Scene set for upgrade to powerful trade pacts

Will one night in Bangkok make the world Ardern’s free-trade oyster?

One Night in Bangkok may be the title of the only decent song from the musical Chess but it is also now all that is left of Jacinda Ardern’s season of summitry this November.

The Prime Minister heads to Bangkok tomorrow for the East Asia Summit, which will take on a little more significance following the cancellation of Apec in Chile in midNovember because of civil unrest.

But this year, the East Asia Summit was always going to be more important to New Zealand’s immediate trade interests in the Asia Pacific region, as we used to call it, or the Indo Pacific as we sometimes call it these days.

Demonstrations around political summits are nothing new. There were plenty in Auckland when New Zealand hosted Apec in 1999.

There were plenty in Santiago in 2004 when Chile last hosted Apec, Helen Clark represented New Zealand and George W Bush was US President.

They were generally antiglobalisation demonstrations.

The recent ones in Chile have been deadly, with 20 killed and 3000 arrested. They began with a student protest over metro fare increases of 3.7 per cent but quickly led to a mass protest of more than one million people against a raft of issues including inequality.

Ardern will have mixed feelings about Apec in Chile being cancelled.

Over the past 20 years, Chile has become New Zealand’s closest economic partner in South America and there will be some sympathy over the political crisis that has ended years of planning and anticipation as a host.

Apec draws a longer list of political A-listers than the East Asia Summit and was tipped to be the venue for a trade deal to be sealed between Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.

Tension and rivalry between the US and China have now become a consuming and distracting element in just about every Apec and East Asia Summit, be it over trade, the South China Seas, Huawei, or rivalry in the Pacific.

Like the storyline in Chess (a woman managing relationships between super-rivals) it is an ongoing challenge for countries such as NZ to juggle relationships with the super powers.

A year ago at Apec in Papua New Guinea, Chinese officials barged into the office of the Foreign Minister after tensions overflowed about the proposed wording of a communique — it was not issued in the end.

The rivalry and tension is reflected in all sorts of things, including over how to refer to our region and who gets to choose. It is a small but symbolically important issue.

It was only two years ago that Trump and officials leading up to Apec and the East Asia Summit started to revive an old term, Indo Pacific, to replace the one we have been using for 30 years, Asia Pacific.

It is an ongoing challenge for countries such as NZ to juggle relationships with the super powers.

It was part of the US strategy to downgrade the relevance of China and upgrade the importance of India, its closer friend. US allies Australia and Japan have gone along with this plan as well.

Early in his term, Foreign Minister Winston Peters initially said New Zealand would stick with what we are comfortable with, Asia Pacific.

But as he forged closer relations with the US last year, New Zealand’s position changed. New Zealand now uses both terms, depending on which country it is talking to or about.

New Zealand would never talk to China about the “Indo Pacific,” for example. But in a new co-operation pact with Japan announced by Peters yesterday, it uses the term Indo Pacific instead of Asia Pacific.

The hosts of the East Asia Summit, the 10 Asean countries at the heart of Asia, have been understandably threatened by the removal of the word Asia, but have remained undecided, not wanted to offend China or the United States.

It took 18 months for Asean to come up with a position on the imposition of this term. Asean published an “outlook” on the “Indo Pacific” after a leaders’ summit in June, which is a bit of a sop to the Americans.

It is one of those infuriatingly obfuscating documents that diplomats spend a lifetime learning to perfect. It accepts the use of Indo Pacific as well as Asia Pacific and says it is aimed to boost “Asean Centrality”. Basically, the United States’ decision to rename the region has caused hours and days of wasted time and effort responding to it.

What the document doesn’t spell out is that whenever the Asia Pacific is described as “open and inclusive,” it is coded language to include China, and when the Indo Pacific is described as “open and free,” it is coded language to exclude China.

It is easy to say words don’t matter, but when they matter so much to the US and China, they can’t be ignored by small players such as New Zealand or dismissed as meaningless.

So a statement from Winston Peters about New Zealand working more closely with Japan in the Indo Pacific has an entirely different meaning to China than New Zealand working more closely with Japan in the Asia Pacific.

On the trade front, New Zealand currently has irons in the fire with China and America — a pending upgrade to the 2008 free trade agreement with China, and a bid with the US to begin free trade talks.

And the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership talks between Asean and six countries including New Zealand and India are likely to conclude in some form in Thailand this weekend.

The US has a low-level presence at the East Asia Summit, Robert O’Brien, the latest National Security Adviser and the fourth person to hold the role under Trump.

China will be represented by Premier Li Keqiang with whom Ardern is likely to meet.

There has already been media speculation that the upgrade to the FTA could be announced in Bangkok.

Peters told Sky News correspondent Jackson Williams last week that the upgrade was going to be announced “very, very shortly”.

If it is, then one night in Bangkok would certainly have been more than worth the effort.