KEY POINTS:
It's world summit season and time once again for Helen Clark to strut her stuff on the international stage. After months of unfavourable publicity over the election funding scandal Clark is now poised to enjoy several weeks of high-profile news coverage. She embarks on a trip which will include meetings with four European leaders.
When word first went out to New Zealand's diplomatic posts that the Prime Minister wanted to stitch in meetings with Tony Blair (Britain), Angela Merkel (Germany), Jacques Chirac (France) and Romano Prodi (Italy) there were suggestions Clark might want to lobby European support for the UN Secretary-General's job if that contest went to a second round. The job has since gone to South Korea's Ban Ki-Moon.
Now the Wellington rumour mill is again at work with suggestions Clark wants to position herself as an emerging international leader on climate change issues in line with her declared aim to see this country take a leading edge on the matter.
Is she after another big job overseas, as cynics suggest? The truth is probably more prosaic. Clark needs to put her considerable international diplomacy skills to New Zealand's advantage in Europe. Quickly.
Sir Nicholas Stern's report released in London this week has highlighted the economic downside for the world if countries do not get serious about climate change. The British economist paints a picture of rising sea levels, droughts, floods, 200 million climate refugees on the move, and a global economic cost of $10 trillion if governments and industries do not take action.
New Zealand's record certainly does not match up to the clean, green image that has become this country's brand. Toxic emissions from the nation's car fleet and animal stocks have seen to that.
And Europe has a growing environmental constituency that is concerned about where its food comes from and is conscious of the need to protect its own food security. That's one of the reasons why the European Union resisted trade in genetically modified foods.
Clark's meetings with the big four European leaders are not ostensibly about trade. Her focus on relationship building is important as it enables her to remind those leaders of the blood New Zealand spilt in two World Wars to help Europe preserve democratic freedoms.
The sentiment she is able to evoke will provide a platform for our Trade Minister when he gets down to more detailed negotiations in the near future over New Zealand's preferred access to the European market. It was just that sentiment that helped New Zealand gain preferred access for its butter and lamb exports when the European common market was established.
Unfortunately that sentiment is eroding with generational change and the emergence of growing numbers who care about the impact on the planet from the fuels burned taking our produce to European markets.
Our trade officials generally tend to paint European concerns over New Zealand's efficient agriculture sector as simple protectionism, a desire to protect the lifestyles of their farmers and their beautiful countrysides from the onslaught of industrial-style farming. Hence the portrayal of a current proposal to hit such exports with a food miles tax as a protectionist backlash.
My view is that is short-sighted. The argument might find favour with Clark's leadership contemporaries but is less likely to resound with some emerging leaders.
Clark needs to use at least one of her three major European speeches to spell out just how New Zealand plans to stake out its own strong line on economic sustainability to offset some very real downsides in the eyes of our beholders.
She also needs to get climate change on to the agenda for the APEC meeting where the leaders from 21 Asia-Pacific economies will talk turkey on the future of world trade.
The leaders will make the usual noises about reactivating the stalled World Trade Organisation negotiations so that the Doha Development Agenda can be revived. They are also likely to discuss the idea of creating a regional free trade area known as the FTAAP (Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific) which has been strongly driven by New Zealand's Apec business representatives, particularly Sir Dryden Spring.
But the indication so far is that it will take quite a bit of creative tension from the leaders themselves to ensure the draft communique is given some teeth.
Clark can use her longevity within Apec (she is the third longest serving leader) to get climate change on the agenda and begin the process of building a consensus among some of the world's worst emitters (the United States and China) on how to tackle the problem in a coherent fashion.
If Clark is to live up to her aim to make solving climate change the rallying cause for New Zealand she needs to beard some major dragons. Apec would be a good start.
* Steven Joyce, the National Party's campaign manager for the 2005 election, has called to assure the Herald that he did not realise until final invoices came through in October that GST had not been appropriately factored in when the party's broadcast advertising budget was placed.
