Why do we appear to be avoiding China?
Relationships matter, especially to the Chinese. It doesn’t hurt to visit your friends.
Although long-signalled, the trade wins that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is ticking off in Europe should be celebrated for the material improvements those freetrade agreements would bring to our exporters.
But six months to the day since Winston Peters set her on a path to being prime minister, New Zealand’s approach to trade and our relationships internationally is not without risk.
All in all, things are better than freetrade zealots might have expected only a few months ago.
In late 2017, not only were there fears the TPP would collapse, the new Government contained so many anti-TPP protesters it seemed possible a deal might be done without us.
In the end, the general consensus that has existed for decades – that free trade makes us better off – prevailed.
While Labour brought with it a more embracing approach to counter public concerns about trade deals, by and large the intent is the same.
But even pushing aside the headache that has been a coalition promise to progress a free-trade deal with Russia – which Ardern should formally abandon – other markets are simply not getting the attention they deserve.
Despite effectively naming China as one of our best friends in a major foreign policy speech, none of Ardern’s huge ministry has found the time to visit Beijing.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters, whose racy comments on the Chinese have been well documented, has signalled a trip is imminent. But so far the most senior figure to visit China since the election is a bureaucrat – Mfat chief executive Brook Barrington.
Trade Minister David Parker, whose portfolio of portfolios is surely the most impressive of all time (trade and export growth, economic development, attorney-general, environment and associate finance), will not, on current plans, visit China for more than another six months.
This, at a time when New Zealand is supposed to be trying to secure an upgrade of the 2008 trade deal that has transformed the economy.
Why should we care?
Because relationships matter, especially to the Chinese.
It doesn’t hurt to visit your friends, if only to check in to remind them how much you value the close to $20 billion a year in annual trade.
Conventional wisdom suggests China, more than most other countries, keeps track of diplomatic contact, and everything else.
Parker suspects China does keep score, but seems relaxed. ‘‘If they were worried about it, then they would be expressing it.’’
If only diplomatic relations were so simple that we could take it for granted that a global power, with very different cultural values to our own, would speak as frankly as Parker wants us to assume.
In diplomacy, the symptom of the problems tends to emerge long after the cause.
Soon Peters will surely visit Beijing, as will other ministers. Surely. But even once the trips begin, the extent to which New Zealand’s trade-focused ministers will travel is likely to be a sharp decline from recent experience.
Although in 2017 National’s schedule slackened, in earlier years sightings of trade or foreign ministers in Parliament were rare. The travel schedule of Peters, who is also deputy prime minister, is unlikely to ever be as heavy as what might have been considered normal for previous foreign ministers.
Fletcher Tabuteau, recently crowned NZ First deputy leader, is now being referred to as ‘‘the real foreign minister’’ by some diplomats.
But until Tabuteau is made a minister, sending him in the place of his boss could be viewed by some countries as an insult.
In Parker, unlike Peters, New Zealand has an avowed free trader, albeit one with a ‘‘progressive’’ tone.
He knows precisely what it means to say ‘‘a New Zealand dollar’’, a concept lost on many.
Parker takes credit for a conspicuous shift in the public’s attitude to trade as a result of a more open debate on the subject under the new Government.
But he appears much more concerned about the domestic view of trade than of the hard graft of constant travelling to check in with major markets.
He is not the first to think this way. Shortly before stepping down, former foreign minister Murray McCully remarked that, while he initially intended to base himself in Wellington and leave the diplomacy to the diplomats, reality dawned.
‘‘I very quickly learned that the official visit and the formal meeting are the essential currency of international relations.’’
Even if Parker was to accept that he needs to travel more than he has been – approximately once a month so far – he will not be in a position to do so until the prime minister lifts some of his absurd workload from him.
Parker is certainly one of the smartest in the Cabinet, but his range of portfolios exposes the Government and the country to risk.
At best, Labour is trading off a pipeline of deals it inherited – criticism once heaped on National.
Unless hard work is done to maintain and extend them, New Zealand’s relationships and reputation will soon diminish.