Author       Terence Wood

Murray McCully's time as New Zealand's foreign minister is at an end. On 1 May he'll be replaced by Gerry Brownlee. It's hard to know what Mr. Brownlee will mean for New Zealand's approach to foreign aid, but it's easy to assess Mr. McCully's legacy. He brought change, and he claims to have brought development when before there was only pseudo-expertise and waste. But the changes he made were either unneeded or harmful, and the development achievements he claims either haven't occurred or can't be attributed to him.
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McCully will be remembered for reintegrating New Zealand's semi-autonomous aid agency into the foreign ministry for no good reason. But the smaller injuries he inflicted on New Zealand aid were every bit as important. He took a well-functioning humanitarian emergency fund for NGOs and replaced it with one that was only able to get money out the door when stories of its dysfunction made it into the media. He killed off a similarly efficient fund for non-emergency NGO work. McCully's botched humanitarian emergency fund was eventually repaired. But, as the latest OECD review pointed out, New Zealand still wants for an effective general NGO funding tool.

Author     Robert Ayson

​We don’t have a lot to go on to evaluate New Zealand’s response so far to the heightened state of tension between North Korea and the United States. Pretty much the only direct evidence comes from the first two minutes of a radio interview given by Bill English earlier this week.
 
But the Prime Minister said enough for us to detect an approach that seems consistent with New Zealand’s existing line on North Korea’s troubling nuclear program. Perhaps the most obvious and important of these is that New Zealand would like to see this problem dealt with peacefully through diplomatic channels and in accordance with United Nations resolutions. A second is that North Korea is violating its international legal obligations, a point that echoes Foreign Minister McCully’s condemnation last month of North Korean missile testing. A third is that New Zealand welcomes signs of US-China collaboration, including indications that China is willing to increase economic pressure on North Korea.