Daily Archives: June 3, 2022

SINGAPORE New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is in Singapore from Monday (April 18) to Wednesday for an official visit.

She is accompanied by her partner Clarke Gayford, New Zealand Minister for Trade and Export Growth Damien OConnor and senior officials.

This is Ms Arderns second official visit to Singapore, following her first in May 2019. It is also her first official overseas visit since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a press statement on Monday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) said that Ms Arderns visit reaffirms the excellent relations between both countries, underpinned by the SingaporeNew Zealand Enhanced Partnership, which was established during Ms Arderns first visit to Singapore.

During her visit this week, Ms Ardern will attend an official welcome ceremony at the Istana on Tuesday and call on President Halimah Yacob.

Following that, Ms Ardern will meet and hold a joint press conference with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. Mr Lee will also host her to an official lunch.

Ms Ardern will have a new orchid hybrid named in her honour during her visit, said MFA in its statement.

Ms Ardern will visit Japan after her trip to Singapore.

In a statement last Monday, the New Zealand Government said that the visits aim to reconnect New Zealand with two of its closest Indo-Pacific economic and security partners.

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New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern in Singapore for 3-day visit

After a US trip that ticked all the boxes, the PM arrives to a more prosaic set of challenges and a familiar message from the polls.

Jacinda Ardern is New Zealands Gorbachev. That was the headline on the Australian edition of The Spectator this week. An improvement, at least, on the assessment of a US politician who six months ago called her a Lenin with hair, in league with satanic communists, or the fabulist headline in the reliably swivel-eyed Trump media bible Breitbart yesterday: New Zealand Socialist Jacinda Ardern, in Power After a Sham Election, Gets Warm Welcome from Biden.

Hyperbole notwithstanding, the Spectators central argument was uncontroversial. For Ardern, like a lot of leaders including the former Soviet president, there is a considerable disconnect between her high regard internationally and the discontent she is facing domestically. And with the exception of, say, the Spectator Australia, wingnut Republican state senators and Breitbart, thats true enough. At the end of a highly successful US trip which exceeded any reasonable expectations, the scene back in Aotearoa will be more prosaic, the mood grumpier. The adrenaline runs slower.

Labour Party president Claire Szab tried to harness some of the DC feel-good factor by firing out an email to supporters even as Ardern was making her way to the airport, praising our amazing PM, a landmark White House meeting and a hugely successful first trip to the US since Covid, as well as a a truly incredible speech at Harvard that no other world leader could have delivered. It was an opportune moment to shake the tin for donations, but the afterglow will be brief; in more ways than one, immediately upon landing Ardern goes from international to domestic.

While there may be more geopolitics than usual across the months to come an in-person meeting with Albanese is a priority and New Zealand will have an important part to play at next months Pacific Islands Forum for the most part the focus is local. Three Waters. Fair Pay Agreements. He Waka Eke Noa and the formula to bring farming into the Emissions Trading Scheme. Co-governance. The health system overhaul. Housing. And so on. Coursing through it all: inflation and the cost-of-living crisis.

The 2020 election was an aberration. There will be no Covid election sequel. MMP was built to avoid majority one-party governments. Elections are almost always close. The pandemic is not over, but politically were inching back to the norm. The last four opinion polls provide a clear picture, and its a picture of a knife edge. In most, but not all, of those polls, National and Act are a whisker ahead of Labour and the Greens. The Mori Party is suddenly being sighted wandering the halls of parliament with a shining crown under its arm.

With, say, 16 months to the election, the parties in parliament today all look likely to be returned.While Act might have lately bobbled up and down, in large part according to Nationals level of competence, David Seymour has hauled the party out of purgatory. Across the five elections before 2020, Act averaged less than 1.5% of the vote. Today, pending some calamity, theyre assured of a return to parliament, comfortably above the 5% threshold. The Greens, meanwhile, are defying naysayers and the gravity of small parties that support governments to sit around 10%. Neither Act nor the Greens has ever been part of a formal governing coalition in New Zealand. One will, Id wager, by the end of next year.

All of which means were in for an early start to the long season of pre-election rulings-out and bottom lines all round. A National government will hinge on Act support. A Labour government on the Greens. Reasonably enough, were going to want to get a sense of how they might look and what they would prioritise. The same goes for Te Pti Mori.

Its useful in that light to look not just at the individual parties in the polls, but for want of a better word the blocs. Take TVNZ-commissioned Colmar/Kantar polling, the most recent of which was this week: if you splice out the urn-shaped two worst years of the pandemic, you can see a kind of reversion to mean. True, New Zealand First isnt included, but you get the drift.

Another Labour message issued this week, one much less upbeat that Claire Szab's, came in the form of an attack ad on National leader Chris Luxon, zooming desperately into his face to upbraid a shortage of new policy announcements.

