interest is ongoing

Opinion

New Zealand’s Pacific interest is ongoing

David Barber

Wellington

NEW Zealand’s interest in the well-being of the Pacific Island states is not, of course, entirely altruistic. Much more than Australia, which understandably has a greater consciousness of the vastness of Asia to its near north, New Zealand is a Pacific country. It has historical and cultural links throughout the region and large and growing resident Polynesian communities.

The peoples of the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau are New Zealanders, their rights of citizenship a lasting reminder to the rest of the population that New Zealand is geographically and practi cally in and of the South Pacific.

It is New Zealand’s “home region” and is the focus for many of our political, security and social interests. The bulk of New Zealand’s overseas development assistance still goes into the South Pacific - close to $lOO million in the current year. There is nothing altruistic about that. The South Pacific states make a sig nificant contribution to this country’s economy, currently buying about $6OO million worth of goods a year - a return of six-to-one, cynics might say.

Clearly then, it is not a part of the world to be taken lightly by Wellington, despite the region’s comparatively minor political and economic significance on the world stage. Unfortunately, it was, of course, taken for granted by generations of New Zealanders, whose attention and trade were concentrated almost entirely on Britain - the so-called Mother Country - until the 19705.

The founding of the South Pacific Forum and its first meeting in Wellington in 1971 were pivotal events in raising the regional consciousness. The late Norman Kirk was the first prime minister to switch the focus closer to home and successive governments have made the South Pacific a policy priority ever since.

A man who pursued that priority with enthusiasm and vigour is Don McKinnon, New Zealand’s minister for foreign affairs and trade for the last weight years - and simultaneously minister for Pacific Island Affairs. In the process, he has secured his place in Pacific history by taking the leading role in brokering what every one must hope will be a lasting end to the nine-year civil war on Bougainville. But although he has described this as "an issue close to my heart”, he has been far from a one-issue minister. In fact, he has been more active than most of his predecessors in cultivating links and improving New Zealand’s relations generally through

out the region. And he has been at pains to extend the contacts beyond the govemment-to-govemment level, encouraging and actively supporting a wide range of other New Zealanders to visit the region and increase their knowledge of their own backyard.

When McKinnon visited Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and Fiji in August, he took with him a party of 40.

This included seven other MPs, the Race Relations conciliator, the South Pacific Trade Commissioner in Auckland, half a dozen representatives of non-govemmental organisations with pro grammes in the Pacific, some military personnel and four schoolchildren. The result, he noted later: A batch of parliamen tarians, who might otherwise have followed the time-honoured pattern of going off to Europe or America, now have an apprecia tion of the Pacific; some island officials have got first-hand knowledge of trading opportunities in New Zealand; some NGOs have seen the fruits of their labour on the ground; military who plan regional disaster relief have the feel of the region and, impor tantly, a group of the younger generation have been given a taste for the Pacific.

This was the third such tour McKinnon has made in the last four years, having previously visited the Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, Tonga and New Caledonia. Each time he has taken a sim ilar mix of people in pursuit of increasing New Zealanders’ under standing of the island states and their ongoing relationship with New Zealand.

They have been invaluable on that score. But they have also given Kiwis on those trips increasing concern about some of the long-term trends in the region. The biggest worry has been what McKinnon himself has described as the growing gap between New Zealand and Australia and the static and sometimes declin ing growth rates in the Pacific Island economies.

The fear is that unless that gap is checked per capita income in the region will fall even further behind those in the two more developed nations creating political, social and economic prob lems for everyone. What has encouraged McKinnon and other New Zealanders familiar with the region is the progress made in recent years towards reforming the island economies.

It is a long slow process but there is now a greater awareness that living standards can only rise when profligate government spending is checked, over-fat public sectors trimmed and private sectors encouraged to play a meaningful role in national economies. Every meeting of Forum leaders and economic minis ters now acknowledge the need for quite radical macro-economic reform and most are doing something about it.

It will take some time for the benefits of that process to appear, but there is now a cautious optimism in Wellington that the early 21st Century will see the island states setting out on a path of growth. ■