PRODUCTIVITY, GROWTH AND PARTNERSHIP - GIAB FORUM, 11 OCTOBER 2002

Senior Government Ministers and representatives of major New Zealand businesses will meet on October 11 to continue the on-going dialogue between business and government on accelerating economic growth.

The meeting has been called by the Prime Minister’s Growth and Innovation Advisory Board, in association with the Knowledge Wave Trust.

“The one day forum will bring together around 50 key participants in the New Zealand economy, early in the new parliamentary term, to renew momentum for growth, with a particular focus on improving productivity,” the chair of GIAB, Mr Rick Christie, said today.

“The forum represents one aspect of GIAB’s activities to deepen partnership between the public and private sectors as part of its brief to oversee implementation of the Government’s growth and innovation strategy.”

GIAB is planning a series of such meetings with a number of groups over coming months.

“This will be a day of workshops and interaction among small groups of key leaders in the economy and will include representatives of the trade union and social sectors,” said Mr Christie. “The forum is timely, coming as it does when global economic conditions are becoming less favourable for New Zealand than they have been in the last three years, when growth has been strong by historical standards.”

Themes for the day will include:

identifying clear responsibility for issues where government and business should take individual responsibility, and/or should best work together; promoting collective action to improve New Zealand’s export orientation and performance; exploration of education system, skills training and workforce issues to improve productivity; exploration of ways to improve and deepen New Zealand’s research and development effort and apply technology towards improving productivity; unblocking infrastructure bottlenecks that are impeding growth; encouraging greater channeling of investment capital to the creation of new knowledge and to meet infrastructural needs, including via public/private partnerships; ensuring that the innovation system is working for major players in the economy as well as small and medium enterprises.

“We all know that there are no ‘magic bullets’ in the process of restoring New Zealand to the top half of the OECD,” said Mr Christie. Forums such as this provide one avenue for ensuring that we harness our collective efforts effectively in pursuit of that goal.”

Invitations are being issued this week and a full list of participants will be available ahead of the forum.

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