Canterbury Investor Network Function

Friday 28 May 2004

Good afternoon. I'm pleased to welcome you here and endeavour to help us put together a Budget for Investors that has the merit of being Canterbury based. I don't plan to speak long or too formally.

My wicked speechwriter watched the TV show on Ronnie Reagan last night. It was apparently about how the President's mental software parted company with the mainframe quite early in the piece.

Today he suggested kindly that it was time to expose myself to the mercies of the market and see how I did without any cue cards. I suspect, like most of you who try and work off speech notes, the answer will be "quite well when I ditch the notes."

I will work off two important bullet point points however.

• Firstly, the role of CDC in this package is to be the broker, not the banker.

• Secondly, one thing no Budget has ever done in New Zealand is fix our incredible caution about venture capital lending. We need to get over this.

We rate quite highly in the international entrepreneurial stakes. I'm really not sure how we do that. Our venture capital lending rates are very low, very timid and very tentative. Nothing is more likely to really power our growth onward and upward as becoming more willing to put our money into our own ideas and products.