Author    David Capie

Over the last few months more than a few commentators at home and abroad have become highly sensitive to changes in the New Zealand government’s China settings. Statements about everything from Hong Kong, cyber-security, the origins of covid-19, and the treatment of the Uighurs have been subjected to forensic scrutiny. Yet last week, perhaps lost amidst a late deluge of Olympic medals, a significant development in New Zealand’s position on China’s claims in the South China Sea went largely unnoticed.
 
By submitting a statement or ‘note verbale’ to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, New Zealand has joined a growing number of countries including Australia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, the UK, the US, and Vietnam, setting out their legal position on the South China Sea disputes. In doing so, the Ardern government has gone much further than it has previously been willing to go in rejecting Beijing’s expansive territorial claims.

Author   David Capie

​Last week’s speech to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern offered the clearest statement yet of how her Labour government wants to manage the challenges of a more contested region.
 
The immediate headlines were all about the Prime Minister’s use of the term ‘Indo-Pacific’, a shift away from New Zealand’s longstanding desire to see itself as at home in the ‘Asia-Pacific’ region, not least as host of APEC this year. Because ‘Free and Open Indo-Pacific’ is a framework promoted enthusiastically in Washington and elsewhere, Ardern’s choice of language prompted some to claim the PM “has firmly aligned New Zealand with the United States worldview”. But a closer look at the speech suggests Ardern’s government wants to embrace Indo-Pacific on its own terms.

Author  Marion Crawshaw

Development assistance underpins New Zealand’s Pacific engagements. But COVID is changing its focus. The long term is murky and challenging but it’s worth asking some hard questions.

Looking forward New Zealand’s aid budget is similar to previous years (see here). Country allocations are set out here. But details of expenditure are opaque. Some projects are continuing, but closed borders and shattered economies create problems for existing long term development projects, especially those that rely on overseas experts travelling to work with local counterparts.  Zoom helps with programme consultation and support but it can’t substitute for in-person contacts.  Broadband internet connections in the Pacific are slow and very expensive.

In addition, Pacific countries have experienced a COVID-induced drop in government revenues, especially those heavily dependent on tourism for government income and livelihoods.  These include Fiji, Cook Islands and Samoa.  COVID has exacerbated PNG‘s fiscal issues. New Zealand provided an initial NZ$50 million package of support to prepare health systems, and address wider health, economic, governance and social challenges arising from the pandemic.  Ongoing funding has helped to ensure supplies of medicines, food, PPE and vaccines, especially for those Pacific counties experiencing COVID outbreaks. The need is enormous and will be protracted. An independent Pacific focused organisation providing analysis, visibility and advocacy for New Zealand’s Pacific relationships and supporting policy development would help us move forward.

Author     Anna Powles

The political crisis  in Samoa is heading into its eighth week. The caretaker prime minister, Tuila'epa Aiono Sa'ilele Malielegaoi, leader of the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP), who has held power for 22 years, shows little inclination to end the impasse and allow prime minister-elect Fiame Naomi Mata’afa and the Faʻatuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (F.A.S.T) party to form government.
 
On the eve of the 59th independence anniversary on June 1st, the Archbishop of the Catholic Church, Alapati Lui Mata’eliga, used his Monday mass to castigate Tuilaepa, seated in the front pew, suggesting the  current caretaker government is heading towards a dictatorship and that “the heart of any democratic government is the constitution and the rule of law”.  Invoking the legacy of the Mau movement, the Archbishop decried the state of the nation: “there is no peace…it appears as if our forefather’s shed blood for no reason.”

Author     Robert Ayson

​A week ago New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta and her Australian counterpart Marise Payne issued a joint statement citing “clear evidence of severe human rights abuses” in Xinjiang. The two Foreign Ministers also lent their support to the efforts of leading western partners: “New Zealand and Australia welcome the measures announced overnight by Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States”, their statement continued.
 
But it did not take long for the penny to drop that there were limits to this solidarity. Wellington and Canberra were not joining in on travel bans and asset freezes on specified officials and on the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps Public Security Bureau. “Australia and New Zealand welcome sanctions over Uighur abuses,” one headline read, “but impose none of their own.”

Author    Nurreddin Abdurahman

On March 25 hundreds of Tigray people and their supporters marched through Wellington to demonstrate at Parliament. They called on New Zealand to condemn the atrocities being carried out in the name of the Ethiopian government in the northern province of Tigray.

