NZ, Australia look to boost aid cooperation

Foreign Minister Murray McCully. Photo / Paul Estcourt

New Zealand and Australia have agreed to further tighten aid and development cooperation in the southwest Pacific, yesterday setting an "ambitious" work programme for the two countries' officials.

The move, agreed during regular six-monthly talks in Canberra between Foreign Minister Murray McCully and Australian counterpart Kevin Rudd, follows growing efforts to coordinate international aid across the region.

It also comes as the United States renews its development interest in the Pacific, part of a process of re-engagement that has seen improved military relations with New Zealand and plans to strengthen joint training and its presence in Australia.

In the background is the growing influence of China, whose recent rapid rise in aid spending in the Pacific - largely in competition with Taiwan - concerned both regional governments and aid planners.

Yesterday Mr McCully declined to be drawn on any role China may have played in international aid programmes in the region, telling the Herald:" "I don't look at the aid budget through that sort of lens."

Canberra is also cautious, emphasising its strategic interest in the region while trying not to offend Beijing's sensitivities, already pricked by security assessments of the rise of Chinese power.

"Of course we discussed China's aid relationship with Pacific Island countries, and as I said at the Cairns (Pacific Islands) Forum a year or so ago, we welcome the possibility and prospect of greater transparency from our Chinese friends in their aid relationships with various Pacific Island countries," Mr Rudd said.

Mr McCully said he and Mr Rudd had spent some time talking about the emerging architecture of the Asia Pacific region.

He said they both welcomed the fact that the US and Russia had joined the East Asia Summit, and that American aid was moving back into Pacific to partner New Zealand and Australia.

The two ministers also discussed US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's transtasman visit, and the signing of the Wellington Declaration as a significant boost to US-New Zealand relations.

"I've publicly acknowledged the support we've had from Australian ministers and the Australian government, the encouragement they've given the US to move to the much better space we've managed to achieve," Mr McCully said.

The two ministers said that as, collectively, the largest contributors to official development aid in the southwestern Pacific, New Zealand and Australia needed to boost cooperation in the region.

"Therefore we have resolved today to work even more closely in dealing with the development challenges across Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia," Mr Rudd said.

This would involve working as much as possible in tandem in an integrated aid strategy, developing last year's Cairns Compact to lift cooperation between the key players in the Pacific.

"Before that, everyone was out there doing their own thing, and we need to do better on that so the aid flows from Australia, New Zealand the European Union, Japan, the US, Korea and elsewhere are coordinated on the ground," Mr Rudd said.

Mr McCully told the Herald that he and Mr Rudd had identified areas in which the two countries could lift their game, including education and fisheries, which had a complicated set of requirements that ran from resource negotiations and industry development to illegal catches that took hundreds of millions of dollars from the Pacific states.

"We emphasise that we have one of the (world's) biggest development challenges in our region," he said.

"In fact, apart from sub-Saharan Africa, we've got the biggest challenge to confront, so I think we need to focus on what's going to work."