It contained at least a couple of clues to Labour's thinking. First, theyre moving already into campaign mode. Second, theyre determined to goad National out of the small-target strategy the approach that worked for Anthony Albaneses Labor Party in the Australian election. It might not make for exciting elections, but its not hard to see why Team Luxon would go the same way: steer away from big, sweeping pledges; talk about economic management; let the election be decided as a referendum on The State of Things.

From that standpoint, the most hopeful data point for Ardern revealed this week came in the Talbot Mills corporate poll, as published by the NZ Herald. That showed the "right track/wrong track" gauge moving in the governments favour, with 51% saying the country was on the right track against 40% picking the wrong track. The previous poll had 48% to 42%. It's still a much lower "right track" figure than the peak of the pandemic, when it was in the high 70s. But it could mean something. Or it might just be a burst of turbulence on the way back down to Earth.

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Jacinda Ardern returns to New Zealand as the mood reverts to the mean - The Spinoff

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern meets US President Joe Biden in the Oval Office. Photo / Supplied

OPINION:

There is historic symmetry that it's a Labour Prime Minister who has decisively positioned New Zealand with Washington as the Great Game between the US and China unfolds, most especially across the Pacific.

It was the great Labour war leader, Peter Fraser, who forged the military alliance with the US after the fall of Singapore in 1942, which later led to Anzus in 1951.

Four decades later, it was another Labour Prime Minister, the brilliant but flawed David Lange, who broke the same alliance.

Just two years short of the 40th anniversary of Lange's election, Jacinda Ardern is the third Labour Prime Minister to be fated to have to choose sides in a Cold War. The symmetry between her and Fraser was noted by California Governor Gavin Newsom when he met Ardern in San Francisco last week.

If some Labour supporters are unsettled with how firmly Ardern has positioned New Zealand with Washington, some National supporters were similarly startled when party doyen John Key went on TV3's AM show on Monday and declared Beijing would be in the South Pacific "forever" and argued New Zealand should partner with them.

Fraser, Lange and Ardern's historic moves were more forced on them than planned.Fraser spent 1917 in jail for sedition, after criticising William Massey's introduction of conscription, before introducing it himself in 1940.

Lange never intended his anti-nuclear theatrics to cause our suspension from Anzus, but the mishandling of our informal invitation and the US's formal request for the USS Buchanan to visit New Zealand in 1985 meant he bumbled into it.

Ardern has always been more of an Americophile, with her Mormon background and semester spent at Arizona State University in 2001. Those present in their meetings say she even managed to build a professional rapport with former President Donald Trump.

Yet Ardern's earliest political experience was as a staffer for Helen Clark and Phil Goff when they were working towards the free-trade agreement with China, when the multilateral rules-based system was still operating adequately, and before Xi Jinping became President of China. Ardern became Prime Minister before Xi transformed himself into president-for-life and when Russia launching a full-scale invasion against a European state remained unthinkable.

The Prime Minister can never have expected it would fall to her to choose between Washington and Beijing, but choose she has, as clearly understood by the great powers. If Ardern's planned visit to China proceeds this year, it will, at best, be awkward.

Despite Key's insouciance, keeping less friendly great powers out of the South Pacific has always been one of New Zealand's major foreign policy goals. The United Tribes of New Zealand's communications with the British leading to the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi were partly about limiting French and American influence in Aotearoa. Fraser's alliance with the US and then Anzus were about keeping out Japan and Chinese and Russian communists.

In its 2021 Defence Assessment, the Ministry of Defence identified "the establishment of a military base or dual-use facility in the Pacific by a state that does not share New Zealand's values and security interests" to be the first of the most threatening developments to New Zealand's defence and security interests.

That is code for China and only the most naive observers could misunderstand the increasingly less long-term objectives behind its activity in the South Pacific, including the current 10-day jaunt through the region by Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Great-power foreign ministers don't visit island micro-states out of curiosity or carry gifts borne with altruism, but because they have strategic intent.

ACT's foreign affairs spokesperson, Brooke van Velden, put it best, when she asked Parliament of Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta on Tuesday, "Why is she still here and not visiting the Pacific?" Van Velden received no useful answer, although Ardern is set to announce a no-expenses-spared visit to New Zealand by new Samoan Prime Minister, Fiame Naomi Mata'afa, this month. Similar invitations should be extended to other Pacific leaders as soon as possible.

But van Velden is right that Mahuta should seldom be in New Zealand now that borders have reopened. Mahuta's background and connections make her perhaps the perfect New Zealand foreign minister to get on a plane and better Wang's Pacific swing.

