, monographs by chosen academics, commissioned studies of an industry or analysis of a public policy, and books.

It has been a phenomenal output, based almost entirely on the mind of Roger Kerr, the range of his reading and research, his consistent principles, precise arguments and the clarity of his language.

It is not necessary to agree with him (as I don't on Treaty issues and compulsory saving, for example) to find him thought-provoking. He is never short of speaking invitations.

If the country had one or two institutions that could compete with him for lively, clear-headed criticism of public policy, politics would be in better heart.

Those who cannot hold a candle to him have long wanted him silenced. They have not included a Prime Minister until now.

Privately, Jim Bolger and Bill Birch used to curse the Roundtable's unrelenting criticism, and David Lange, in his second term, took constant flak.

But Helen Clark is the first in her position to call for the head of Roger Kerr, saying that she cannot "work with" the Roundtable while he remains.

It was not said in a fit of pique, either. The Government was well-primed for the brain-drain advertisement that prompted her call.

The letter from Aucklander Richard Poole, e-mailed along a network of expatriates, was frank about the Roundtable connection.

"To get to the point, Roger Kerr ... would like to use this letter to Helen Clark as a catalyst for a newspaper ad that makes the Government realise that us young New Zealanders are worried about our direction and the future of the place ...

"What the Roundtable would like to promote is an ad with excerpts of the letter, together with names/occupations and current cities of people who feel the same and want something done.

"With business backing and sponsorship as well as some assistance from other business organisations and their PR companies, they hope to pay for much of the full-page ads in major dailies."

It was juvenile, but then so was Jim Anderton's post-election call to emigres that it was safe to come home now.

Any who heeded him are probably contemplating their devalued dollars and feeling a little like Stalin's returnees in the movie East/West playing at the moment.

New Zealanders know all about OE. In my time, people were kind enough to call it a brain-drain too.

If Labour wanted to blame Muldoon, that was fine. His baleful character seemed to be permeating every corner of national life. It was a good time to leave. But we would have gone anyway.

Inevitably, Richard Poole's "non-political" e-mail came into the Beehive and the ambush was set.

Roger Kerr walked into it. There is a political naivety about him that is both a strength and a weakness. It renders him utterly impervious to unpopularity but inclined to behave as though politics were rational and fair.

Most people, I imagine, assumed that behind the campaigns and paid advertisements of the past nine years on poverty, food banks, public ownership and the like, there was an unstated party interest.

Nobody is surprised that we haven't heard a word about poverty or food banks since the election, though the Government's spending priorities have been elsewhere.

Just about everybody realises that political affiliations are irrelevant when the left is promoting important issues. But most people also realise that does not apply to the right.

There were many who heard the echo of a certain nasty cackle in the Prime Minister's response. But it's a different economy now. The Roundtable does not "work with" governments. Roger Kerr will survive.