In US media interviews, Grant Robertson will push the line that New Zealand is open for business once again. Photo / Greg Bowker
OPINION:
Grant Robertson is relishing the prospect of getting off to New York with a clutch of chief executives to plug New Zealand's "reconnection to the world" and check the opportunities that a direct link with the US East Coast presents.
Finance ministers typically don't get to lead business missions offshore.
Those berths are usually reserved for prime ministers and trade ministers. Jacinda Ardern and Damien O'Connor have already led such missions to Singapore, Japan and the United States this year.
The Robertson mission has been organised by Air New Zealand, which is taking a dozen CEOs, some journalists, and "connectors" between the US and New Zealand, on a four-day mission leaving Auckland on Monday on a direct flight to JFK airport.
From a business perspective, Robertson will be projecting the "New Zealand is open for business" storyline during media interviews in New York. He'll be spruiking how our doors are once again wide open for tourists, business investment and international students.
He won't be fronting on Stephen Colbert's The Late Show with a chilly bin of zero-carbon beef as Ardern did in her own swing earlier this year.
His natural setting is more Bloomberg, where he expects to be interviewed by the Washington DC or New York bureau. Possibly NBC.
The big issue that will be uppermost for US-based financial media, however, will likely be the New Zealand economy.
Ardern is seen as a global superstar — outside of New Zealand. Much of this was due to New Zealand's initial success with Covid. However she has received some flak from US and Australian conservative media as the upshot of her recent speech to the United Nations, where she said speech can sometimes be a "weapon of war".
But as a more confident Robertson showed this week, he also has some bragging rights.
Figures showed the Government's Budget deficit grew to $9.69 billion in the year ended June 30 from $4.56b a year earlier. But this was significantly less than the shortfall of $19b projected in the May Budget. The economy has performed better than expected and the Government has been able to rein in some of its pandemic spending.
On Bloomberg TV — this time out of Hong Kong — and at a session organised in Auckland by Bloomberg Address and livecast for its international client base, Robertson talked through how New Zealand was managing its way through this period of high inflation.
He has made the point that in his view — as a result of fiscal and monetary policy — the New Zealand economic recovery and monetary tightening has started earlier than in many other jurisdictions.
It is obvious that Robertson and his advisers are fine-tuning his messaging and endeavouring to inject more clarity into his approach.
He had been somewhat miffed by some of the reactions from CEOs in the recent Herald Mood of the Boardroom survey, including on Government spending. This week, Robertson told Bloomberg Address that while the Government could try to achieve a surplus earlier, a sharp correction would do "significant damage to New Zealand".
He had been challenged on housing, inequality and the infrastructure deficit, to name just three issues. At Bloomberg Address and a later briefing at engineering consultancy Aecom, Robertson said it was impossible to solve decades of underinvestment in just a few years. He cited the fact that New Zealand's population grew from 3 million to 4 million over 30 years (1973-2003) but from 4 million to 5 million in just 16 years (2003-2019) and the underinvestment that occurred during those years.
It wasn't quite a special pleading. However, expect to hear more of this.
But everyone is moving on now from the pandemic.
Four days away in New York also provides him with the opportunity for a lot of chin-wagging with CEOs from a good cross-section of business and also the Air New Zealand board, many of whom are well-connected through their other directorships.
It is obvious from the briefings Robertson is now making to a range of select business chiefs — outside of traditional business organisations — that he is taking seriously the need to project with more clarity the benefits of some key Government policies such as the Three Waters reforms and Auckland's light rail and City Rail Link projects which have become swamped by side issues and misinformation.
What gets lost is that project costs have snowballed across the board as the upshot of international inflation; labour costs are also up; the pandemic paused projects but also the purpose of the reforms has got lost. This is an area where Robertson is working with external advisers to get renewed focus on "why we are doing this".
He will be keen to use the downtime on the 16-hour flight and in New York to hear where business is coming from on the big issues.
New York holds a special appeal for Robertson. He spent four years there as a junior diplomat some two decades ago, which he found an "amazing" experience.
He has assisted the Air New Zealand board to source a couple of well-connected speakers for the New York leg.
He jests that he's keen to find out whether some of his old haunts still exist.
Robertson was last in the US in 2019 when he attended the IMF/World Bank meetings.
Next week's meeting of these institutions in Washington is likely to be one of the most important in their history.
Robertson will be there too.
He may be a bit player among the US, China, UK, and others. But there is a New Zealand story to tell and readouts to gain.