Dialogue: What's so holy about business anyway?

By GORDON MCLAUGHLAN

To hell with the vociferous business lobby, I say. They've had a fair go for a long time now and their chagrin at losing the confidence of the public is laughable. And they did lose that confidence last November after 15 years of inside running.

Every time they don't get their own way they pick up their ball and whine about going to Australia.

What's so holy and so mystical about business anyway? Christchurch businessman Paul Young was quoted in the Herald recently as saying of Michael Cullen: "It's a bit like an engineer talking to doctors. He's not a businessman, he hasn't been in the business field. That makes it very difficult for him to relate to the business community."

Has Mr Young been a politician? Is that why it's so difficult for him to relate to the political community - and the majority of other New Zealanders who think the time has come to widen our vision of life and society?

I'm intrigued by this myth that business is so arcane that no one outside a holy inner circle of Knights Templar who have successfully run one can possibly understand how it's done. You'd think being successful in business, to have managed a company or marketed a product, was the apogee of human intellectual and emotional endeavour.

If it were true that you had to do it to really know about it, then what about the employees of business organisations and the host of commentators, economists and journalists who have always lived on salary? If Dr Cullen can't understand business, how do they manage to? If he doesn't have the right to govern, why are they entitled to pontificate?

(I've been in business on my own account for 25 years and I must admit to many a chuckle at pearly words on extrepreneurialism and business practice by some journalists of modest talent who wouldn't last six months out here where you have to think entrepreneurially all the time and work till it hurts.)

The biggest sneers, of course, are wrapped in "teacher" and "academic," pathetic slights from New Zealand's pioneering, anti-intellectual past by people who seem to think that the essentially autocratic activity of managing people or running a business bestows on them the gift of political insight and wisdom. Such people don't understand democracy.

The components of the lobby with its grim foreboding, mainly employers and manufacturers' organisations and chambers of commerce, should remember that thousands of successful businesspeople voted Labour or Alliance at the last election, perhaps because they thought investing in creative industries - in education, health and in lifting Maori performance - will not only make this a more attractive and salubrious place to live in but will also enhance our economy and increase our wealth. That's because they understand that wealth is not only profits from making and selling widgets.

The coalition Government was voted in on a platform that included reversion to Government-owned accident insurance, amendments to the Employment Contracts Act, higher tax for high-income earners, greater support for arts and culture and other social activities.

Because the business lobby was so petulantly miffed by the victory, it began a barrage of complaint, accusing the Government of wounding business by doing what it said it would do and what most New Zealand voters wanted it to do. Businesspeople energetically talked down business confidence, then blamed the Government when the decline arrived. In fact, the decline was neither theirs nor the Government's fault.

I left the country last month when the news story of the day was the plummeting of business confidence and the business lobby was crowing, "We told you so." The ACC and ECA moves have done this, they said.

I arrived in Sydney a few hours later to find exactly the same business indicators with no ACC or ECA argument going on. Greg Ansley confirmed in the Herald a couple of weeks later that what happened here happened at the same time in Australia and the only common factor seemed to be the rise in interest rates, imposed here by an independent Reserve Bank Governor.

It seems to me that if we are to join the global economy, as we are being constantly urged to do, then we should start looking at our economy and reporting about it in a global context.

But still business lobbyists have ranted on and distracted everyone from the real task of watching the Government. Some sections of the proposed ECA amendments are inimical to the interests of the self-employed, the fastest-growing and one of the hardest-working groups in the economy. The Government had seriously goofed and care needs to be taken that it corrects this error.

Now, if you knew how painful it has been for me to condemn any group at the risk of flattering a Government, you'll have some idea of how sick and tired many of us are of the strutting self-aggrandisement of some members of the business community.