By JOHN ROUGHAN
Out of the blue, the crystalline blue of a sunny winter sky, my tennis partner asked what was the most memorable thing at the Knowledge Wave Conference.
Without hesitation, I said it was a paper by someone whose name I forget, and it was about business growth characteristics. It wasn't much of an answer but it was true.
The presenter's name, now that I have looked it up, was David Clarke, an executive of Westpac Bank in Australia. Now that I read his paper again, it was not a subject for a sunny weekend anyway.
It stuck in my mind as much for its style, a matter-of-fact antipodean clarity, and for what it did not say. It did not mention cost-cutting and it was not at all interested in the Government, which was remarkable in a session on economic strategy.
It is even more remarkable that after two weeks anything from a conference is still with me. I caught only half of it, and that tennis companion, as sceptical as I am about the knowledge economy, was not there. Yet he senses something happened.
So does Finance Minster Michael Cullen, another sceptic at heart, who devoted an entire speech to the event when he spoke to a business audience in Hamilton on Tuesday.
A conference is like a book. The real test is not when you come to the end flushed with mental stimulation, but whether any of it remains after a week or two.
And like many good books, the Knowledge Wave Conference did not come to a neat and tidy conclusion. It told Dr Cullen, for example, that "New Zealand needs smart, active Government intervention if we are to lift our economic performance."
And that was true, too, although most of those present had strenuously avoided the G-word.
But what was interesting, and may turn out to be historically significant, about the event in Auckland two weeks ago is the fact that it was not a Government initiative.
Wellington took some time to realise that, and was a little unnerved when it did. National Radio, I was told, reported the first day of the conference as Rogernomics resurgent. The public service regards Auckland as a hotbed of free marketers. If only.
Auckland corporate life, by and large, has only a vague idea what happened in 1984 and has never been able to fathom the ensuing fuss. It thinks Rogernomics was about getting government out of business unless it can be helpful.
As everyone in Wellington seems to know, it was about getting government out of business investment calculations because governments can never be helpful without muddying the water. That remains the prevailing principle of our public policy. Nobody was more nervous than the Treasury when it came to the Knowledge Wave Conference.
The initiative for the event should be credited to the University of Auckland, especially its energetic vice-chancellor, Dr John Hood, formerly of Fletcher Challenge. Early in proceedings he engaged the Prime Minister to be co-host, although she never seemed entirely at ease.
Perhaps she suspected the affair was an elaborate bid to boost the funding of universities, Auckland University in particular. Auckland believes its international credentials and the quality of its research merit a margin over the rest.
If the university had been a profitable private enterprise, a whiff of self-interest would have have been enough to see the whole project denounced by the commentariat. But the pursuit of self-interest often serves the public good, and it probably has done so this time.
The event grew into something bigger than tertiary education, and more than catching the popular waves of science and technology. It left participants with a sense of optimism, of something beginning. It may turn out to have been a defining moment for a concerted direction.
Now the organisers and sponsors (which include the Herald) aim to give the conference impulse a form and shape. Unless they are careful they will find themselves reinventing the Government.
If public money is needed to give business a concerted direction, nothing is to be gained by keeping the Government at arm's length. Politicians are not uniquely incompetent at investing public funds.
A panel of businesspeople would be no better, and probably worse. The problem is not the people, it is the system in which they will not suffer if they get it wrong.
The only sanction on public investment is the ballot box. If, heaven forbid, we are going to resort to public investment to point business in a concerted direction, the elected Government must make the decisions.
The present Government, rhetoric notwithstanding, is not anxious to do so. It protests a little too strongly that the era of neutral, hands-off microeconomic policy is past. Dr Cullen now thinks that policies in education, immigration and the like ought to be concentrated on a narrower definition of the economic interest.
"We cannot continue with the scatter-gun technique of recent times," he said in Hamilton. "We need to recognise we have natural competitive advantages and work off those."
His picks? The things we do already: forestry, dairy products, meat and wool, fishing, aquaculture, marine industries, tourism, film, fashion. But immediately he had doubts: "That does not mean narrowing the emphasis to conventional products ... A lot of hard thinking needs to go in ... "
Public investment should not be narrowed. It should aim to produce a constant stream of well-educated people capable of footing it with the world with whatever interests and talents they have.
And companies that cultivate those sort of people are halfway to international survival. That was a thrust of that paper, I remember. I hope something comes of it.
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