Meet Mr Fixit

As job descriptions go, it's simple enough - just make sure everything goes right and nothing goes wrong. By Andrew Stone

Maarten Wevers calls himself the Prime Minister's right hand man on Apec. Jenny Shipley, he insists, is running the show. His task is to be certain it all comes together on the day.

But that job description sells his role short. In effect, Wevers is Mr Apec, sitting at the top of a massive organisational effort to deliver a trouble-free forum.

He chairs the Apec senior officials group, an elite team of bureaucrats from the 21 member economies who shape policy for the presidents and prime ministers coming to Auckland. This keeps him in close touch with top ranking figures in the region.

Closer to home he carries the can for policy, logistics and communications, now building to a crescendo for a few intense days at the end of this week.

All of which means the buck for Apec 99 stops with the 47-year-old career diplomat.

In the last few hectic months the team he heads has mushroomed from a dozen key officials to more than 60 core staff - just half the number the Canadians needed at the Vancouver summit in 1997.

The budget is a bit tighter too - $45 million compared with $60 million in Canada - but the logistical nightmare is the same: running an international summit, protecting the security of world leaders and dealing with a medium-sized foreign media army whose editors have fond hopes that in Auckland the wheels might fall off Apec.

With the leaders' meeting not far away, Wevers is nervous enough to be counting off the days, but certain the event is on track.

Dry runs with the trade ministers' Auckland forum in July, several meetings of senior officials, and of Apec women leaders in Wellington, have given organisers confidence that their procedures are sound.

Wevers concedes that the leaders' jamboree is the acid test of two years behind-the-scenes slog. But he is confident that the groundwork for Auckland's Apec has been laid.

Besides the task force, which operates out of Auckland and Wellington, the Apec machinery has engaged lots of private sector enterprises. "It's a large and multi-faceted beast. Something happens every five minutes," says Wevers.

He thinks Auckland will enjoy hosting 20 world leaders and seeing presidents on its streets. He accepts the inconvenience of motorcades and gridlock on city streets but prefers to focus on the upside - the local economic stimulus, the international exposure, the private sector spin-off from the chief executives' summit.

All his work, he says, is directed at achieving a good outcome, supporting the region's leaders in carrying on the Apec free trade and open market agenda.

On this score Wevers unhesitatingly asserts that Apec's goals are tied to lifting living standards throughout the region.

He maintains that profile-raising activities during the year have increased awareness of Apec and its importance, and the link to expanding trade, job growth and living standards.

Despite the huge setback of Asia's economic crisis and renewed protectionist impulses, Wevers says Apec's leadership has stood behind the aims of free and open trade, a position reinforced by trade ministers at their mid-year Auckland summit.

He contends that these strands of Apec's progress during New Zealand's watch have fed into support for the free trade recipe, in the face of misgivings at home and abroad about the impact of globalisation.

Wevers says New Zealand's management of Apec this year has drawn the business sector into its processes and in turn kept pressure on the region's political figures.

A former ambassador to Japan, Wevers worked in posts in Brussels and Port Moresby, and spent two years attached to David Lange's office while the Labour leader was Foreign Minister. He returned from Tokyo to head Foreign Affairs' Apec division then moved into the top job - the biggest task of his career.