So too should the Prime Minister plan a major tour of South Pacific capitals. Even her harshest critics know her interpersonal skills are unmatched. If anyone can trump Wang's goodwill tour it is Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson, a former diplomat, surely also appreciates cash is needed to secure New Zealand's defence and security interests in the Pacific.

Looking ahead, Ardern has promised a Cabinet reshuffle before the end of the year. That would be routine in any government, but the polls demand she refresh her team.

Mahuta needs urgently to become a full-time foreign minister and is, in any case, perhaps the worst possible person to sell the Government's Three Waters proposals. That job will presumably fall to Robertson, because of his political skills and that Three Waters ultimately falls under his job as Infrastructure Minister.

Kiri Allen would be a potential replacement as Local Government Minister, but without Three Waters.

Elsewhere in the Cabinet, Police Minister Poto Williams has mature ideas about modern policing but Ardern will need a more traditional law and order conservative to front the portfolio in election year.

Kieran McAnulty could fulfil that role. Next in line for elevation, the Wairarapa MP clearly identifies with what remains of Labour's non-woke, provincial working-class bloke constituency.

With Covid now just one of several winter viruses putting the elderly and others at risk, expect Chris Hipkins' Covid-19 Response job to go back to ordinary health ministers Andrew Little, Peeni Henare and especially Ayesha Verrall.

Little has an enormous job ahead with his vision of centralising the health system. After his first jab at Pharmac this week, look for it to be fully integrated into Health New Zealand so that trade-offs can finally be made between pharmaceutical and more expensive and dangerous surgical interventions.

Ardern's trip to the US went as well as she could have hoped. On the business side, Trade Minister Damien O'Connor another more conservative, working-class Labour MP has won a big and perhaps surprising fan in his boss. Businesspeople accompanying Ardern were impressed that she opened doors to no less than Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, managing over US$10 trillion in investment funds. They are grateful for the publicity stunts she performed to promote their products.

A good week's work. But next week, of course, it's back to the price of cheese and deteriorating polls.

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Matthew Hooton: Ardern decisively positions NZ with the US in a new Cold War - New Zealand Herald

President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in the Oval Office of the White House - China's reaction was muted. Photo / AP

China's reaction to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's meeting with US President Joe Biden was been relatively muted in the view of longtime China watchers - despite a Government spokesman accusing New Zealand of spreading "disinformation" as a result of the visit.

Ardern met Biden at the White House on Wednesday morning, New Zealand time.

The meeting produced a joint statement that noted New Zealand and the United States' close ties on matters of security and singled out China's recent inroads in the Pacific as concerning.

"We note with concern the security agreement between the People's Republic of China and the Solomon Islands," the declaration read.

"In particular, the United States and New Zealand share a concern that the establishment of a persistent military presence in the Pacific by a state that does not share our values or security interests would fundamentally alter the strategic balance of the region and pose national-security concerns to both our countries," it said.

After that meeting, China's foreign affairs ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the statement was a "hype-up" and had "ulterior motives to create disinformation and attack and discredit China".

University of Canterbury Professor Anne-Marie Brady, an internationally renowned expert on the propaganda system of the Chinese Communist Party, said there had not been much fallout from the meeting.

"It's a very bad look for the Xi Government to have got NZ-China relations to the point that they'll say their concerns in public," Brady said.

Brady said China's recent diplomatic push into the Pacific was beginning to look like an act of hubris, particularly after it failed to get Pacific island nations onboard with a cooperation agreement, which leaked last month, while Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was touring the region.

"The Xi government's strategic overreach in the Pacific is turning into a diplomatic failure. They don't want the Chinese public to be raising questions about the failure of BRI [the Belt and Road Initiative - President Xi's key foreign policy platform].

"The Wang Yi trip to the Pacific has been a disaster for China. Almost every Pacific state he has visited has politely rebuffed the plan to create a cross-Pacific security agreement led by China that excluded New Zealand and Australia," Brady said.

Former diplomat, and former executive director of the NZ China Council Stephen Jacobi, who led programmes in New Zealand on BRI agreed the reaction from China was fairly soft.

"You've got to see [the reaction] in the context of the rivalry and strategic competition with the US," Jacobi said.

Jacobi said it was only the very end of China's official response to the meeting, which urged New Zealand to hew to its historically independent foreign policy, which was directly addressed to New Zealand, rather than jointly at New Zealand and the US.

"Of course this is the first thing they've said. We're going to have to watch to see if something else happens," Jacobi said.

Jacobi noted that he had spent the day at the China International Import Expo, where China's ambassador to New Zealand Wang Xiaolong had not once mentioned the growing tension between the two countries.

"The ambassador made no mention of it at all in his speech - which was focused on Chinese growth, the success of Covid, the opportunity for New Zealanders to do more business in China," Jacobi said.

