Seating Arrangements

Proximate Cause:  Tellingly, it was Helen Clark who was seated close by when, earlier this week, Jacinda Ardern delivered a speech carefully crafted to keep New Zealand’s dairy exports heading China’s way. Photo by Politik

PURISTS WOULD ARGUE that New Zealand’s foreign policy should not be determined by who its Prime Minister sits next to. Their preference would be for consistency of message and predictability of action at all times.

Easier said than done, of course. Contradicting the President of the United States when you’re seated next to him in the White House would be a diplomatic incident in its own right. Small wonder, then, that Jacinda Ardern decided that when in Washington, talk like a Washingtonian.

Ms Ardern is not so naïve, however, as to imagine that both the tone and the vocabulary of her Washington pronouncements would go unnoticed by those who speak the language of Beijing.

Aware that the New Zealand Prime Minister’s next stop would be the Nato summit meeting in June, China’s diplomats opted to remain silent. They were keen to hear what she would say when she was seated next to the Nato Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg.

In the official White House communique of 31 May 2022, President Joe Biden and Ms Ardern jointly singled out the Peoples Republic of China as “a state that does not share our values or security interests”, noting that any Chinese attempt to establish “a persistent military presence in the Pacific” would, by fundamentally altering the region’s strategic balance, give rise to national security “concerns” in both New Zealand and the USA.

One month on, the heady incense of Ukraine’s heroic resistance to Russian aggression which suffused Nato’s Madrid summit (28-30 June 2022) seemed only to brighten the militaristic glint in the New Zealand Prime Minister’s eye. Impressed, no doubt, by the lengthening geopolitical reach of the Nato partners – now extending all the way to the Indo-Pacific – Ms Ardern wound her diplomatic rhetoric up a notch. China, she said, “has in recent times also become [like Russia] more assertive and more willing to challenge international rules and norms.”

This was too much for Beijing. China’s Wellington embassy described Ms Ardern’s comments as “wrong and thus regrettable” and “not helpful in building trust”.

To the untrained ear, this may sound like a mild rebuke. But to those, like the Australians, who have, in the relatively recent past, forfeited China’s trust, the economic penalties following such rebukes have been anything but mild.

It’s all very well to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the shieldmaidens of Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Denmark and breathe in the heady perfume-du-jour – L’air du Cordite. But, eventually, all New Zealand Prime Ministers are obliged to get off at the World’s last bus-stop and breathe in L’air du Cow.

Not for nothing is our foreign service dubbed MFAT – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. By asserting the indissoluble linkage of New Zealand’s diplomatic and economic interests, our diplomats might just as easily have called themselves the Ministry of Milk Fat. It has always been thus. In two world wars we traded blood for butter, and, even today, it is the brute calculation of who pays for what that ultimately determines our allegiances.

Ms Ardern may have thrilled to the martial music of our “traditional allies” and longed to strike the heroic poses of her North European counterparts but, for all their war songs, the Americans and the EU nations weren’t offering to bankrupt their own dairy farmers by taking all the milk solids we can send them.

Thankfully, at least some of the employees of MFAT still have their eyes on the only prize that matters – the well-being of New Zealanders. Thankfully, some still understand that the only “national security” worth a damn is the security that comes from being able to pay your country’s bills. And the only country making it possible for us to do that; the only country willing to take all the milk solids we can send; is the Peoples Republic of China.

To her credit, Prime Minister Ardern always comes back to that single, crucial, fact of New Zealand economic life. It helps that the National Party’s foreign affairs spokesperson, Gerry Brownlee, “gets it” too. Even more helpful is the fact that the woman who negotiated New Zealand’s free trade agreement with China is as alive and alert as ever.

Tellingly, it was Helen Clark who was seated close by when, earlier this week, Jacinda Ardern delivered a speech carefully crafted to keep those milk solids heading China’s way.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 5 August 2022.

Breathless And Irrelevant: Tim Groser Dismisses the TPPA’s Opponents

Scold Mode: “We need adults to do this, not breathless children to run off at the mouth when the deal is not actually finished.” Trade Minister, Tim Groser, makes clear his disdain for the TPPA's opponents.

