Now here’s the thing. New Zealand is responsible for 0.2 percent of the world’s emissions that affect our planet. Soon we will be paying money to Government for these domestic and business environmental out pourings’.

More money than we care to for an ETS which is, at best, highly questionable.

What do you think about this?

New Zealanders are too compliant. We don’t march up and down the streets enough to have our say and responsibly give feedback to what is wrong. As long as we have the All Blacks and the All Whites it seems that we are doing okay.

We lock up the house when a test is on, take the phone off the hook and smugly watch a 15 man side defeat a 14 man Irish side. How good is that?

But unlocking the door and facing the issues is different. We still pay too much business tax, our incentives to sell overseas need to be improved and the price of everything continues to go up (without us making as much as a wimper).

It is very ‘nice’ of us to continue to look after the Government’s bank account but there are more important issues to deal with than continuing to meekingly submit to this revenue massaging. For example how about the state of manufacturing in this country?

On another note, our lead story this issue is about Blair McPheat’s ‘snappy invention’ which attracted significant visitor attention and resulted in distributors being appointed at a recent trade fair in Nuremberg.

In Analysis, Dr Wolfgang Schotz, supremo at HERA, talks about the strategic importance of heavy engineering to the New Zealand economy and John Walley, CEO of New Zealand Manufacturers and Exporters Association (MEA) says our confidence for manufacturers “is built on the hope of more sales and more jobs, not the reality of current performance.”

Elsewhere in this busy June issue we look back on EMEX 2010 which demonstrated some fairly significant business activity currently taking place in the market and there is also plenty of business news and product innovation for you to catch up with.