How New Zealand sees itself on Home Services

Jan

How New Zealand sees itself

posted by admin in Window Cleaning

Our nearest neighbours are close to 2000 kilometres away, or as far away as Moscow from London. Our borders abut the Pacific Ocean and Tasman Sea. Our isolation from others gives us the world’s fifth-biggest exclusive economic zone. It stands to reason, therefore, that our nation will seldom occupy world headlines. We are simply too small and too remote. In a world where might is right, small countries lose out. So the authority of the UN Security Council, the World Trade Organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the myriad of other rules-setting bodies matter to us. Our major preoccupations in the international arena are: Peace and security. This takes several forms. We continue to be very active on nuclear disarmament issues, working with colleagues in the New Agenda grouping of nations. Nuclear disarmament has tended to take a back seat, as counter proliferation efforts have come to the fore. New Zealand has been increasingly concerned at the lack of action by nuclear weapons states to lower the alert status of their arsenals. It is not widely known, but it should be, that despite the end of the Cold War, thousands of nuclear weapons remain on “hair trigger” alert. This not only increases the probability of the use of nuclear weapons overall, but also heightens the possibility of them being used accidentally or unintentionally. That would be catastrophic. At this year’s UN General Assembly New Zealand will launch an initiative to de-alert nuclear weapons. Along with our partners Sweden and other interested countries, we will be asking all other countries to join us in sending a clear message that this situation cannot persist. This is the first time that this objective will be put forward as a resolution of the General Assembly, and demonstrates again New Zealand’s willingness to stand up and be counted on key disarmament issues. Another key priority for us on disarmament is tackling the great harm being caused around the world by cluster munitions. New Zealand has learned through the work of our defence forces of the terrible effects unexploded cluster munitions can have on the lives of communities trying to rebuild after war. At this very moment our second team of ordnance experts is working in Southern Lebanon to help remove up to a million remnants of these weapons. Now we have joined a small group of countries, led by Norway, to push for the negotiation of a new international treaty on cluster munitions. We are also active in peacekeeping deployments internationally - across United Nations and UN-sanctioned missions from the Middle East and Africa to Asia and the Pacific. Our multicultural armed forces relate well to diverse communities, and our country takes a lot of pride in their work. In Afghanistan, our primary role has been in Bamian province, where we run a Provincial Reconstruction Team. We also deploy police and military trainers, and in earlier years have sent special forces. Iraq did not meet our criteria for intervention in 2003 and we did not participate in the war there. We did, for one year, send New Zealand Defence Force engineers to do civilian reconstruction work, believing that was consistent with the United Nations mandate established in the course of 2003. Trade policy. This looms very large on New Zealand’s agenda, as our major export goods are agricultural - and therefore the most discriminated against under current world trade rules. A successful WTO round is our top trade priority. For it to succeed it must deliver on opening up agricultural trade. That is also in the interests of the developing world. But New Zealand has strong interests in negotiations on industrials and services too, and is looking for an outcome which delivers more openness across the board. Meanwhile, in our own region we are forging new trade links with Apec partner economies. Our first free-trade agreement was with Australia more than 24 years ago. Now we have FTAs with Singapore and Thailand, and a sub regional FTA with Chile, Singapore, and Brunei. We have completed 14 rounds of FTA negotiations with China. Negotiations for an FTA are also going on between Asean and Australia and New Zealand. Environmental issues. The image of being clean and green is as strongly associated with New Zealand as is being nuclear free. Our country is passionate about the environment, and we take that passion into international organisations on everything from whaling and the Antarctic, to fishing quotas, sea bird protection, and the Kyoto Protocol. New Zealand has ratified the Kyoto Protocol; even though our unique greenhouse gas profile makes emissions reduction more challenging than for many nations. Fifty per cent of our emissions come from pastoral agriculture, which is also the source of tremendous wealth for our economy. Our aspiration is to see New Zealand move toward carbon neutrality over time. We can reach it across our electricity sector by 2025 and in our transport sector by 2040. Human rights. As one of the world’s oldest continuous democracies, with our first Parliament elected in 1854, we do stand up for