Only one key topic when leaders meet
Covid key to transtasman agenda, but Ardern has bigger opportunity
There will be only one major topic on the agenda when Jacinda Ardern and Scott Morrison meet in New Zealand in March. That’s the Covid-19 pandemic. When the two prime ministers met in Sydney last February, the postmeeting news conference was dominated by Ardern’s grandstanding over the Morrison Government’s decision to deport what she claimed were “Australian criminals” back to New Zealand.
Those criminals have since been a scourge on New Zealand society.
But even though that issue was top of mind for Ardern in an election year, there should really have been only one serious topic for the 2020 prime ministerial talks: the emerging Covid19 pandemic.
But New Zealand was still living in a bubble.
The Australian prime minister had moved ahead of international authorities and warned his country to prepare for a coronavirus pandemic. But although the topic was on their meeting agenda, Ardern studiously ignored it while she whipped into Morrison at their news conference.
I wrote then that it was as though their meeting “took place in a parallel universe where threats of global pandemics, multiple deaths and a potential international recession did not exist”. Fast-forward 12 months and the ground has shifted.
Ardern has won international plaudits for her Government’s crisis management.
It should not go to her head. There’s been a bit of gratuitous sledging this week.
Particularly, Trade Minister Damien O’Connor’s suggestion New Zealand could teach Australia some basic diplomacy in dealing with China bombed in some quarters. It was reminiscent of Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta’s early suggestion that NZ could mediate between our two prime trading partners as part of this year’s Apec, which New Zealand is hosting.
O’Connor’s Australian counterpart subsequently let him off
It is important to the economic health of our respective economies that a transtasman tourism bubble is launched.
that hook. But not before a flurry of sledging from the Australian side, suggesting the reason why New Zealand finally got its FTA upgrade from China was because it was prepared to overlook human-rights infringements, Hong Kong and the economic coercion applied by China against Australia.
None of this will disturb the transtasman equilibrium for long. But it is important that Ardern makes a stronger fist of this year’s meeting.
There is no real clarity yet on when New Zealand will obtain the vaccines that the Government has said we are at the front of the queue for. In reality, others have jumped up that queue.
It is important to the economic health of our respective economies that a transtasman tourism bubble is launched this year. A taskforce put the preparatory work in place. But the virus flare-ups in both countries — including the more recent variants — have made this more complex.
The bigger opportunity for both PMs is to develop an agenda which can be played out as New Zealand hosts Apec this year to drive an economic growth agenda for the Asia-Pacific region.
Ardern is set to host Apec virtually. But an invitation to Morrison to come to New Zealand to support the initiative would make sense.