He said there was no indication yet that China would look to apply informal sanctions against New Zealand exports. Australian exporters have struggled at times to get goods into China. It has often been presumed this is in retaliation at Australia's more hawkish stance on relations with the superpower.

"There is no suggestion that is a problem at the moment," Jacobi said.

"Of course, we just signed the FTA upgrade, which gives us new procedures to manage difficulties if they arise," he said.

He said the next step in the relationship with China was having a high-level ministerial visit, either the prime minister or the foreign minister. This was difficult at the moment given China's zero-covid policy.

"We have to maintain the direct discussion and engagement," he said.

Jacobi said China had some understanding for New Zealand siding with the United States on particular issues.

"We are who we are, right - we are a Western democracy. That's kind of what we do. The Chinese, however, are quite capable of reading between the lines on these things," he said.

University of Otago Professor Robert Patman agreed the fallout from Ardern's visit had been muted.

"The Chinese continue to make the distinction between Australia and New Zealand in terms of their respective relationships with Washington," Patman said.

He said that while New Zealand was close to the US, it was not in "lockstep" on certain issues like Australia was perceived to be.

"We have a different worldview from both Australia and the United States," he said.

Patman said this difference fed all the way into things like the recently announced Aukus security agreement between Australia, the US, and the UK. He said not being part of the agreement had benefits to New Zealand.

"It gives us a chance to diversify economically," he said.

Patman said Ardern's foreign policy appeared to recognise that China, as a superpower, was going to be involved in the region one way or another, so New Zealand would have to find a way to strengthen the democracies of the Pacific to respond to that challenge.

"We can't contain China, and nor can we take a top-down position, where we say to them 'we know what's best for you'... that's not going to work," Patman said.

"If you're a micro-state you've got opportunities. There's more than one game in town," he said.

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Experts think China pulled punches in muted reaction to Jacinda Ardern-Joe Biden meeting - New Zealand Herald

The Queen is a woman "who smiles with her eyes" and relates easily to people from all walks of life, former Commonwealth secretary-general Sir Don McKinnon has told those at a service of tribute in Wellington.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was among dignitaries marking the milestone of seven decades on the throne at St Paul's Cathedral in Wellington.

She was joined by the government's administrator Dame Helen Winkelmann.

Attention then shifted to representatives of the Defence Forces as they marched to the cathedral's altar.

The deputy Speaker, Cabinet Ministers, members of the diplomatic corps and members of the public were then formally welcomed to the service.

Bishop Duckworth reminded the congregation Elizabeth was just 25 when she became Queen, and during her 70 years of service "the world has changed dramatically".

"The Queen remains a symbol of our constitutional arrangements."

She has visited Aotearoa 10 times and laid the foundation stone of St Paul's Cathedral during her first visit, he said.

Former deputy prime minister and ex-Commonwealth secretary-general Sir Don McKinnon gave the keynote address, describing the Queen as "a remarkable woman" who was probably the most photographed person in the world.

He did not want to "upset the Buckingham Palace courtiers" with anything he said, recalling the regular meetings

He would always try to "have a laugh" with her and regularly discussed the All Blacks and other topics that would lighten the occasion.

"Her interests were far and wide" but talking about horses and cattle always engaged her interest.

"She had an immense knowledge of horse breeds all over the world."

This was a response he would expect from horse people everywhere, he said.

On Commonwealth Day a reception was always held at Marlborough House in London and he saw her genuine warmth and her ability to relate to people from all walks of life.

"Incredibly warm personality, very calm all the time, smiled with her eyes very vividly and serene when you think of all that was going on around her.

"Seventy years of grit, grace and glory," he said in conclusion.

Ardern did a short reading from an entry into Hansard in 1952 written by former prime minister Sidney Holland who attended the funeral of George VI, Elizabeth's father, and saw her write her signature as queen for the first time.

Holland observed in his Hansard entry that perhaps it was the start of a new Elizabethan era and Ardern said his words were prophetic as she has become the first monarch to be queen for 70 years.

The Queen had been staunch and a comfort during times of tragedy, she said.

It concluded with prayers and the singing of God Save the Queen.

The cathedral's bells rang as people left.

Overnight the UK began four days of pageantry, parties and parades to celebrate Queen Elizabeth's reign.

The first day included the traditional Trooping of the Colour and a flypast of 70 aircraft over The Mall and Buckingham Palace.

Senior royals joined the Queen on the palace balcony to watch the flypast.

However, at the end of the day the palace issued a statement saying the Queen will not attend a National Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul's Cathedral tomorrow because she was suffering "some discomfort" after a full programme earlier today.

The 96-year-old monarch has cancelled several appearances in recent months because of mobility issues.

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'Seventy years of grit, grace and glory': NZ tribute to Queen - Otago Daily Times