Dialogue: John Roughan

Dress down for a 5-year hiatus


These days Helen Clark is a walking billboard for the New Zealand garment industry. When she looks around the cabinet table she must groan at the shapeless suits, cheap shirts and vengeful ties of her male ministers.

They are not much worse than the average ... well ... maybe quite a bit worse, but most of us buy off the rack. Helen Clark might ask herself whether the depressing general standards of dress in this country is one of the byproducts of the protection she has just revived for the rag trade.

There are more serious reasons to rue her cabinet's freeze of tariff reductions this week for the next five years. But since economic reasoning must have failed to persuade this crew from its timid populism, perhaps it is worth an appeal to the Prime Minister's elevated tastes.

She might use the tariff pause to wonder why our shops for clothing and shoes are a mixture of indifferent domestic products at terrifying prices and imported rubbish. She might note that the markets for cars, computers and electronics are not like that now.

It is not by chance that clothes are about the only consumer goods still worth buying on a trip overseas. After a dozen years of gradual tariff reductions the only categories still carrying significant protection (nearly 20 per cent) are textiles, apparel and footwear.

Our airport arrival lounges no longer resemble a Japanese electronic fair as they did in the days that homecoming Kiwis struggled in with complete audio systems, portable televisions, kitchen appliances and, often enough, a car following by sea.

But inside the baggage there are still likely to be suits from San Francisco or shoes from Sydney. You will hear that not only were they cheaper there but the variety and style was better than we have at twice the price.

Protectionists are forever sneering that free trade floods a country with cheap and shoddy imports. It is actually tariffs that lower the standard. An imported item has to be cheaply made if it is to pay heavy duty at a border and sell profitably against the local manufactures.

That is why we are wearing shirts made in China but driving better cars now. It is the reason that sneakers last six months and tyres run for years.

The other side of the tariff coin - the side that socially protective people are inclined to forget - is the effect on countries which have to keep their wages low to sell over the barriers that countries like ours erect.

It is a commentary on the quality of New Zealand-made clothing that most of it still mortally fears competition from the Third World.

Good governments, particularly of small economies, do not reduce trade barriers simply to be able to import the world's best goods at market prices. They do it to force their resources into activities that can earn the quality of life their people want. Protect Third World activities and you will end up there.

Every mainstream politician from here to Tony Blair knows that. But lowering barriers is hard politics. It hurts some people and unsettles most. When Bendon closes stitching factories it is on the front page. When a new design label is launched it is a brief in a back section.

We have had remarkably good governments for 15 years, and a dozen years of tariff reductions have brought some progress - even in the apparel sector. When Miss Clark came into Parliament, you would never have called her a billboard for New Zealand design, partly because there was none to speak of.

She might sound more grateful for a few homegrown fashion houses now competing in world company. Instead, she argues that relief from tariff reduction will inspire clothing manufacturers to "re-engineer" into top-range products. It takes you back. We haven't heard that nostrum since the industry plans of the 1960s.

The Government knows it is taking the cowardly course. It has merely made the task of meeting the Apec tariff phase-out by 2010 much more painful than it needed to be. But that is unlikely to be the Government's problem.

Trevor Mallard, Minister of Everything, says it was "foolish" for New Zealand to be leading the Apec charge. It is foolish for a country of this size not to be.

The idea that a few tariffs should be retained just as bargaining chips in trade negotiations is farcical. We are no bigger than a moderately sized city to most countries we want to trade with. Whatever may cause them to lower their barriers to our goods, it is unlikely to be the attractions of sales here.

That is why Apec has been particularly valuable for to us. Unlike the World Trade Organisation, which runs on principles of reciprocal concessions suited to the economies of the United States and Europe, Apec promotes the fact that free trade, however painful the transition, is ultimately in the self-interest of everybody.

You'd think it would be obvious.