Pacific mission gets policy reset on a roll
ANALYSIS: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wrapped up her trip across the South Pacific yesterday. While she has delivered a ‘‘reset’’ in relations, there are problems that will take more than a new attitude and more than aid money to fix. Henry Cooke travelled with her.
It was close to the last stop of a gruelling trip but Ardern’s smile was as wide as ever, even as she acknowledged that the school block she was opening in Rarotonga was funded by the National Government, not hers.
As she finished her speech, host Emile Kairoua proclaimed ‘‘it’s our job to make sure she is the longest ever serving prime minister of New Zealand’’.
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who met her on this trip who disagreed. Ardern’s weeklong mission across Samoa, Niue, Tonga, and the Cook Islands easily succeeded on the terms her Government had set itself: a reset, as Winston Peters promised. The locals treated her like a pop star, and the leaders seemed to all come out of their bilateral meetings with something approaching respect.
The prime minister announced just over $36 million in aid – about
3.6 per cent of the total aid budget allocated for the Pacific for
2015-2018.
It is part of a larger strategy to move away from that donorrecipient relationship that she needed to get right. Conversations with people who were at the bilateral meetings indicate that this attempt to really listen, not just dictate, was mostly achieved.
That didn’t mean everyone got everything they wanted or that the prime minister is now best friends with the old men who lead these nations, but it does mean the leaders now know – and likely respect – our new prime minister, and realise that this relationship has changed to a slightly less paternal one.
The bonds with the premiers of the tiny ‘‘realm’’ countries of Niue and the Cook Islands are naturally the strongest – especially given the pension portability announcement which will allow Niueans and Cook Islanders to return home from New Zealand earlier in their lives without putting their Kiwi pension at risk.
This was a real and important change, not just more aid, and these nations have been asking for it for decades.
Given its relative cheapness – maybe $4m a year – it’s hard to figure out why no-one had done this before, other than the pernickety rule-following attitude of the political class. These are the kind of shifts you can build a new bond upon, and explains why Cook Islands Prime Minister Henry Puna was basically bad-mouthing the National Party during his press conference with Ardern.
A bit cooler
In Samoa and Tonga, which are being loaned and granted money from China like there is no tomorrow, the politicians were a bit cooler.
Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, who has met five Kiwi prime ministers during his time in office, could barely look at Ardern during their press conference.
When a question about the Chinese loans came up he was defensive, saying ‘‘it’s all transparent, it’s all out in the open’’ and claiming he couldn’t remember how much money his Government owed China. Tongan Prime Minister »Akilisi Po¯ hiva didn’t even hold a press conference.
These are the places causing that ‘‘strategic anxiety’’ Peters talked about in his reset speech. Both Peters and Ardern were loath to mention the word ‘‘China’’ – even as they arrived in Samoa’s airport funded with a Chinese loan and met the Tongan prime minister in a government building funded by a Chinese grant.
It is obvious the Government is wary of China’s growing influence in the region and the indebtedness of some of the governments (as is the International Monetary Fund) but it is also not really possible for us to largely fob off our second largest trading partner. Peters handled this tension well: he set the media pack off on the issue last week, but then refused to talk about it.
One of the more interesting decisions Ardern made was to break with tradition and walk on to Atapare Marae in Rarotonga, instead of being carried in on a chair. She said this was simply due to her being ‘‘heavy’’ right now but it’s fair to say she might have also been a bit worried about how it would look to have a white woman carried on the shoulders of Pacific people.
There are a lot of photos of Ardern surrounded by Pacific people, all attached to stories about how she was helping them with aid.
The prime minister is a sophisticated enough politician to be aware of the white saviour complex: of how this kind of coverage can make it seem like white people are the only people with the wherewithal to fix the problems these islands face, which in fact often stem from the colonialism her ancestors engaged in.
The acknowledgements she started every speech with were wise. Along with local leaders she always mentioned ‘‘Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters’’, usually with an extra line of praise.
At the pension announcement she made clear this was a part of coalition negotiations: essentially handing the victory to Peters. Wherever you are in the world, coalition politics require this kind of tender love and care.
Climate Change Minister James Shaw did not get quite that amount of love. Shaw was the only Green Party representative, and occasionally seemed a bit out of place. Indeed, while climate change is a huge challenge for these nations, and ostensibly one of the topics of the trip, there was no major announcement in the area, just some rhetoric from Ardern about ‘‘doing our bit’’ and the 2050 goal of net zero carbon emissions.
We visited a village in Samoa which was already losing its main path into town to the rising sea level. As ever the unfairness is stark: these nations are among the lowest carbon emitters in the world, but they will bear some of the worst damage.
If storms like Gita really do become the norm, we’ll be needing a climate change refugee scheme a long time before 2050.
But as Ardern was quick to point out this was still in many ways a listening and promising tour, not a delivery one. The real record will be in the delivery. So how will that look? A lot more investment instead of aid. A proper change in climate change policy.
Peters also motioned towards the biosecurity problems that stop us importing much fruit from these islands, which he said was put in the ‘‘too-hard basket’’ and needs to be fixed. The metaphor is apt: plenty of the problems the Pacific faces have been chucked in the too-hard basket. For this reset to work, the whole thing will have to be emptied out.