Stephen Anstice: You’ve had an incredible background with cigarettes, poker machines and alcohol. We in the printing industry are particularly concerned about paper having a poor reputation. There has been a lot of talk and a lot of money spent to work out what to do about this. Have you had a look at the campaigns we have run?

Bill Healey: Yes. My first view is I think you’ve got to reposition the importance of the sector first and say that print isn’t going away. I did that with alcohol. I said well it’s not going to go away. The problem isn’t alcohol; the problem is people getting pissed. It’s irresponsible consumption of alcohol and if you look now, it’s been quite subtle but now police aren’t focusing so much on venues as much as individuals, and for too long we said it’s not our problem.

If you talk to some people in the Hotels Association, they would say that I wasn’t hardball enough. They’d say that I didn’t fight every fight because I wouldn’t go public… people said we should be out there stopping proposed policy but I said, it’s not going to happen.

SA: Do you see parallels there with some of the arguments about people trying to improve the position of paper; maybe it doesn’t need to happen because paper is going to be there anyway?

BH: No. I sense that the first thing about paper is that you’ve gone out and drawn attention to paper when in actual fact, it should be part of a broader strategy to reposition the importance of print in the future of communication.

SA: I agree with you 100% there.

BH: That’s the first strategy. Then there’s a subset where you say “by the way, it’s environmentally responsible”. I accept some people have said go head to head, to say print is more environmentally sound than electronic media. But that’s probably tit for tat and can lead to a play-off.

SA: I’m not even sure that print is more environmentally sound, but people will choose what method they want to use, so you can’t dictate to people how they want to consume something.

BH: Graham Morgan [chief executive of Geon] mentioned the UK campaign to me the other day. He raised the point why…

SA: … why are we reinventing the wheel?

BH: I am meeting with the head of APIA soon. I am surprised that PIAA did not lead that campaign.

SA: I think it was largely political. Some people felt that the PIAA should be doing more about promoting paper and print, therefore, they wanted to do something about it. One of my concerns is it is more about people wanting to feel good about themselves because they’ve done something than it is going to do anything to improve the image of the industry or make it more acceptable. I’ve always used the argument it’s a bit like Toyota. They don’t give you an argument about why using aluminium is not a problem; they tell everyone how much fun it is to drive a Toyota.

BH: Exactly

SA: There can’t be that many issues that are unique to printing?

BH: That’s right. A lot of them are general business issues and that is why we are a very active member of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. 

We have had issues such as parallel importing and the book bounty and there are some issues in relation to waste management and paper.

I think the bigger thing is you have got to have a membership base that is confident that you as an association understand their needs and can articulate those ideas to business and mobilise allies to progress those issues. I was involved in the National Tourism alliance, where it was a federation of all the relevant industry associations that had an interest in tourism; when we went to government, we spoke with one voice. I think there’s a feeling that there needs to be one voice for the industry. There are players out there that could perhaps could come together in some form and exist as a single entity.

SA: That view is often talked around the industry, although I get the impression you see the industry getting more benefit joining other larger industry organisations 

than worrying about some of our smaller splinter ones?

BH: I think you have to do both, whether you have a single entity or whether you have a common back office and they continue to operate in their own ways. 

I have used the Liquor Stores Association as an example… it actually wasn’t a discrete organisation but it was sold to 
the market as if it was even though all of its support came from the retailers association.

SA: I, and a lot of our clients, see our role as an industry to make sure all the channels are kept open for them. They will say make sure the letterboxes don’t get regulated because I like using unaddressed mail or make sure we are doing all the right things in respect to waste management because I don’t need the industry to look bad. They are looking for somebody else to take that position and take that leadership and that is what they expect of us.

BH:  Therefore you expect that of us.

SA: My view has always been that the association has to do more about talking to the people that influence and make policy in Canberra. It’s not about a knee-jerk reaction when something is happening; it’s about participating in all the discussions and forums and the debate. You cannot expect to turn up at the last minute and change policy – you have to have a bit of a vision and work towards it.

BH: You never just “go to a minister”. That’s the first issue. This business of “I want to see the minister” – give me a break. I have sat on the other side of the table and thought: “Why is this person here?” You immediately put a line through the bloke because he just wants to see the minister.

There is no point going to them with a problem. You have to help them. You have to give them some options and you have to understand that, at the end of the day, they have to balance those two options and they’re going to have to make choices. That doesn’t mean you have to roll over, but you don’t escalate: you don’t push them into a corner so that it becomes them or us. Eventually that does force a decision. A key part of my vision is how we do that.

SA: I think that’s interesting because as an industry we have to work out what policies are important to us and which ones we can realistically impact. How do you think the industry should go about doing that and then sorting out the issues?

