[asia-apec 924] NZ: Exporter questions Apec's value

[Gatt Watchdog]

>From "The Dominion", Wellington 25/11/98

Exporter questions Apec's value
By Marta Steeman

FOR industrialist Gilbert Ullrich, advocate of more Government
incentives for exporters, Apec is an "extraordinary business" and
he questions if there is much for New Zealand exporters to gain by
belonging to it.

Mr Ullrich led a campaign last year opposing big business
rejection of a $100 million business assistance plan.

Opening Ullrich Aluminium's new fabrication and service centre in
Petone, he said that according to the Foreign Affairs and Trade
Ministry, by opting for Apec policies, New Zealand would be
further ahead in 20 years time by only 0.4 per cent more than
gross national product gains it would have made by sticking with
the Uruguay Round of trade liberalisation.

But the Uruguay Round gains were bigger for New Zealand,
according to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resource
Economics.  It had suggested that over 20 years New Zealand would
benefit with gnp increases of between 1.6 per cent and 3.5 per
cent, Mr Ullrich said.

He was intending to be a delegate at the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation conference in April for small to medium-size
businesses and "we are seriously supposed to regard this
conference as the engine room of growth for the region."

But New Zealand sent nobody to the Apec small business meeting in
1996, 1997 and this year.  So clearly it was not a high priority.

Unilaterally reducing our tariffs and destroying many small
industries was not very smart, Mr Ullrich said.

"If Apec turns out to have been an exercise in self-delusion, it
won't bring back the industries or jobs we consigned to oblivion
in our desire to lead the world."

There was a New Zealand minister at the Apec conference in
Malaysia crowing that Japan had allowed a contentious issue -
tariff cuts on fish and forestry - to be referred to the World
Trade Organisation for resolution.

"I can't help feeling that this was the Japanese equivalent of our
parliamentary practice of sending things to the graveyard of a
select committee.

"I don't know the answer to the question as to why our Government
will go to such lengths to be involved in this whole extraordinary
business."