the rule of law and the human rights upheld by the United Nations. Many of us in our current government cut our teeth in politics on the issue of South African apartheid. Sadly, too few people around the world enjoy the personal freedoms we in Western democracies take for granted. Intercivilisation and interfaith dialogue. There are a number of initiatives worldwide now which seek to bridge the divide which has become so apparent between the Western world with its Judaeo-Christian ethos and the Islamic world. New Zealand believes it has something to contribute to this debate, given its own multicultural, multi-faith population, and its reputation for peacekeeping in and relationship building with diverse nations. This year we have hosted the third Regional Asia Pacific Interfaith Dialogue, and also the first regional forum to be held anywhere in the world on the United Nations’ Alliance of Civilisations initiative. The latter is a direct challenge to Samuel Huntingdon’s bleak prophecy of the inevitability of a clash between civilisations - a notion we reject. Development assistance. In terms of the proportion of gross national income devoted to Official Development Assistance, New Zealand is at the lower end of Western nation contributions, though we are on track to boost what we give to 0.35 per cent by 2010-11. In terms of broader definitions of contributing, however, we rate highly, taking into account our very open markets for goods from developing countries; the labour mobility we provide for people from the South Pacific, and our contribution to peacekeeping. Without basic stability, all the ODA in the world can’t make a difference to development. This leads me to comment on regions of the world where New Zealand has particularly close engagement, beginning with our near neighbour Australia and the South Pacific. The New Zealand and Australian economies are closely integrated and our labour markets are open to each other. Our governments liaise on many issues, and our defence forces cooperate closely. While we do not agree on all international issues, nonetheless the ties which bind us make us like family members to each other. We are both very immersed in the affairs of the South Pacific, bilaterally and through the Pacific Islands Forum. The bulk of New Zealand’s development assistance goes there, focusing on poverty alleviation, sustainable rural livelihoods, health, education, and good governance. We have also been drawn into peacekeeping and stabilisation work, in Bougainville in Papua New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands. Some support was required in Tonga after last November’s disastrous riots too. Fiji is a major issue of regional concern with the coup d’etat last December being the fourth in 19 years. Fiji’s development has been severely impeded by its manifest coup culture. New Zealand and others have a wide range of sanctions on Fiji at present, while also endeavouring to work through the Pacific Islands Forum and with other partners on supporting Fiji to move back to constitutional government. The broader Asia Pacific is also a huge priority for us, working through the trans-Pacific Apec organisation and the many bilateral and regional relationships we have in East Asia. The Apec nations account for 70 per cent of our total trade. Forty per cent of our trade is with Asia alone. Long term, the vision is for an East Asian community to emerge. All this for New Zealand is a far cry from the days when Asia was circumvented en route to Europe. But I must emphasise that relationships with Europe remain exceedingly important to New Zealand. We see ourselves as members of a community of shared values and as natural partners in a globalising world. Britain and Germany are significant trade partners for us in their own right and the European Union, taken as one unit, is our second-biggest market. Rather than time and distance attenuating links, the reverse is happening as we formalise and deepen our relationship with Europe across education, science, and policy and security dialogue and co-operation. The same is true of our relationship with the United States. For more than 20 years, it came to be characterised by the issues which divided us, which, given the overall commonality of views and values, was inappropriate. A lot of work has been done by both of us now to strengthen the relationship without either resiling from strongly held views, and we have made a lot of progress. New Zealand’s window on the world is rather different from that of European nations like Britain. While we share the same values and take up many of the same issues, each of us also tends to focus most directly on bilateral and regional relations in the areas closest to us. For New Zealand, that means the Asia Pacific. That is a huge reorientation from where we were at the outbreak of World War II, when we tended largely to ignore our own neighbourhood. My foreign policy objective as prime minister has been to see New Zealand positioned as a principled, constructive, and engaged international citizen. This is an abridged version of the address Miss Clark delivered to the Oxford Union. The full text is available at www.dompost.co.nz