Peters leans Nordic way
New Zealand is planting a flag in Sweden for the second time in November, and Foreign Minister Winston Peters is promising a ‘‘barnstorming’’ opening to mark the occasion.
The $4.8 million move, deemed weakly justified by Treasury, will be celebrated by the minister whether his schedule has him there or not.
For Peters, literally eating the fat of Nordic land has him eager to capture the region’s utopic qualities. New Zealand opened an embassy in Stockholm in 2008 under Peters’ watch, but the doors were shuttered four years later after National cut the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) budget by $10m.
The Nordics were not impressed, Peters says.
But he was highly impressed by Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway, all of which he has visited.
The sight of two men fishing salmon from a crystal clear river running through metropolitan Stockholm, the Swedish capital, struck him. ‘‘It was a very explosive moment in my memory.
‘‘I just thought, look at this, it’s just unbelievable.
‘‘It’s a marvellous commentary on how successful they’ve been. Now go to Auckland or Wellington and tell me where you can see that sort of thing?’’
He has also been to Lapland, in the region’s sparsely populated northern reaches. There he watched the indigenous Sami people round up thousands of reindeer, and ate the animal’s fat for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Tourism and a current $750m in trade partially explains the embassy in Sweden. But predominantly, Peters wants to learn from the region’s ‘‘first class’’ economies and social outcomes, its fishing technology, even the top-of-the-line whiteware it produces. ‘‘We’re not performing as well as we should.
‘‘And Scandinavian and Nordic countries can help us because many of them are standout models.
‘‘All the evidence is there now, and I can see that we put an official operation in there and we’ll get a serious payback from that.’’
Exactly how it will happen is yet to be seen. Peters announced the appointment of diplomat Andrew Jenks to the post on Friday, a Swedish speaker who previously worked in trade policy in Stockholm. ‘‘We’re going to have a barnstorming opening, get our message away and we’re going to work extraordinarily hard to make sure we build up our commercial links.’’
At $4.8m to establish, the embassy is a fraction of MFAT’s $1 billion four-year budget.
But Treasury was cautious about the ‘‘weak strategic case’’ for the embassy.
‘‘Existing trade links are relatively low and the relationship is easily managed from within the existing network,’’ a February report remarks.
New Zealand diplomats in the Hague, London, Ireland – all within hours reach by plane – are too far away to have an impact, Peters says.
Jenks, currently ambassador to Spain, will present his credentials to the King of Sweden in November.