 

TIM GROSER is not known for saying silly things. In fact, he is one of that fast-dwindling number of public figures who still possesses sufficient faith in his own intellect to insist upon writing his own speeches. It was, therefore, rather shocking to hear him dismiss the organised opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) as “irrelevant”.

 

As a former Marxist, Mr Groser should be under no illusions about the power of radical ideas to shape the discourse of whole epochs of human history. The Pope may have dismissed Martin Luther’s 1517 protests as “irrelevant” – but that did not make them so. Indeed, the “protestant” church is named after them. Nor is it wise to confuse the strength of a protest with the number of people making it. It was Rosa Parks, alone, who refused to give up her seat on that Montgomery Bus back in 1955, but her protest against the injustices of the Jim Crow South touched off an explosion of change.

 

Without Professor Jane Kelsey’s patient amassing of evidence critical of the TPPA, the current upwelling of concern about its likely consequences for New Zealand and New Zealanders would have been much smaller, and considerably less well-informed. As one of the very few Kiwi academics to take seriously the universities’ statutory duty to act as the “critic and conscience” of society, Professor Kelsey has acted as a virtual one-person think-tank, testing the claims of the free-trade crusaders – often to destruction.

 

With Mr Groser arriving home empty-handed from Hawaii, and the next round of TPPA negotiations several weeks away (at least!) how exciting it would be if, in the interim, the Trade Minister and Professor Kelsey could be prevailed upon to participate in a public debate on the pros and cons of persisting with the TPPA. Outside of election campaigns, it’s been many years since a major public debate of this sort has been attempted. If our free-to-air television networks cannot be persuaded to screen the event pro bono, it could, at the very least, be live-streamed on the Internet.

 

A metropolitan town hall packed to the rafters, with tens-of-thousands more following the action on television or the Internet, would, of course, instantly render the opposition to the TPPA extremely relevant. For this reason, alone, Mr Groser and his boss, the Prime Minister, would likely be loath to participate. Merely by appearing on the same stage as Professor Kelsey, the Trade Minister would be acknowledging her as his equal. Given Mr Groser’s recent statement that: “We need adults to do this, not breathless children to run off at the mouth when the deal is not actually finished.” Such an acknowledgement seems … unlikely.

 

Which is a very sad reflection on the state of political affairs in New Zealand. Our leaders celebrate this country’s democratic credentials at every opportunity. Indeed, our historical predilection for “punching above our weight” on foreign policy issues was put forward as one of the best reasons for seating New Zealand at the UN Security Council table. The truth, however, is that it’s been quite a while since we Kiwis did any such thing. For most of the last 30 years, top-down has, rather forcefully, replaced bottom-up.

 

Demanding a major public debate on whether or not to persist with the TPPA would, therefore, be a fine first step towards re-learning the knack of making politicians dance only to the tunes composed by “We, the People” – the voters who elected them. After 30 years of distributing those high-pitched corporate song-sheets, the politicians have, surely, had their turn?

 

Not according to Mr Groser. The Trade Minister is adamant that the negotiation of trade agreements is a matter for the people who know what they are doing – not the people per se.

 

It’s a view deeply entrenched in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) whose senior officials are absolutely convinced that the ministry’s remit can only be delivered by the sort of elite specialists they have, decade after decade, made it their business to recruit and retain. Mr Groser was, himself, one of their brightest stars. Imagine the celebrations when John Key awarded him the Trade portfolio. Finally, MFAT’s long-term plan for luring the United States into a state-of-the-art, New Zealand-designed, free trade agreement, had a champion worthy of its ambition.

 

Breathless Children: 1 WTO's Millennium Round: 0 - The Battle For Seattle, 1999.

 

And he’ll be damned if he’s going to let the likes of Jane Kelsey and her “breathless children” muck it up. But surely, Mr Groser, you haven’t forgotten the events of 1999 in Seattle, when tens-of-thousands of “breathless children”, braved the riot squads’ rubber bullets and pepper spray to derail the World Trade Organisation’s (still uncompleted) Millennium Round? This world contains more than politicians, diplomats and business-people. Failure to acknowledge the all-too-relevant concerns of ordinary Kiwis will only end in the irrelevancy of Mr Groser.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 4 August 2015.

How Smart Is Tim Groser? Will We End Up Panning Or Praising New Zealand's Trade Minister?

