A RARE BIRD BLAZES TRAIL FOR AUSTRALIA IN RANGOON

ERIC ELLIS, Rangoon

IT'S A long way from rural Edenhope in Victoria's Western Districts to a Bolshevik-built warehouse on Rangoon's Bo Aung Gyaw Street, but Neil Bird seems to be handling the transition with aplomb.

Bird, 44, is Australia's self-styled "pioneer capitalist" in socialist Burma, a gentle land ruled by a brutal military which has missed out on Asia's economic miracle.

With his bluff hail fellow well met way, Bird's eye for a deal is what he reckons this country desperately needs now as it takes tentative steps to open to the world. His Irrawaddy Investments Myanmar Ltd has been operating for two years with big ideas to do everything from fast food to newspapers to straight-out trading. Right now he is bringing in Toohey's Red and its advertising.

With his cigar-smoking partner, a scion of one of Burma's oldest Muslim families, Bird operates from a converted godown in Rangoon's main "commercial"area, opposite one of the capital's main mosques.

The power is off more than on and thus the air-conditioning as well as the telephone. Calls abroad or even elsewhere in the city can take hours to get through.

A business contact - "who subsequently ripped me off" - got Bird interested in Burma and he arrived two years ago from a domestic scene in Melbourne's Brighton for two years of hard slog.

A Melbourne High School old boy, Bird calls himself a "self-inflicted victim of the 1980s" who is "re-inventing himself" after the failure of various minor companies that flourished as paper shufflers before the 1987 share crash.

But he is no "white shoe" operator or disgraced Labor Party luminary like some of the pioneer capitalists of South-East Asia's other great socialist frontier, Vietnam.

"That role has been filled by dubious operators from ASEAN economies, in particular Singapore and Thailand, who don't pretend even to hold their nose when arriving here." One of the few tourist hotels in Rangoon is a joint venture between a Singapore company and the powerful daughter of Burma's long-time strongman, General Ne Win.

Nor is Bird an apologist for the Burmese regime, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), although he believes much can be done by foreign business engagement here.

"There are three things you don't get involved with here," he says. "Drugs, sex and politics."

But inevitably any meaningful corporate involvement in Burma means breaking one of those taboos. Bird admits he has developed contacts "at the highest levels" of the SLORC regime.

"It's very important to keep your distance and simply provide the things that this country needs, such as western expertise," he said.

Burma, he said, was not yet mature enough to warrant bigscale investments and would not be until Western powers, including Australia, lifted aid and lending restrictions.

That will not happen at least until SLORC releases from house arrest its star political prisoner, the Democracy campaigner and Nobel Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Meantime, business is superficial stuff, mostly trading.

A recent coup for Bird - highlighted in SLORC's official press - was the launch of a fleet of Rangoon public buses, daubed with the "red cow" logo of Australia's Bonlac.

Bird and his parter are also trading Burmese rice, pulses and beans to the Indian subcontinent and Europe and he is trying to bring in Australian building products.

Bird says he is motivated, of course, by the lure of lucre but also by a higher duty.

"I've seen Australia miss out in so many markets around here. In Myanmar(Burma) we could be first and we could be the best," he said.