BH:  For us, policies are products. So what I’ve put to the board is that we need a comprehensive policy register. We need to identify areas relevant to the industry and we need to have a very simple one-and-a-half page summary that goes through the issue, the background, what is the relevance to the association, what is our position, what are our communication strategies, what’s it going to cost us.

A policy position is generated either at the request of the board, at the suggestion of one of the advisory groups in the regions, or following research from the staff. I see the advisory committees as primarily being forums that meet quarterly in each state. Some states have moved down the path of having specific interest groups. I would prefer to have them more be general but discussing several issues, rather than being specific issues forum.

SA: Is that because you want to get away from everyone seeing the PIAA as the advocate for their particular issue and make sure it’s representing an industry view?

BH: Exactly. I also want people to walk out and feel as though they’ve had some input and I also want them to be less formal.

SA: I liked your idea of saying, well the back office function and the secretariat can be centralised, and the brand can have a separate role out in the marketplace, such as your example of the liquor industry.

BH: The other critical point is that you can’t have winners and losers. Too many often it is, “We need one association, why don’t you come and join me”. Everyone wants one body but there has to be give and take. You have to understand that individuals always back self-interest–

How many people do you employ?

SA: About 1,700

BH: Politicians don’t want to talk to me – they want to talk to people like you. You pay bills. Someone is going to have to say we need manufacturing jobs in this country of some description.

You made a point about my experience. When I went into retail, they had just brought in Sunday trading. A lot of small operators were concerned about not only opening on a Sunday, but the whole competitive tension. You had the rise of big supermarkets, the rise of the big box Dan Murphy’s.

This idea of small operators competing in a consolidating industry is something I’ve seen. Sometimes you’ve got to be cruel to be kind to these people and you’ve got to say, look you can’t compete head to head with Coles on apples or a slab of beer.

You’ve got to compete on service or find your niche. You’ve got to deliver. You’ve got to be smarter than them. The government is not going to wind the clock back. So I sense that part of the problem [that the printing industry] has is that you’ve moved from a craft to an industry to now a series of businesses. And many people still see themselves as craftsmen who are self-employed.

SA: And who aren’t getting paid the premium they think they should be getting paid because their craft is so special.

BH: Yes

SA: And they’re reluctant to accept that nobody’s paying a premium for that special craft any longer.

BH: Yes

SA: I imagine back in those days that the bloke at the local bottle shop told you it was ridiculous that Woolworths was selling beer for whatever they were selling it for…

BH:  He couldn’t buy [it at the Woolworths selling price] and he still can’t.

SA: I have always thought it’s been a challenge for the PIAA to represent large printers like us and then the raft of the much smaller ones with quite different issues and somehow balance the two.

BH: That’s always a challenge. But there are issues where you have to have all the players in the team because if you don’t, government just won’t listen to you. You have to swallow any differences and recognise that it’s far better to go in united and agree to disagree on those issues internally. The retailers association has imploded. There are four retail bodies in there and it’s nonsense. Government won’t listen. Coles and Woolworths suffer because they don’t have the mums and dads, the mums and dads suffer because they don’t have the big guys.

SA: So we need to make sure we don’t fall into that same trap. We need to make sure we unite ourselves. Where do you think the industry should stand on the topical issue of the carbon tax and emissions trading scheme?

BH: We’ve put in a submission saying that there should be compensation for trade-exposed industries. We’ve said the threshold should be 12% and we’ve said we reach that threshold. So we’re saying that there should be compensation.

SA: My view is that you can’t be a King Canute in these things. You have to understand the political reality. It’s much better for us to be seen to understand the need to change behaviour than to take a big position that could be interpreted as us not understanding the problem.

BH: I suppose that’s to some extent what we’ve done. I wouldn’t be manning the barricades on this one.

Resumé

Age 56

Family

Wife Deborah, four children

Career history

• May, 2011-current: CEO, Printing Industries Association of Australia

• 2005–10: national CEO, Australian Hotels Association

• 2003-04: director general, NSW Department of Tourism, Sport and Recreation

• 2002-03: CEO, Enterprise and Career Education Foundation

• 1994-2002: various roles, including executive director, Australian Retailers Association

• 1988-94: various roles, NSW Premier’s Department – Office of Public Management

• 1985-88: TAFE NSW

• 1977-85: NSW Dept of Education

Education

• Master of Commerce (Organisational Behaviour), University of NSW, 1987

• Graduate Diploma in Personnel and Industrial Relations with Distinction; NSW Institute of Technology, 1983

• Graduate Diploma in Education, University of NSW, 1977

• BA (History), University of NSW, 1976