Impressive. But in the Pacific, it is personal relationships.
A very successful High Commissioner to the Cooks was the late Brian Donnelly, the popular former New Zealand First MP. Donnelly had been deputy principal at Titikaveka College in Rarotonga and spoke Cook Island Māori.
When Donnelly was High Commissioner, he knew everyone and knew everything.
Not hard.
Sit in the bar at Trader Jacks in Rarotonga and you learn everything.
I recall doing just that one evening and the barman said,
“Richard, you are sitting in Winston’s seat”.
I was in the Cook Islands prior to Christmas. At a charity event I chatted with Prime Minister Mark Brown. I asked him why the Cooks wanted its own passport.
He explained that there is a restriction on how many New Zealand rugby players can play for a European club but no cap on the number of Pacific Island players. He believes with their own passport Cook Islanders could play professional rugby in Europe.
Very Pacific. Nothing about being independent.
Donnelly, who never missed a Warriors game, would have understood. How many of our diplomats have even been to a rugby league game?
Donnelly’s advice to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would have been to avoid a public row over passports by lobbying the Rugby Union to exempt Cook Islanders from the player cap.
If I had asked the Prime Minister about his trip to China, I am sure he would have told me.
It is not a secret that offshore exploration has revealed valuable minerals in the Cook Islands Exclusive Economic Zone.
New Zealand has told the Cook Islands repeatedly that it must be more economically self-sufficient. In New Zealand offshore mining may be given fast-track approval.
In my view Foreign Affairs is more concerned about the views of organisations, such as Greenpeace, than representing the best interests of the Cook Islands.
China has gained influence in the Cook Islands because the Chinese provide the assistance that the Islands want. We provide the assistance we say they need.
I have travelled with Winston Peters in the Pacific. He is the best-known and most popular New Zealand politician. The adults ask if they can take him fishing. The children call out “Winnie”.
Even if our diplomats could not discover what was to be negotiated Peters could have found out. He has his own chair at Trader Jacks.
Like me, Peters has known Cook Island politicians from our days at university.
Many New Zealand MPs are friends with Pacific MPs.
Albert Henry before he was the Cook Island Prime Minister was a member of the Auckland Central Labour Party. Henry said I was his MP.
Tom Davis, when he was Prime Minister, would say that because I was Minister of Pacific Island Affairs, I was his representative.
I used to drink kava with the Solomon Island Prime Minister, Solomon Mamaloni, on Sunday afternoons at his home.
We would discuss everything, our families, election prospects and each country’s relationship with China. By the end of the afternoon, we would have a very good understanding of each country’s position.
Political correctness is our priority. For the Chinese, it is realpolitik.
Once a Fiji army officer visited me in my house in Fiji and said the army was going to do another coup and why.
I informed Foreign Affairs. I was told our High Commission had no intelligence of a coup. As tipped, the coup happened.
If we selected diplomats not for their university degrees but their networking skills and knowledge of the Pacific, we would know what was happening in Fiji, the Solomons, Kiribati and the Cook Islands.
Are the New Zealand Government statements professing ignorance of the contents of the Cook Islands/China agreement for America’s benefit? Is our Government trying to convince the Americans that New Zealand is blameless for the extension of Chinese influence in the Pacific?
Is New Zealand’s great political survivor, cunning enough to ensure that he can claim no prior knowledge of any Cook Island/China strategic partnership?
Even if that is the explanation, it is still a massive diplomatic failure.
