Painting Apec pictures

By Rod Oram

Between the lines

"Awe Black - awesome, proud, competitive."

Cute, but what does it mean?

"The colour depicts our love of sport, our pride and our competitive spirit," said Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, plugging the slogan as she opened an international event this week.

A rugby tournament? No. Apec's conference on small and medium-sized enterprises, involving 300 business people and scores of politicians from 20 Asia Pacific economies.

For two days, the Christchurch Convention Centre was New Zealand businesses' shop window to representatives from economies embracing half the world's population.

A few dozen primarily South Island companies displayed their wares but foreign delegates left barely wiser about the sophistication of New Zealand business.

Their ignorance was not for want of trying. The place buzzed as they networked. Once an activity better suited to large companies, international trade is rapidly becoming practical for the small and medium firms (those employing 19 or less people) which make up 96 per cent of all New Zealand companies.

To its credit, the Government took the great leap of bringing together business and political delegates. But it is still out of touch with business. Small slips are significant.

Two sides of the cavernous convention hall were draped with big black curtains, each bearing a huge white fern. Eleven large colour photos were arranged around one fern and 12 around the other.

Were the delegates inspired by 23 scenes from New Zealand industry - say, the world's largest dairy processing plant (Kiwi Co-op's in Taranaki), or Buckley Systems' semiconductor fabricating machines used by 70 per cent of the world's microchip makers?

No, the pictures were all sporting.

At last year's Apec summit in Kuala Lumpur, our Government showed a video to world business leaders as a way of inviting them to this year's Apec summit in Auckland.

The video was stuffed with shots of green fields, blue waters and white mountains. In this idyllic playground, a well-known industrialist was shown enjoying a glass of wine and people performed exhilarating physical feats without doing much for the GDP. Briefly, a few apples jiggled by on a sorting line and some logs disappeared into a ship.

This is an issue of substance as well as form.

A key Apec body is the Apec Business Advisory Council (Abac). Each government appoints three members to Abac. One is meant to be from a small or medium business to give Apec leaders an insight into entrepreneurial companies which are the great hope of many countries including ours.

Yet Wellington appointed Philip Burdon, a former trade minister and a current Brierley Investments director, Douglas Myers, chairman of Lion Nathan, and Fran Wilde, chief executive of Trade New Zealand.

Burdon and Myers have good Asian credentials and Wilde works with a lot of small companies.

But they, like the Government, don't have their all on the line running a small or medium sized company, the bedrock of our economy.