Trade always trumps human rights

John Key with Saudi Arabian King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. Photo / Supplied

The sound of sanctimonious tut-tutting rose to a roar last week, almost drowning out the sighs of relief as people everywhere woke to the realisation The Bachelor was nearly over.

Much of the muttering was inspired by the sight of Saudi Arabian royalty sitting down for some quality face time with the national ponytail puller-in-chief.

Is there no one, wondered the moralists, to whom the Saudis won't speak?

Others expressed discomfort at New Zealand's Prime Minister consorting with people whose Government still cuts your head off for sorcery, sentences women to flogging for being out alone at night, imports children to be used as sex slaves, according to the US State Department, and severs hands for crimes such as theft.

Where some countries aim to give people a hand up, in Saudi Arabia you're more likely to have a hand off. What can it have been like for the PM and party, doing the rounds and shaking hands whose tenure at the end of the arm to which they were attached could not be guaranteed?

The Saudi Arabian visit was a return to the old Key model of jet setting, glad-handing and grandstanding, which we can now see has never worked.

Trade deals - wherever, with whomever - still trump any other consideration, well into a third term of them not having worked so far. As a result, we have a budget coming that will also show asset stripping, environment raping and beneficiary bashing are not the economic cure-all they were thought to be.

But many saw the criticism of the Saudi visit on moral grounds as blinkered and lacking focus, pointing out that many other countries where Key likes to hang out have morally noxious policies.

Indeed, the international moral high ground is a sparsely populated area (although there's no talking to the Scandinavians about this stuff).

Human rights relativists will tell you that the only difference between Saudi Arabia and Isis is that Isis are amateurs. The only difference between Isis and China is that China is officially atheist. The difference between China and the US is that in China even unarmed black people get a trial before they are shot.

New Zealand trades routinely with odious regimes, partly because there's no other kind. Add India to Saudi Arabia, China and the US, with the banned caste system that continues in practice and the setting fire to girl brides because the dowry is not big enough and the killing of baby girls at birth because who needs more girls?

And Indonesia, which shoots people for something that shouldn't be a crime in the first place and enforces a brutal regime in West Papua. And Australia with its calamitous anti-Aboriginal policies. And Israel with its refusal to work for a fair and peaceful solution in the Middle East. And Gaza, whose Government seems bent on exterminating all Jews.

It's not hard to see why 200,000 people volunteered to leave the planet on the Mars One project.

Why should one country be singled out for sanctions instead of another? How do you know where to draw the line? Fortunately, there is a line. You may not know exactly where it is, but you will know when you're on the wrong side of it.

Let's take it as read we're all against child sex slavery. Saudi Arabia is on the wrong side. China and Indonesia are on the wrong side. But America and Australia are on the right side, because in those two countries people can complain about their Government's policies and work to change them.