Shipley has last word after cruising in the slipstream

By John Armstrong

The Apec circus officially ended just before 6 pm yesterday with a beaming Jenny Shipley wrapping up her final press conference. She should have given Bill Clinton the last word.

Absent last year, the American President defied cynics' predictions by coming to Auckland and grabbing a moribund Apec by the throat, warning it of complacency over free trade and forcing it to confront the crisis in East Timor.

Mrs Shipley cruised serenely in the slipstream of Air Force One. The buzz surrounding Mr Clinton and the diplomatic hurly-burly over East Timor meant she did not have to talk up the yawn-inducing elements of the Apec trade agenda to demonstrate the group was making progress.

That task was left to the Minister for International Trade, the deft Lockwood Smith, who persuaded other countries to start debating the abolition of evil food-export subsidies and allow more flexibility in tariff cuts ahead of the completion of global trade talks.

So Apec lives! But as what?

For a forum which shuns politics, there was an awful lot of it about in Auckland. Apec now provides camouflage for off-agenda big-power powwows, avoiding high hopes generated by holding leader-to-leader summits in their own countries.

So, China and the US quietly made up in the wake of the Belgrade embassy bombing and resumed work on China's entry to the World Trade Organisation. Japan, South Korea and the US held a rare trilateral on the tantrums of North Korea.

Above all, there was East Timor. As Foreign Minister Don McKinnon noted, bringing leaders to one location forced them to take a position on Indonesia's behaviour they could otherwise have avoided.

Peer pressure also prompted Indonesia to relent. Mr McKinnon's singular success in chairing an emergency meeting of Apec Foreign Ministers was in securing the attendance of Indonesia's neighbours.

Those countries still shunted the enforcement of the independence ballot back to the United Nations. But Mr Clinton then waved the big stick at President Jusuf Habibie, thus politicising Apec forever.

Inevitably, Mrs Shipley was eclipsed. But she had to be more reticent in her language.

To many Asian nations, the crisis came perilously close to interference in another's domestic affairs. That line was crossed by US Vice-President Al Gore in Malaysia last year. Mrs Shipley won points with Asian leaders for slamming his "megaphone diplomacy."

As this year's host, her quiet diplomacy enhanced her reputation.

But her successful Apec is unlikely to shift the polls enough for her to rethink bringing the election forward.

Having stared down Jakarta, however, she has recovered some of the political high ground she has lost this year. By calling back Parliament next week, she is seeking to reinforce it and hold the initiative into the election campaign.