Legal eagle takes the chair at Roundtable

BY NICK KRAUSE

The irony has not gone unnoticed. Roger Partridge, noted Auckland lawyer and new chairman of the Business Roundtable, was a card-carrying union member.

It was, naturally, a red card. "`Organisation is the only weapon of the working class', I think it said on it," he recalls.

There wasn't much political philosophy involved. In the summer of 1980 Mr Partridge was a part-time storeman and packer for grocery wholesaler AWL – and the job required membership of the Storemen and Packers Union.

"Back in those days when I started work in law, union membership was compulsory as well and we would have union inspectors come on to the premises to make sure the people were signed up."

There were conscientious objection provisions but he never got to test them. After completing degrees in commerce and law at Auckland University, in 1985 he went overseas to study for his masters at Cambridge.

"I set off to university intending to be an economist. I was interested in law for the legal policy really. I liked the problem-solving part of it."

But he ended up following his father, John, a solicitor in Auckland with Bruce Scott Stevens & Partridge, into law. After working at Buddle Weir in the early 1980s, his Cambridge LLM led him to join London firm Herbert Smith. On his return to New Zealand and the merged Bell Gully Buddle Weir in 1990, he brought with him English wife Lyndsey, now a consultant at Chapman Tripp. The couple have two children, a daughter, 16, at Diocesan and a son, 14, at Auckland Grammar, the fourth generation at the school.

With two decades of legal work behind him, mainly commercial litigation, economics returned to the mix in November 2007 when Mr Partridge became chairman of Bell Gully and took the firm's seat on the Business Roundtable.

If, as his old red card states, organisation is the working class's weapon, it is assuredly also a corporate lever. The Roundtable has been around in New Zealand since 1985. Like its American namesake, it is a group of senior business leaders who advocate a strongly free-market agenda designed to influence economic policy at a national level.

The mission, according to its website, is "to research and promote policies for achieving a better standard of living and quality of life for all New Zealanders".

Its executive director, Roger Kerr, says Mr Partridge will bring new perspectives as chairman.

"He is the first chair to be a lawyer. He'll bring wide connections from his professional role and he cares about New Zealand.

"He is very smart, good company and a top lawyer, with good economics and commercial expertise too."

Mr Partridge is keen to get stuck in. While the Government has got many things right, it has also come up short in important areas, he says.

"Setting a concrete goal of closing the gap with Australia over the next 15 years shows leadership.

"A number of the reforms the Government has undertaken have been very positive for New Zealand – and I include here the reforms to the RMA and the changes to our employment laws.

"I also think the tax reform – lowering the burden of income tax on the most productive people in the country – is a positive step, and one I hope will help stem the exodus of New Zealanders to Australia, currently over 30,000 a year."

On the other hand, "I would like to see the Government act more boldly. The country still faces risks and is underperforming.

"Private external debt is very high due to years of current account deficits, and external shocks or domestic mismanagement could put our credit rating at risk."

He believes the Don Brash-led 2025 Taskforce should stress in its next report the urgency of corrective action.

"Though we have seen a good number of government reviews and taskforces, we have yet to see the `game-changing' reforms that we need if we are to succeed in climbing back up from around the bottom of the OECD income per capita ladder and close the gap with Australia."

THERE is a list (of sorts) which he would like the Government to address as priorities. And having a National Government in office helps – the Labour administration, he says, marked "a very chilly period".

"We were very influential in ensuring that tax reform became an election issue at the last election. This, no doubt, had an influence on our National-led Government's GST/income tax switch, probably its boldest move, as well as the introduction of a lower company tax rate."

The Roundtable's priorities include further reform of employment law and the Resource Management Act and tax reform, possible if public expenditure can be reduced.

"We believe the Government should be aiming to reduce personal and corporate tax rates to 20 per cent. This would make New Zealand much more competitive, would help attract back New Zealanders from overseas, help stem the flow of migration to Australia and attract foreign investment."

Not surprisingly, welfare and superannuation reform are major concerns.

New Zealand has one of the highest rates of sole parenthood in the OECD and, he says, the most lenient benefit rules, while the numbers on sickness and invalid benefits have increased sharply over the past decade.

"The future costs of superannuation would be unsupportable and the most obvious response is to gradually raise the eligibility age, as other countries are doing."

The education system is seriously failing those who need it, Mr Partridge says. "While we have high achievers at the top end of the system, 29 per cent of our secondary school students emerge from school without a level 2 qualification, the minimum qualification for entering an apprenticeship, and 15 per cent don't achieve basic literacy and numeracy.

"I think the working group that looked at school choice pointed in the right direction and the Government should follow through on its recommendations."

And then there's privatisation, which he believes the Government should restart to improve efficiency and kick-start capital markets.

"It makes no sense for our Government to own three electricity generators or for our local councils to own ports, or community trusts to own electricity distribution businesses.

"While the GFC has seen many market failures, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests the private sector is, on average, better at running businesses than the Crown – and even the Crown acknowledges it is not getting an adequate return from its SOEs."

In the meantime, he has business in London and New York to attend to for the next 12 days – meeting 150 Bell Gully alumni at a function in London ("to try and reverse the brain drain"), after which he will meet heads of leading law firms in the United States.

The Roundtable has its place and he and the 40-plus members will continue pushing its agenda. "It's as relevant as it ever was for CEOs to play a role in public policy but I think it still has remarkable influence. Even those that don't like us like to talk about us."

- © Fairfax NZ News