Clark woos Chilean teachers

The Prime Minister hopes to entice Chilean English-language teachers to New Zealand to counter flagging interest from the Asian market.

Helen Clark was in Chile's capital, Santiago, at the weekend for the inauguration of Chile's first woman president, Michelle Bachelet.

The Prime Minister has had a close relationship with outgoing President Ricardo Lagos and said from Chile yesterday that she had gone "in essence to keep New Zealand on the radar screen with the new Administration".

"We've had a lot of things develop between New Zealand and Chile in the six years of President Lagos and it's important to cement that in with the new President."

Aside from meeting both Mr Lagos and Ms Bachelet, the Prime Minister also had a brief chat with United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the inauguration, where they had a "cordial" chat, and addressed two business audiences.

"What is clear is that Chile sees NZ as offering a model of development which is very relevant to them. They have big primary industries and they see New Zealand as a country that has achieved first-world living standards on the basis of an advanced set of primary sectors, so they are very interested in ... doing business with us."

NZ's four-way free trade deal with Chile, Singapore and Brunei - coming into force later this year - would enhance relationships far beyond economic benefits, she told a trade seminar in Santiago. "NZ is a natural half-way point to East Asia for Chileans ... the close relations NZ is developing with East Asia will be of growing interest to Chile."

She said she had used the trip to stress the synergies between NZ and Chile in the agriculture field.

"Fonterra, which was once an exporter here, now plays a role as an investor and builder of capacity and volume of production in the Chilean dairy sector which can then be marketed through Fonterra's off-shore distribution channels.

"That, I think, will be increasingly the way for New Zealand as we reach the limits of the land we can devote to certain forms of land use, like dairying or fruit.

"There are clear opportunities in education here to be picked up. The new President has said that one of her priorities is to have every teacher of English spend six months in an English-speaking country while they are training and we could be providing those semesters of training. That's a lot of teachers every year."

Chile was also interested in our teachers going there "but I think most critically we could pick up the opportunities in the teacher training".

Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has already raised concerns about the declining number of Chinese students coming to New Zealand, which has forced the closure of some English-language schools.

Helen Clark said: "We need to diversify the range of countries from which we receive students and when a country like Chile says we want every trainee teacher of English to be spending [time overseas] we need to see the opportunity in that.

"We've invited the new [Chilean Education] Minister to NZ but we now have to get proactive at our end to see what we can put in front of the Chileans to help some of their needs."

Helen Clark leaves for the Philippines today where New Zealand is co-sponsoring an interfaith meeting of senior leaders in the region.

"We've got in behind this process because we felt that there's a tendency for different faith communities to talk past each other and not to each other."

- Additional reporting NZPA