Opportunities for investment in Fiji abound but if the country wants to attract Australian private sector to invest here, it has to simplify investment procedures. This is the view of Westpac director and senior economist Justin Smirk.
Mr Smirk spoke to the local media yesterday ahead of today’s Fiji/Australia –Australia/Fiji Business Council Joint Forum opening at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva, where he will also be a guest speaker.
“The main one is you need to simplify taxation,” he said. “You need to improve approvals processes, you need more clearly understood legal and business requirements are when you come into this country.
“It’s difficult to get things done here at the moment, a lot of people won’t give you an answer when you go and ask them something and they say: ‘you want to go and talk to this person.’
“There’s a lot of uncertainty within the system about who’s in charge and who should be giving approvals,” Mr Smirk said.
He said apart from the usual prospects in tourism, building and construction and infrastructure, Fiji has the capacity to offer Australian investors more.
“I would like to see Australian retailers and distributers come here and start thinking about how we can access products for our market.
“So the Coles and the Woolworths coming here and putting in infrastructure – the cold storage, etc, and then putting in infrastructure to do regular shipping.
“We could have Australian agriculture companies coming in here and think about how to establish both agricultural production but again, infrastructure and storage and training. We need to start training the people within the system to have Fijians doing all this work.
“And I think there is scope for high end fashion here. Not just doing cut and paste but the Kookai-type model.
“So we can design in Australia or wherever but we have our production network and distribution coming out of Fiji.
“And we do the high end stuff, we do the modern technology with the modern sewing machines and the laser cuttings and all that, we don’t do it cheaply, we just go in there and do it properly and have high level trained Fijians working in there.”
Mr Smirk said all depends on having in place a simplified, workable investment approval system.
“It’s really those simple grassroots things I think. You don’t need to go and do big investments here. You just need to get a system that works. And people will come.”
