Fran O'Sullivan: Single market push will require fence mending

COMMENT

Bank of New Zealand chairman Kerry McDonald has given strong indications that he is prepared to work with New Zealand business organisations to advance the single Australian market proposal.

But the man who headed the New Zealand side at the first Australian-New Zealand Leadership Forum is not yet prepared to say which organisation might be chosen to carry the forum's banner.

Nor is McDonald likely to reshape his core organising team - at least in the short term - to ensure a stronger business-oriented group is mustered to match the professionalism of the Australian side for next year's forum.

McDonald and his Australian forum co-chairperson Margaret Jackson will promote a single transtasman market at an Auckland business meeting next month.

The single market was the major proposal adopted by the forum.

But some considerable fence-mending is needed before the event.

Political sources suggest cabinet ministers such as Commerce Minister Margaret Wilson should have been included in sessions dealing with transtasman business harmonisation, or at least been at the forum's social functions, as she is running much of the harmonisation agenda.

McDonald's decision to exclude Kiwi business organisations from the forum also created angst among those left out when 75 Australasian powerbrokers converged on Wellington's Government House for their two-day meeting.

Qantas chairman Margaret Jackson, who led the Australian side, included Business Council of Australia president Hugh Morgan and CEO Katie Lahey in the stellar business-oriented group she mustered.

But McDonald - who operated a looser, more talkfest-oriented approach - excluded the Business Roundtable, Business New Zealand and the Chambers of Commerce.

Even the Australia-New Zealand Business Council, to which McDonald once belonged, did not make the cut.

This exclusion caused some annoyance in Finance Minister Michael Cullen's office.

It has been working with the business council to develop research on policy issues underpinning the single-market agenda which he announced after his annual meeting with Australian Treasurer Peter Costello in January.

Transtasman working groups are already developing common policies in areas such as banking prudential regulation, transtasman competition and securities regulations and joint accounting standards.

Suddenly the Leadership Forum was playing in the same sandpit without including all the players.

Business organisations canvassed by the Herald say they will be looking to both co-chairs to adopt an inclusive approach as policy ideas are developed.

There have been suspicions that McDonald tailored his list to exclude groups such the Roundtable which might be offside with the Government.

But he maintains that was not the case.

Jackson and Morgan shoulder-tapped forum participants to form working groups in areas such as competition law, securities regulations, accounting standards, banking regulation, efficiency between the two Australasian stock exchanges, taxation and intellectual property, and the effect of a single market on employment.

McDonald says the forum "offered some worthwhile paths forward".

The Auckland function, which will be hosted by the Transtasman Business Circle, is tentatively scheduled for June 29.

"That will be an opportunity for an hour or so for a wide group of people involved in the forum and others to discuss the outcome of the forum and what's proposed to move things forward," said McDonald.

The Australian core team has based its approach on the decade-old Australian American Leadership Dialogue.

This dialogue, founded by Australian businessman Hugh Scanlan, has private sector finance and is strongly independent of the Government and the bureaucracy.

It is resourced by two non-profit education foundations, the American Australian Education Leadership Foundation in Washington, DC, and a counterpart organisation in Melbourne.