Mr Douglas misleads on debt—Sir Robert

Press, 1 February 1986, Page 9

Mr Douglas misleads on debt—Sir Robert

PA Wellington The . Minister of .Finance, Mr Douglas, was trying to mislead the public into thinking New Zealand had not been borrowing overseas since the the change of Government, said the former National Prime Minister, Sir Robert Muldoon, yesterday. Mr Douglas said on Thursday that the Government now had no requirement to borrow overseas except to refinance maturing debt or to increase overseas reserves.

Sir Robert said the Government, the Reserve Bank and State corporations had all increased their Indebtedness sharply since the election, partly

by additional borrowing and partly by the reduction in the value of the New Zealand dollar.

“More importantly, the Government has forced by far the greater part of our external borrowing into the private sector,” he said. “Someone has to borrow to cover our external deficits, which have been in excess of $2500 million a year at times during the last 18 months.” . Sir Robert repeated criticism he made earlier this month of the Government Statistician, Mr Steve Kuzmicich, for not publishing any surveyed figures of overseas private indebtedness since March, 1984. “The increased import-

ance of this private overseas indebtedness demands that the statistician survey and publish figures of all private Indebtedness at three-monthly intervals as he does for official indebtedness,” Sir Robert said. • . ,

Mr Kuzmicich said the Statistics Department first started collecting total overseas debt figures in 1983, but it was “a difficult and protracted exercise.?

Identifying overseas borrowers to be included in the survey was difficult and those asked for information were slow in responding, he said. Since the floating of the dollar it was even more difficult to identify borrowers because of a lack of records.