Promoting business
p. 55 · Read in the full issue
and investment
THIS is my last Tradewinds column for PIM for I will soon be retiring from the South Pacific Trade Commission. I have naturally been thinking of the commission’s work over the 12 years I’ve been its senior commissioner, and what strikes me is how I have seen a hackneyed, tired old phrase one that usually means little to most people come to life and to
actually mean something specific and
worthwhile.
The phrase I am talking about is “regional co-operation”. As an arm of the South Pacific Forum, the South Pacific Trade Commission’s task is to promote business and investment opportunities in all island member countries. But in doing that, we are at times in conflict with a country’s own objectives in attracting as much trade as possible for we must work as enthusi astically for all Forum countries as we
do for any one of them. While all are entitled to feel that we are even-handed in our assistance, they can’t expect our activities to be exclusive to them.
With such a role we shouldn’t be surprised if from time to time we are accused of playing favourites. Yet that doesn’t happen. My experience has been that those we help accept our efforts as being genuinely regional. The islands display no selfish, dog-in-the-manger attitude. They appreciate that improvement in trade must bring benefits to the region, even if one group or other draws the short straw sometimes. This
enlightened attitude particularly prevails at government
level.
I have found all this greatly encouraging. This is the kind of co-operation that the founders of the South Pacific Forum had in mind when they launched it in Wellington in 1971.
It’s the way I hoped things might develop when, in 1972, I returned to Australia from Kenya, where I had been Australia’s trade commissioner for three years, with particu lar responsibility for Zambia, Zaire, Tanzania and Malawi, and was sent to Suva to take over as Australian trade commissioner for the South Pacific. That post had been established 18 months earlier, following Fiji’s independence.
In Suva I was asked for help and advice by many Australian businessmen selling to the islands, but I was contacted by very few island businessmen hoping to sell to Australia. This was because islanders assumed my job was confined to drumming up more sales for Australian products and services and that I would have no interest in their problems.
But trade is a two-way street and they badly needed help and advice about the market opportunities in Australia. I received official permission from Canberra to spend more time helping local traders, or any island business people I could reach from Suva.
Believe it or not, it took 12 months before the local people were finally comfortable about seeking help from me. They thought there must be strings attached that it was some Austra lian business ploy to dupe them. It was not, of course. I had, as I still have, a genuine commitment to the mutual benefits of two-way trade.
By the time I left Suva at the beginning of 1978 to take up a posting as Australian consul-general in Osaka, Japan, the need to help develop island business and investment was so well recognised (and I claim some credit for helping achieve this) that the South Pacific Forum had decided to establish the South Pacific Trade Commission to concentrate on it exclusively. This was done in 1979. It was set up with financial help from Australia, and operated from an office in Sydney. I
took over its direction in 1982. From the commission’s inception, its annual budget has been provided by Australian aid, and Australian government agencies also continue to pick up the tab on many additional and joint activities.
The fact that the SPTC operates from Sydney, is managed by an Australian, and uses Australian aid funds channelled through the Forum, has resulted in misunderstandings about its purpose, although less so these days. But there is still an attitude in the islands that the people in Canberra spend their time plotting to take advantage of them over some trade matter or other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Contrary to these suspicions, I often have to fight hard to persuade Canberra people to focus on specific island trade issues for more than five minutes at a time! I doubt if my successor, wherever he or she comes from (nobody has been named yet) will find it any different.
Sydney was chosen for the SPTC 15 years ago because it was an efficient base from which to co-ordinate necessary contacts. It also provided an office and facilities for visiting island business people, as it still does. I was given the job in view of my experience in Pacific trade, but I was left alone to get on with it the way I thought it should be done.
Of course we have had our failures as well as our successes, but when I look back on the past decade I can see very significant changes, most of them for the better, although there is still much to be done. I owe a great debt of gratitude to many people who have assisted or at times made possible the modest progress in trade development that we can claim. I haven’t space to list them all, but my thanks are genuine. The list includes PIM, which in support of regional co-operation, has made this regular space available to me since October 1991. I look forward to contributing to development in the region from time to time as we all continue to strive for better things. □