Donald Rod: Industry New Zealand and Trade New Zealand Integration Bill — First Reading 
Donald Rod: Industry New Zealand and Trade New Zealand Integration Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:607;Page:4353] 
ROD DONALD (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 As we now know this bill merges Trade New Zealand and Industry New Zealand. As Gordon Copeland said if we stick around long enough everything goes full circle in this place. The new organisation sounds suspiciously like the old Department of Trade and Industry. Members will recall that the Department of Trade and Industry was restructured out of existence as successive Governments took a corporate path. 
I personally have serious doubts that Crown entities perform any better than old Government departments. At least old Government departments had Ministers and Ministers could be held directly accountable for the actions of those departments and could not hide behind private sector directors appointed at some considerable cost to govern those entities. 
I have to say that the new name New Zealand Trade and Enterprise does not inspire confidence. I am not suggesting that we call this bill the “Department of Trade and Industry Resurrection Bill” but I do think that the name “New Zealand Trade and Enterprise” is rather a mouthful. It reflects the turf wars that are still going on between the Trade New Zealand people and the Industry New Zealand people behind their flash logos. Why do we not call the merged organisation “Enterprise New Zealand”? That name is sharper and more focused and it would embrace all the economic activity that the organisation is set up to support whether it is goods or services export or domestic. 
But perhaps the failure to produce a decent name is symptomatic of the farce that this bill clearly is because the merger is already under way. I have a letter dated 18 March that tells me that the establishment board already exists and that the new chief executive officer starts work on 7 April—even before the absolutely unacceptable report-back date that we have been given for this bill. Indeed the chief executive of Industry New Zealand leaves this Thursday so I guess we have no choice but to pass this piece of legislation. Clearly Industry New Zealand is about to go out of existence and what is more that has been planned since November last year. Clearly the Government is covering its embarrassment by giving the select committee only 1 month to consider this bill because on 1 July its new exciting flagship New Zealand Trade and Enterprise is going to be up and running. That date is the start-up date so this legislation should have been introduced months ago. To do our job properly Parliament should be assessing the performance of both Industry New Zealand and Trade New Zealand so that we can assess whether those two bodies have done a good job and whether the outcome of merging them would be any better. 
We have very serious concerns about many of Industry New Zealand’s funding decisions. Other members have already highlighted the Sovereign Yachts fiasco. A more recent decision of course was to give $1.5 million to EDS. If I recall correctly EDS made a profit of over $1 billion last year. Why should this Government and New Zealand taxpayers be indulging in corporate welfare just because a foreign multinational organisation claims it will produce some jobs? We know where jobs come from. They come from community economic development and from small businesses. That is where Industry New Zealand should be putting its focus and that is where Trade New Zealand should have been as well. 
We are concerned that the merged body will be even more fixated on exporting rather than import substitution. In our view trying to fly on one wing is a failed strategy. Export-led growth is in fact delivering trade dependence and we have only to look at the figures for the year to December to see that that is the case. New Zealand’s trade deficit for the last calendar year was $1.33 billion. The year before we had a trade surplus but for only 1 year out of the last 8 have we had a trade surplus. Is someone trying to tell me that Trade New Zealand has been doing a good job when it has produced the goods in only 1 out of the last 8 years? 
Let us look just at the relationship with Australia our cousins across the water. Here we are celebrating 20 years of closer economic relations. Well for 18 of those 20 years the relationship has gone Australia’s way because it has had the trade surplus. For the year to December our deficit with Australia was—all on our own one country—$1.13 billion. That has a lot to do with the fact that we do not make the most of the opportunities that present themselves to us and one of those is the 
Industrial Supplies Office a tiny little unit in the current Industry New Zealand set-up. We could have learnt a lot from the industrial supplies offices in Australia. They are much more proactive as Mr Anderton was indicating before. They are not happy about the new structure because the office in New Zealand will now be part of an export-oriented agency not just an import-substitution organisation assisting Government departments in New Zealand. The Industrial Supplies Office will be part of this new monolith seeking markets in Australia. Under closer economic relations the industrial supplies offices over there are meant to work together with us but they are hardly likely to share information with our office now that we are in competition with them. What steps are being taken to resolve this issue and others? That is one of the key questions this Government has to answer. 
Our biggest concern however is the absence of any commitment to sustainability. I note with interest that the new chief executive Tim Gibson is a cheese maker. I hope he stays true to his profession—“good things take time.”—because that means taking a long-term view rather than lunging at quick fixes—that is having a focus on sustainability rather than short-run profits. I hope he brings a new culture to the new organisation because when Industry New Zealand was established the Labour Government fobbed the Greens off when we called for a triple bottom line criterion to be applied both to Industry New Zealand’s activities and its funding. The Government failed to deliver on that occasion and I have no more confidence that it will deliver now. The policy statement it put together then was conceptually flawed as it built on an Act of Parliament that set in statute the purpose of “sustainable economic development”. 
That is a concept that has no international use or currency according to New Zealand’s own Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment. He told the Commerce Committee exactly that on 19 June 2000. I hope he will be back to try to give the committee some advice on this bill and I hope that this time the committee will listen because Industry New Zealand has failed to live up to any reasonable expectations of ecological sustainability. There was no clear objective anywhere in its activities to reduce the overall environmental impacts of industry to live within natural income rather than depleting natural capital or to achieve greater output while reducing resource throughput. There is no explicit direction to shift industries including agriculture to cleaner production methods; to shift from more toxic to less toxic production methods and products; to address waste management in a meaningful way with a goal of zero waste; or to achieve best practice in terms of the sustainable management of natural resources including water. There is no reference to renewable resources or renewable energies or any requirement to seek to enhance the ecological systems on which much production and all life depend. In other words it does not meet our expectations because it does not achieve what it ought to set out which is sustainable development—development that fits triple bottom line criteria of not only meeting economic goals but also meeting environmental and social goals. 
I do not believe that this new agency will achieve that. I do not believe that it will involve the community as in the voluntary and non-profit sector in achieving those goals either. I look forward to trying to scrutinise this body at the select committee albeit that we are given only 1 month to do that job—and that I think is an indictment on this Government. The Government has taken since November last year to bring this bill to Parliament and now it is giving us only 1 month to check whether it is indeed the one-stop shop that Mr Anderton talked about. Quite frankly it is not. He has got it wrong in the first place because it does not include tourism. I am glad it does not but the relationship between Tourism New Zealand and this new enterprise agency is one area we need to look at. Every overseas visitor to New Zealand becomes an export market when he or she returns home and that is a connection we should be making—as well as the other points I have made.