Dialogue: We do ourselves a favour if we buy 'made in NZ'

GILBERT ULLRICH* says that, for the sake of creating and keeping jobs, New Zealanders must start discriminating in favour of locally made products, as the Australians are beginning to do.

I have a policy of buying New Zealand-made products if I can because a very good case can be made for it. If we can make something like a grocery food product and do it competitively, we should be doing it and, as Kiwis, we should be buying it.

Why? One of the things we keep saying is that we sell only commodities. We don't process anything much further than a raw material. To a fair degree that is true but the ridiculous thing is that when we do process it further we don't support it as we should.

In Australia, entrepreneur Dick Smith has pointed out a similar anomaly in that country's national psyche. He checked his cupboards and discovered that over 80 per cent of the products were from overseas.

He was apparently incensed, commenting that the whole thing had happened as if by stealth.

In Australia, Mr Smith is a man with a huge profile because of his business success and his record-breaking exploits in helicopters. When he talks, the media tend to listen, and he began to be voluble about this issue.

In addition, he began to license smaller Australian manufacturers to make products bearing various forms of the Dick Smith identity, and coupled them with the publicity he was getting.

All the licensing fees he got were either given to charity or used to publicise the campaign. The first year involved more than $A1.3 million in advertising and charitable donations; the result was that a lot of Australians began buying Australian products.

Australians are a patriotic lot and the moment they began to see how their buying patterns were helping small local companies to compete more successfully against the multinationals, they started to check the country of origin of the products they found in the supermarkets.

If it wasn't Australian, they put it back. If there was an Australian product which wasn't being stocked, they asked for it at the checkout.

Quite quickly (and for obvious reasons) the supermarkets began to compete to show how patriotic they were, and a number of local producers were saved from extinction.

Everybody knows that the more you make of something, the cheaper you tend to be able to make it. That naturally favours big producers, and one of the less palatable elements of multinationalism is the tendency for very large factories to be placed in specific areas to capitalise on cheap labour rates and (in the case of food) growing costs.

In some cases, particularly with regard to food, this has worked to New Zealand's advantage. In other cases, it hasn't worked so well for us.

Good and innovative local producers have been pushed to the wall because they had trouble being stocked, even though their product may have been better than the imported version. Retailers' use of imported, dumped or in some cases sold-on-consignment products has put price pressure on them.

Do I care if it is produced in this country by a foreign company? Not really, because at least it is providing other New Zealanders with jobs.

Would I be overly concerned about supermarkets stocking foreign goods? No, I wouldn't. We need competition, but whether we buy that foreign product is our choice. I would take my custom elsewhere if I found I could get competitive Kiwi products at another shop.

Does this have any real impact? If enough of us did it, it would.

Take the Japanese as an example. One of the reasons Japan has been so successful is that, while its governments make it difficult for foreign companies to do business there, it is also quite difficult to wean Japanese consumers away from Japanese products.

Their manufacturers have the advantage of a strong local market before they even attempt to export.

Would what I am suggesting make a difference to our economy? Not if we only supported inefficient producers. But if the price is competitive, why buy somebody in Malaysia or China a job when you could be buying a New Zealander a job?

When you buy a New Zealander a job, it means that he or she is not going on to the dole. That means you won't have to pay more taxes to support them. If they have more money, they can probably buy your product or service and then you get to be that little more secure.

We have to be more discriminating as consumers. We sit and whine about how the family silver was sold by previous governments and we believe that there is nothing we can do about it.

Take Telecom as an example. A friend who first arrived in Auckland many years ago had to wait three and a half years to get a telephone. That simply wouldn't happen today, and if we are completely honest, much of what we refer to as the family silver was being used by politicians to create jobs to keep unemployment down.

The Government doesn't really have a place in the market because it has different priorities from ordinary business. Telecom wants to make money out of telecommunications. Fair enough. When the Government owned it, that wasn't its priority.

If we really feel badly about Telecom, the answer is in our hands. Change telephone companies. But bear in mind that while you are doing that, Telecom is at least providing jobs for other New Zealanders.

Let's think about jobs. We complain and are concerned about unemployment, but then we go to the supermarket and buy foreign products when a local product is the same price and of equal quality or better.

Every time a local company goes down, we lose technologies and skills. We worry and talk a lot about the outflow of our young talent to foreign countries. But if they cannot get jobs here because we don't buy local products, we have only ourselves to blame.

In effect, it is our choice that they cannot get jobs here because we buy products from the places that will give them jobs.

I am not suggesting that we buy local products if they are clearly inferior to imported goods. That would defeat the purpose of the exercise. New Zealand producers have to be competitive and they have to produce quality items.

But if they do that, we should go out of our way to support them. If they get support in their local market, they can grow and be competitive internationally.

We have world-class airlines, whiteware producers, food producers and so on. We are a market of almost four million people, not huge by international standards but big enough to make our local industries secure enough to look at bigger markets. We support our sports teams passionately. It's time we did the same thing for jobs.

Australians share many of our problems, including that of their youth seeking better opportunities elsewhere. The difference is that they are doing something about it.

* Gilbert Ullrich is the managing director of Ullrich Aluminium.