Student Andrew Harrison writes about Greg Whittred, Dean of the Business School at the University of Auckland

Biography

• Bachelor of Commerce (Hons) University of Queensland
• Masters in Economics University of Sydney
• PhD in accounting and Finance University of New South Wales
• Fellow of the Australian Society of Certified Practicing Accountants and the Australian Institute of Chartered Accountants as well as a member of the Securities Institute of Australia
• Dean of the Business School at Auckland University

Background

Greg’s previous professorial appointments include the Faculty of Commerce and Economics at the University of New South Wales, the Australian Graduate School of Management and the University of Sydney. Visiting professorships include the Graduate Schools of Business at Universities of Chicago, Rochester, Manchester, China-Europe International Business School, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, National University of Singapore and University of Queensland.

Widely published in leading Australian and international research journals, Greg is the author of four books, including the leading financial accounting text in Australasia. He received the Academy of Accounting Historians’ International Hourglass Award for his book Consolidated Financial Reporting in Australia.

Greg’s teaching and research interests are in the areas of corporate governance, value-based management, and financial statement analysis. He has extensive consulting experience in both the public and private sectors.

Presentation

Greg’s presentation provided the perfect conclusion to our guest speaker appearances. His diverse commercial background and wealth of experience in a number of the fields allowed him to give a presentation that summarised many of the areas of specialisation of our previous guest speakers from education to finance to the role of Maori culture in the future growth of New Zealand. As someone who has spent a lot of time in and around university the focus of his speech was education. Greg emphasized the importance of education to New Zealand’s export sector lamenting the collapse of the Colombo plan which he believed initially began to fail in and around the 1960s. He believes that as a country and an educational economy New Zealand missed out on a huge opportunity and is still missing out to this day. To highlight this he used the example of Singapore who he says have taken a Colombo type initiative in developing a strong educational sector and exporting this product around the South-East Asian region.

Another interesting topic that surfaced during Greg’s speech was the idea of World Peace. This was not the airy fairy notion of some theoretical idea which inevitably involves pageants and beauty queens, this was a realistic goal which aimed to use education as a means to end. The idea revolves around a McDonald type education system with a network of co-religious, multi-racial schools educating students so as to create a better level of understanding in areas of conflict around the world which in turn is expected to aid co-operation.

Greg’s presentation was a distinctive mix of perspectives already expressed by previous speakers. It was a cohesive way to end a successful week.