In his presidential address at the recent IPENZ Annual Conference in Wellington, our outgoing President, Dr Francis Small, launched the new IPENZ Identity. He said this was just one step along the road of raising the profile of our profession in New Zealand.

One of the challenges of my presidential year will be to build on this new Identity in order to raise our public profile so that the wider community and its leaders will better understand the important contribution of engineering and technology to national economic advancement, our quality of life and care for the environment.

One obvious way of achieving this is through seeking to obtain more publicity for our views on engineering and technological issues in the news media. This is fraught with some difficulty. For a start, in order to get published, media statements need to contain some element of controversy in which we run the risk of upsetting community leaders or some of our own members. A judgement call is therefore needed as to how far we can go in raising and advancing controversial issues.

There is always the risk that the media will give an angle to a news release that was unintended and we have to be on our guard against the likelihood of this happening. We also need to ensure, as far as we are able to do so, that any public statement which we make is clearly in accordance with a view of the majority of our members. Our Australian colleagues have recently implemented a system of fax polling to assist them in this regard.

We are also at present developing proposals for the Institution to develop a network of contacts with local MPs at electorate level. Before proceeding further with this, we need to ensure that when approaching MPs our representatives always have something worthwhile to say to them and deliver the message in an effective manner.

The IPENZ Board will be encouraged by your support as we further develop this profile-raising exercise.

John Blakeley IPENZ President