Interview with Roger Kerr

Karyn Scherer at NZ Herald interviews Roger Kerr. Some extracts:

Roger Kerr doesn’t even wince when I ask whether it feels as though everyone is already writing his obituary.

“It doesn’t bother me in the slightest,” he chirps. “If I’m of sufficient interest then great. It’s an opportunity to tell the story the way I see it.”

After 25 years of banging the Business Roundtable drum, Kerr doesn’t need to be asked twice if he’d like the opportunity to bang it a little more. And although he predictably rails against personality cults, who wouldn’t enjoy the sort of attention he’s been getting of late?

A recent Herald editorial described the gong he received in the latest Queen’s Birthday honours as “perhaps the most deserved” on this year’s list, and suggested he’d had a greater influence on New Zealand’s economic direction over the past few decades “than anybody outside the state service, or possibly within it”.

There have been compliments from less obvious quarters, too, including several Labour MPs, as well as others “who might have seen me as a tribal enemy or something”. Such tributes, he beams, “mean more to me than the award itself”.

Whether the 66-year-old might have got the same reaction had he not discovered eight months ago that he might not have much longer to live is a moot point. Regardless of whether you agree with the Roundtable’s message, few dispute that Kerr has mostly been an unusually personable messenger.

That’s just the first few paragraphs. The full interview is quite lengthy, but in my opinion very good.