Ethiopia, an East African country of over 100 million people, a federal state peopled by multiple religions and ethnicities, stands on the brink of catastrophe. Credible reports have reached human rights NGOs and the international media of a massacre of churchgoers at Dengelat in Tigray that took place last November, and further killings in the city of Axum, in the west of the province, at about the same time. These terrible events came in the midst of an undeclared war between the central government and regional Tigray forces. Despite international disquiet, the Ethiopian government and its leader Abiy Ahmed has until now sheltered behind the tired rubric of non-interference in a sovereign country’s affairs.
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What lies behind these events and how can further tragedies be averted?

Author    Marion Crawshaw

As the COVID numbers in PNG grow exponentially, Australia is scrambling to provide support. The support includes vaccines for frontline health workers, a large Medical Assistance Team (MAT), PPE, tents for isolation wards and a long list of other supplies.  From what we know so far, Australia will be working on the ground with the PNG response system, WHO and UNICEF.  New Zealand appears to be unaccountably absent from this picture of urgent support required for a Pacific neighbour in trouble.  
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The alarming growth of COVID in PNG is relatively new although it might have been predicted given the very low testing numbers.  The fact that recent cases are spread right across PNG’s provinces also raises suspicions that there has been unidentified spread in case numbers for a while.  The picture looks increasingly like that of Italy a year ago, when initially small numbers of cases grew exponentially and eventually overwhelmed the health system in much of northern Italy.

Author     Marion Crawshaw

The departure of the Micronesian states from the Pacific Forum will be a tragedy for the Pacific region. The Pacific’s visibility and effectiveness on the global stage will be reduced. While individual members will continue to have agency in their own right, the Forum draws members together and amplifies their common concerns. It has done this effectively with oceans issues, climate change and fisheries.  The Micronesian countries have been at the forefront of all these issues.  The Blue Pacific concept developed by the Forum explains the connections between Pacific Island nations and tells the story of the importance of the Pacific to the outside world.  The Biketawa Declaration provided the basis for cross regional mutual support in troubled times and the Boe Declaration has built on it, presenting broad concepts of security that have resonated well beyond the Pacific.  
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Like all multilateral organisations, the Forum is imperfect. If you go digging deep in the weeds of its work, you can lose the sense of the importance of the whole.  Yes, the meetings can be tedious but even in a zoom environment they provide opportunities to connect, maintain community and forge common understandings.  Expanding attendance, in both numbers and level, of Dialogue partners at the annual Pacific Forum meetings in the last ten years shows the increasing profile of the Pacific and the Forum, even if discussion is constant on how to make the meetings more meaningful.

Author   Robert Ayson

You won’t find it on her twitter feed alongside messages of welcome to Anthony Blinken, the newly confirmed US Secretary of State. You won’t find it on the Beehive site somewhere near the Foreign Minister’s statement on the Myanmar coup.  Nor will you locate it on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. But at the end of last week Nanaia Mahuta gave a television interview in Australia which could be the best guide yet to how she is approaching the central question for New Zealand’s foreign policy – dealing with the rise of China.
 
The brief but significant exchange on this thorny question may have been overlooked by media on the eastern side of Tasman: the interview began with yet another discussion of New Zealand’s approach to covid-19. But Mahuta’s main role that evening was to set out the Ardern government’s position on a very different problem: Trade Minister Damien O’Connor’s all-too newsworthy assertion that Australia could improve its relationship with China by following New Zealand’s example and showing some more respect to Beijing. Mahuta’s response (at around the 5 minute mark) was unequivocal: “in terms of the China-Australia relationship,” she told the ABC interviewer, “that is not really something we can or should comment on. That is a matter for Australia and China to work through.” Mr O’Connor, that’s your bus coming, isn’t it?

Author     Robert Ayson

There are good reasons why we are hearing a lot about American democracy as the Biden Administration takes office. If anyone needed reminding of the strain that four years of Donald Trump’s presidency had placed on the institutions underpinning America’s democracy, the 6 January siege of the US Capitol building illuminated the problem with terrifying starkness.
 
Two weeks later, in the poem that stole the inauguration show, Amanda Gorman insisted that “while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.” In his inaugural address Biden sought to rededicate the United States to its constitutional principles: “Today”, he intoned, “we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy.”
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