Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

In the second of an occasional series where we invite influential New Zealanders to tell us about the people, writers and thinkers who influenced their thinking, we hear from the Business Roundtable's executive director Roger Kerr.

The former Foreign Affairs and Treasury official has been the public face of the big business lobby group for more than two decades.

During those years he's been one of the most energetic and prominent proponents of the economic policies known in New Zealand as Rogernomics - a term coined, not as it easily could have been, in reference to Roger Kerr - but after former Labour finance minister and now ACT MP Sir Roger Douglas.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the Business Roundtable was on the winning side of countless policy arguments from privatisation to user-pays.

Then with the election the fourth Labour Government the tide turned and the Business Roundtable faded from the nation's headlines and many of its pet causes seemed to have been consigned to the political dustbin.

But the political tide has turned again and the free market philosophies of the Business Roundtable appear to coming back into favour.

So who are the people writers and thinkers who influenced the thinking of Roger Kerr?

Well, the names nominated by Roger Kerr are mixture of the predictable and the surprising: Enlightenment economist Adam Smith, Roger's brother Alan (a surgeon who regularly spends time in Gaza volunteering his services), the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, former Telecom boss Rod Deane, Shakespeare, economist Bryce Wilkinson and prominent American legal scholar Richard Epstein.

The first interview in the series was with Moana Jackson and can be listened to here.

If there are influential New Zealanders you would like included in the series we would be keen to hear from you. You can email ideas@radionz.co.nz