Dialogue: Who cares about moody business?

By GARTH GEORGE

What is this thing called "business confidence"? And why should anyone - and particularly a Government - give a hoot whether it is up, down or sideways?

To read this newspaper lately you would think the whole future of the nation depended on it.

It appears that if "business confidence" is "the lowest it has been since ..." then the Government should be bending over backwards to do something about it and the rest of us should all be worrying ourselves sick.

Yet no one has ever told me what "business confidence" is. And what, for that matter, is "business"?

"Business," I have always understood, is something that a lot of people indulge in, from one-man, self-employed tradesmen to multinational corporations employing tens of thousands of people.

Is the "business" that has lost "business confidence" all or only some of those?

Is the local tradesman, who has so much work on his hands that he's working 10 hours a day, six days a week, lacking "business confidence"?

Or the couple in the family dairy or some other retail shop working seven days a week?

Or the small operation that employs a dozen or so people?

Or is it just the big operators with loud voices, echelons of economists and squadrons of spin doctors who are making all this negative noise?

And what is it that business lacks confidence in?

Is it confidence in its ability to produce the goods and services it has been set up to do?

Is it confidence in its ability to sell those goods and services to the public or to export them abroad?

Is it confidence in its ability to employ enough people to produce the goods and provide the services and to sell them?

Or is it simply the confidence in its ability to continue to extract the stratospheric level of profits it has been used to making in the past decade or so?

Now I would have thought that business in New Zealand would be brimming with confidence. After all, for the past 13 years at least, successive governments have done everything they possibly could to pander to the needs (read demands) of business.

I reckon all of us non-businesspeople ought to be rather relieved that business these days is lacking a bit of confidence. Remember the days when business confidence was so high that this country was swimming in money - and in inflation?

And what happened? In 1987 the whole overconfident bubble burst, the sharemarket crashed, a number of apparently flourishing businesses were found to be houses of cards, and thousands of gullible and not-so-gullible New Zealanders lost almost all they had.

Since then we have been told - so many times that it has become a litany - that if business isn't prosperous, none of the rest of us is either.

That we need business to be prosperous, so we can better look after the sick, the elderly, our children and the needy. And that we need business to be prosperous in order to create jobs.

Well, if those are the principles behind all this kowtowing to business, how come there were 38,419 people on the dole in 1985, 146,812 in 1991 and there are 157,700 this year?

How come hospital waiting lists haven't got any shorter, all health services are under increasing pressure, education is not keeping up with the needs of our children, and there are more than 800,000 New Zealanders on some sort of state-funded benefit compared with just over 600,000 in 1985?

(Strangely enough, the number of superannuitants has dropped from 459,813 in 1965 to 454,339 this year. What does that say about all the hand-wringing over whether we'll be able to afford old-age pensions in 2050?)

And how come thousands and thousands of workers have been laid off or made redundant, and the wages and salaries of those of us who have survived have lost more than 10 per cent of their buying power?

And how come the dollar is hardly worth the paper it's printed on overseas and our balance of payments is so far out of balance that it has us verging on bankruptcy as a nation?

Yet for most of the time since the recovery from the 1987 crash, business, both indigenous and imported, has given the impression that it has been supremely confident.

Quite frankly, I don't give a damn whether businessmen are celebrating with champagne or crying in their beer.

Nor should you.

garthgeorge@herald.co.nz