Diplomatic Genius, Or Corporate Minion? From its humble origins as a modest New Zealand trade initiative, the TPPA has always been viewed by Tim Groser (above) as the Kiwi sprat to catch an American mackerel. New Zealand corporates just ain't that clever!

 

TIM GROSER may be a lot smarter than even his most fervent supporters claim. It’s just possible that the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) – as currently drafted – is the document he had in mind all along. That, from its humble origins as a modest New Zealand trade initiative, the TPPA was always viewed by Groser as the sprat to catch a giant USA mackerel.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear there was never the slightest chance that the United States was ever going to sit back and let a handful of small Pacific states set up a free-trade zone from which it was excluded. As a pretty shrewd geopolitician, Groser would also have realised that, as the US slowly disengaged from its military entanglements in the Middle East, there was a very high probability that its struggle with China in the Pacific – disrupted by 9/11 and all that it inspired – would be resumed.

A comprehensive free-trade agreement, including an increasingly apprehensive Japan – but  excluding the Peoples Republic of China – was an obvious “next move” for a United States determined to reassert its hegemony over the nations of the Pacific Rim. It was also an obvious “next move” for New Zealand, whose economic fortunes were, to a potentially dangerous degree, becoming entwined with those of its principal protector’s principal rival.

 

The plausibility of this argument depends entirely on how skilled at playing geopolitical chess you are willing to believe this country’s diplomats and trade envoys truly are.

 

Who was it, for example, who initiated the process which led to the New Zealand-China Free Trade Agreement (FTA): New Zealand or China?

 

This country’s preference, for at least the past two decades, has been an FTA with the United States. Was it the latter’s refusal to negotiate seriously (i.e. to commit to the liberalisation of its agricultural sector) that persuaded the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) to focus its attention, instead, on the Chinese? Because, in addition to boosting our exports, the New Zealand-China FTA also provided our diplomats with the precious bonus of just a little leverage vis-à-vis our “very, very, very good” friends in Washington. Groser, himself, is at pains to reassure anybody who asks, that should the TPPA negotiations fall through, New Zealand will not be left without options. Sceptics are invited to ponder the significance of New Zealand’s early decision to join the Chinese-initiated Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

 

Could Tim Groser and his colleagues at MFAT really be so smart? Is it possible that, sometime in the next few days, New Zealand will put its signature to a document that gives its key exporters the best of both worlds? Not only a vastly rewarding economic relationship with the second most powerful economic entity on the planet; but also the long-sought and much-desired prize of a free-trade agreement with the world’s mightiest nation? Well, yes, it is possible. And, if it happens, Tim Groser’s much anticipated appointment as this country’s next ambassador to the United States will have been well-earned.

 

From Washington, Groser will be supremely well-positioned to judge just how serious the developing struggle between the US Eagle and Chinese Dragon has become. With the TPPA in place, he will, of course, be free to choose between these two heraldic beasts. Free access for New Zealand’s agricultural exports to all the markets of the Pacific Rim – especially those of the USA, Canada and Japan – will mean that if push eventually comes to shove, New Zealand’s economic eggs will not be concentrated in the basket labelled “Made in China”.

 

A Peoples Republic of China beset by crashing stock markets and a rapidly slowing pace of economic growth will soon be faced with even greater difficulties. Constant economic expansion has been utterly crucial to the Communist Party of China’s ability to keep its population, if not happy, then at least quiescent. Mass unemployment, sharpened by the mass impoverishment of China’s rural and urban stock market investors, could very easily panic China’s leaders into a series of ultra-nationalist distractions in the South China Sea or along the Sino-Indian border. Very quickly, having all our economic (and most of our diplomatic) eggs in a single Chinese basket could prove to be very awkward.

 

Many New Zealanders are fearful of the TPPA. They worry about the future of Pharmac and are alarmed at the prospect of becoming enmeshed in the coils of the Investor State Dispute Settlement process. While these are by no means insignificant issues, there are much greater dangers out there that we would be most unwise to ignore. Looking back, we may yet have cause to feel relieved that the TPPA was wound up in July-August 2015. And even those on the left of New Zealand politics may feel just a little bit thankful that Tim Groser was where he was, when he was.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 29 July 2015.