Author: Malcolm Cook

The TPP issues covered in Ben Schaare's recent post connect to a broader trade context for New Zealand.

When the Uruguay Round ended and the WTO process stalled two decades ago, New Zealand’s trade diplomacy outlook was decidedly gloomy. The only preferential trade deal Wellington had signed was with its noisy neighbour across the Tasman, its largest trading partner, emigration destination, and source of foreign direct investment. As a very small economy (about 0.5% of global GDP in 2014), geographically isolated and with a competitive agricultural sector, gaining greater overseas market access for New Zealand outside the WTO was a daunting challenge. Failure to get bilateral deals with the United States (New Zealand’s third largest export market and source of FDI) or Japan (the fourth largest export market and fifth largest source of FDI) despite determined efforts from Wellington seemed to prove this painful point. 

Author: Mary Wareham

New Zealand was in “listening mode” at the second multilateral meeting on “killer robots” at the United Nations in Geneva this month. No other country with similar disarmament credentials was as quiet, except perhaps Belgium.

It was an odd show for a nation known for its disarmament leadership. New Zealand was part of the core groups of nations that led the ground-breaking humanitarian disarmament processes to ban landmines in the mid-1990s and cluster munitions in the mid-2000s. After securing the adoption of the Arms Trade Treaty in 2013, New Zealand is now at the core of a group of countries working to advance the humanitarian rationale for abolishing nuclear weapons.

Author: David Capie

The news that former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has been stirring the pot and undermining his successor Najib Razak should come as no surprise.  The 89-year old Mahathir has form in this game.  Six years ago he worked to bring down his successor Abdullah Badawi after the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) ruling party performed poorly in the 2008 elections.  As one observer of Malaysian politics put it last week, Mahathir’s latest antics mean he has now undermined two of his predecessors, all his rivals, and both his successors. 

The focus of the current stoush ostensibly concerns the management of the 1 Malaysia Development Bhd., a national investment fund which has chalked up RM42 billion ($11.5B US) in debts over the last five years. But Mahathir has been gunning for Najib for some time. Criticisms began after Najib (who is also Malaysia’s Finance Minister) dropped plans for a “crooked bridge” that would connect the country with Singapore.  Mahathir accused him of “shameful” weakness in the face of Singaporean government opposition. He also condemned the government’s use of British consultants as a throwback to the days of colonialism.

Author: Ben Schaare

The Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions leaked late last month have fueled TPP opponents, who claim that the agreement will undermine the government’s sovereign right to legislate. This comes after similar controversy surrounding the leaked Intellectual Property (IP) provisions, which opponents argue are designed to advantage US corporations at the expense of industry in other TPP countries.

However, the function of ISDS is often misunderstood. To successfully challenge and potentially be compensated for legislation, an investor must show that the offending law rises to the level of expropriation. Essentially the only laws that would satisfy the requirements for compensation are those that do not serve the public interest, are discriminatory, or were not formed following due process. Since the government is unlikely to enact discriminatory legislation, and should be able to justify laws on the broad grounds of ‘public interest’, it is likely investors will only invoke ISDS to redress egregious violations.

Author: Robert Ayson

New Zealanders, and their governments, like foreign policy to be about the making and keeping of agreements. This is evident when a new trade agreement is signed, as it was recently with Korea to the Key government’s evident delight. One can only imagine the party among New Zealand’s trade negotiators should the Trans-Pacific Partnership get across the line. And this penchant for formal accords comes across in what we expect from other countries. One of New Zealand’s first acts as a temporary member of the UN Security Council was to make a clarion call for greater pressure to be applied by the great powers to encourage Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to return to the task of coming to a two states agreement. 

As a small state New Zealand benefits from a strong rules based order which, through negotiated agreements and a growing body of law, limits what the strong can extract from the weak. A preference for negotiated settlement also has strong domestic connotations, including the Waitangi Tribunal process. It is also to be found in the history of New Zealand’s approach to international organisations, including the arguments made by Wellington in the interwar years that the great powers needed to take their League of Nations obligations more seriously as aggression was rising. It is there too in New Zealand’s repeated calls for the great powers today to take their disarmament obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty more seriously. We should expect more of these calls to be made as the NPT Review Conference meets very soon in New York, not least because New Zealand has the role of coordinating the pro-disarmament New Agenda Coalition. 

Authors: Robert Ayson and David Capie 

With Incline we aim to create a thoughtful digital platform that puts international issues in a New Zealand context. As scholars of international relations and strategic studies we have long felt there is insufficient commentary on the issues that should matter to New Zealand as it charts its way in the world. In particular, while there are many excellent offshore blogs, there are too few discussion pieces that put a New Zealand spin on developments in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

We hope Incline will help fill that gap.  We see it as a blog that will feature work by two main sets of informed commentators, all with an interest in the issues that matter to New Zealand and in issues in which New Zealand views need to be prominent. 

The first set of commentators are established scholars and writers, both in New Zealand and overseas.  The blog’s home is Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand’s capital city, but we plan to reach out to experts we know at home and abroad to bring lively opinion from people who know their areas well. We also want to give scholars the chance to share their academic work with a wider audience. 

The second group are emerging researchers who wish to develop careers around the regional and international issues that matter to New Zealand. Here, with the help of the two Managing Editors, Benedict Xu-Holland and Cassandra Shih, we will be seeking views from postgraduate students and others who are developing expertise on specific foreign policy, security, trade and development issues. 

Incline may not be able to match the amount of content produced by well-funded overseas blogs, but we plan to compete on quality. Our initial idea is to feature at least one new post each week and make each of these count.  We don’t have a particular political or ideological line to push and we welcome high quality debate. We look forward to offering a variety of perspectives on a wide range of subjects.

Why choose Incline for a title? There are three main reasons. The first is an allusion to Wellington’s steep topography. Everything here, including the Kelburn Campus of the university where we work, is on some sort of gradient. The second is about debates that should matter to New Zealand. We are often struck by how challenging it can be to raise attention levels on some of the bigger international developments that seem to pass the New Zealand discussion by. So Incline refers rather cheekily to the slightly uphill challenge it can be to generate the debate so needed in New Zealand. The third is a bad but hopeful pun. We hope that as readers you will be inclined to follow the blog and that very good writers will be inclined to produce material for it. 

So it is a pleasure for us to get this new blog going as the southern autumn of 2015 gets underway. And we thank Benedict and Cassandra for all the work they have put into Incline already.