Wellington

David Barber

Is the Pacific really home for the Kiwis?

IT was a small announcement and it didn’t make front page headlines. It didn’t make a stir on the diplomatic cocktail circuit or reach the country’s boardroom agendas, let alone become a topic of conversation at dinner tables around the land.

But in the context of New Zealand’s relations with the Pacific, it was perhaps the most significant decision yet by the still-new National Government.

Faced with all kinds of pressures to slash government spending in every direction, it decided to keep open New Zealand’s High Commission in Kiribati. As something of a bonus, it appointed Mel Taylor, a pakeha but married to a Maori and one of New Zealand’s most dedicated Polynesian advocates and admirers who has just completed a lengthy spell in Niue, to head the post.

It must have been very tempting to the government to close the mission down. Last month it hit more than one million New Zealanders close to a third of the population with cuts in their benefits and there are signs that the nation’s belt will be tightened even further. The Ministry of External Relations and Trade (MERT) has had its operational budget reduced by 20 per cent over the last five years and it’s virtually running on shoestring levels.

Closing the Kiribati mission may not have saved a lot of money in the overall context, but it would have put something back into MERT’s coffers and been seen as a further government contribution to the cost-saving it is urging on everybody else.

It was opened by the former Labour government in June 1989 amid debate about whether, in these times of stringency, it represented “value for money”.

It subsequently sparked fierce controversy over the cost of building a swimming pool for the High Commissioner and then the first incumbent, Brett Lineham, resigned suddenly to take up a position as head of the New Zealand Planning Council, bringing his number two, who happened to be his wife, home with him.

The post has been run on an ad hoc basis since last year.

Since then, the government has been advised, in an officially sponsored study, that it should put more resources into Europe; that the Brussels post needs more manpower to cope with the European Community’s widening agenda, that representation in Germany is inadequate, that an embassy should be opened in Spain and a trade commissioner appointed in Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia.

The Minister for Trade Negotiations, Philip Burdon, came back from his first visit to Asia, saying there was a desperate need for more staff at New Zealand’s diplomatic missions in Japan, Singapore, Korea and Kuala Lumpur.

The Asians, he said, had thought New Zealand was part of their region and wondered where we had gone. They had a perception that in recent years New Zealand had become pre-occupied with the South Pacific and with Europe and

had lost its Asian geography. “We are not a European anachronism at the bottom end of the world,” Burdon protested. “We are not a South Pacific country preoccupied with the South Pacific and wanting to opt out of the realities of the modern global economy.

“We do belong to the Asian sphere of economic influence, and a great deal more attention must be paid to Asia.”

It appeared for a while that Burdon was disavowing the South Pacific emphasis Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Don McKinnon had put on the foreign policy of his government from the time he took over the job.

McKinnon had made a point of going to Fiji (where he made the first official visit since the 1987 coups), the Cook Islands and Niue in January on his first overseas tour. An extended trip was interrupted by the outbreak of the Gulf War but even as Burdon was speaking, McKinnon was continuing his tour, in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

McKinnon was quick to dispel the implications of Burdon’s comments on his return both by naming Taylor to Kiribati and with a speech in which he said; “As far as Fm concerned that endless debate over whether or not New Zealand is a South Pacific nation is long over. This is home.”

He told me closing the Kiribati post would have been “quite inappropriate” when he was telling the Pacific and the world in general that “this is our home region and we intend to play in it”.

He explained away Burdon’s remarks by saying : “The Minister of Trade Negotiations is at the sharp end of trade issues which have to be dealt with at a commercial political level. The fact is we are a Pacific country, but most of our involvement is with aid programmes rather than trade

advantage.”

Spelling out his philosophy, McKinnon said New Zealand was prepared to put aid into the Pacific to ensure a secure home region so that it could get on with profitable trade with the 135 countries around the world with whom it does business.

“Overall,” he said, with remarkable frankness, “our policy in the Pacific is probably a cost to the New Zealand taxpayer, but we see it as a very beneficial expenditure because we want to have that kind of relationship.”

The cost to the New Zealand taxpayer of that aid is a bit of a sore point and McKinnon confesses he is struggling to hold the nation’s aid expenditure to the current miserly .22 per cent of gross domestic product “a further reduction would destroy our credibility as a donor nation’ . He also admits that more than 70 per cent of bilateral aid dollars flow straight back to New Zealand in purchases of goods and services, so it’s not entirely an altruistic exercise.

In a bid to improve the quality of that aid, McKinnon has announced a significant switch away from directing aid to the Pacific Island countries’ public sectors to putting it into

private hands.

The government believes that the private sector is better placed to act as the catalyst for the increased economic growth the island nations so desperately need. □