NZ BREAKS FREE OF THE US-ISRAEL LEASH

Doing it their way                                              

At the UN Security Council’s December meeting New Zealand showed the world it’s no megapower’s poodle.

The South Pacific nation co-sponsored a successful motion demanding a halt to settlements in Palestine territory, delighting much of the Islamic world and infuriating Israel.

Egypt drafted the motion also sponsored by Malaysia, Senegal and Venezuela. The US which normally supports Israel abstained from voting.

The win is more bark than bite as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said no-way and pulled home his Wellington ambassador. But it shows how a resolute and tiny Western country can write its own script and play on the big stage.

Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully told reporters the motion was “a victory for those who are keen to see the Security Council take some action on the Middle East peace process after eight years of complete inaction.”

McCully won’t be in airport VIP lounges after May as it’s all change in Kiwi politics following PM John Key’s surprise pre-Christmas decision to quit. The top job passed almost seamlessly to his former deputy Bill English.

McCully has been ill and his exit after eight years was expected.  Front runners for the position include Health Minister Jonathan Coleman, 51, and Trade Minister Todd McClay, 48, former Ambassador to the European Union. 

McClay’s background makes him the logical choice. Coleman was formerly Defence Minister so also has international experience.

Kiwis will vote sometime before November; if the electorate rejects  a Keyless National Party  Labour’s foreign affairs spokesman David Parker, 56, could collect the portfolio. Policy shift would be minimal as both parties agree on major issues.

Key’s departure while leagues ahead in the polls, the economy bubbling and budget in surplus should be Politics 101 for leaders everywhere: How to play the dark arts without turning embittered and becoming despised.  Few will copy because most practitioners start believing their own publicity and succumb to hubris.

Had Soeharto resigned as president when popular and development booming Indonesia would now be dramatically different.

Key was a high-altitude money trader working across world capitals when he returned home to revive the National Party, becoming PM in 2008. Now he’s done it his way again – striding out of office even though the seers said he’d win the next election.

This suggests Kiwis do politics like civilised gentlefolk. Wrong. Most of Key’s 37 predecessors were knifed at the ballot box, metaphorically stabbed by colleagues in factional brawls or literally dying at their desks.  He got labelled ‘the smiling assassin’ for despatching slouchers without making them rivals.

Key, 55, rationalized that a fourth three-year term as PM (NZ has no restrictions on leadership tenure) would damage his family and “make room for new talent”. Though usually a euphemism for ‘I’ve lost control of Cabinet’,  seasoned commentators reckon the reasons are genuine.

Key broke all rules governing conservative parties, calling himself a “centrist and pragmatist” driven by “common sense” rather than ego or ideology. He voted for gay marriage, still unavailable in Australia, and ignored overseas trends to lift the pension age though costs are crippling budgets as retirees live longer.

Despite his ease in high places Key remained the happy guy next door, hard to hate. Even his Labour opponents said he “served generously with dedication.” He stayed ordinary while being extraordinary a quality seemingly shared by President Joko ‘Jokowi” Widodo.

Although representing only 4.5 million people Key’s goodbye was world news. His big mates in Washington, London and Brussels called to wish him well. At his holiday hideaway in Hawaii he plays golf with Barack Obama.  Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull reacted with Oz slang: ‘Say it ain’t so, Bro’.  So all the more surprising that NZ backs Palestine.

McCully, 63, a lawyer before entering Parliament, worked backstage. Under his watch NZ’s strange relationship with the US improved when the USS Sampson became the first warship flying the stars and stripes to sail into Kiwi waters in 33 years.

NZ was a founder member of the ANZUS security treaty but in 1986 under a Labour Government went nuclear free banning visits by nuclear armed or powered vessels.

The snub astonished Australia and outraged America but the acronym stayed intact; defence officials quietly kept the three-way alliance afloat while their political masters stared at the horizon.

National favours business and farmers, a powerful force in local politics. Aotearoa, NZ’s Maori name, has been an international human rights and social welfare pioneer and a model for others. 

It was the first nation in the world to give women the vote. It developed a massive government housing program, pensions for all at 65, free public health and education, and  no-fault accident insurance  – policies dear to the electorate.

To pay for the goodies NZ has a high tax economy dependent on tourism and food exports.  Its farmer cooperative Fonterra has a milk packing plant in Cikarang, West Java.

Key and McCully last visited Indonesia in July. NZ doesn’t carry the Islamophobic baggage that weighs down Australia’s relations with its northern neighbor so has a benign image in the Archipelago embellished by backing Palestine.  However it’s a ferocious free trader against the Republic’s protectionism.

Also in December the World Trade Organization upheld a NZ / US challenge to 18 agricultural non-tariff barriers allegedly costing Kiwi exporters more than half a billion dollars. Indonesia will appeal.

Another potential clash zone has been flagged by incoming ambassador Tantowi Yahya who plans to give Kiwis “accurate and up-to-date information” about his country’s policies in West Papua.

Vocal NGOs highlighting alleged human rights abuses in the province are unlikely to stay tuned into the former TV host’s message.

 McCully set up consulates in Surabaya and Bali to boost business and sell high-quality education.  Aid has been channelled to develop geothermal power projects where Kiwi engineers are experts.

Whoever becomes NZ’s FAM the little nation at the bottom of the world will continue to do things its way.

(First published in Strategic Review - 13 January 2017)

ANOMALIES DOG NZ-INDONESIA RELATIONS

More to Indonesia than trade                                                       Duncan Graham

Indonesians would not have missed the irony.

While Prime Minister John Key was in Jakarta discussing human rights abuses in West Papua, the sufferings of Indonesian workers in our region were being scrutinised in the Wellington Coroner’s Court.

Five Indonesian deckhands and their Korean captain died when the Korean stern trawler Oyang 70 capsized in the Southern Ocean in August 2010.

Evidence garnered by police from the 31 Indonesian survivors and other crew created a picture of a dysfunctional and dangerous workplace run by an angry skipper.

Tragically that wasn’t the only problem.  Through the police statements (no Indonesians attended the inquest) the survivors alleged verbal  and physical abuse,  shifts of up to 20 hours and a culture dominated by catch, not care.

Four months after Oyang 70 vanished another Korean fishing boat, No 1 Insung, sank probably after hitting an iceberg.  Two of the 22 fatalities were Indonesian.

Spurred by these disasters and 32 Indonesians walking off the Oyang 75 last July, a team from the University of Auckland’s Business School investigated conditions aboard foreign charter vessels operating in NZ waters.

The researchers interviewed 144 people, including surviving crew in Indonesia and the widows of the men who perished.  The academics found “disturbing levels of inhumane conditions and practices (that) have become institutionalised.”

The University report published last year titled Not in NZ’s waters, surely? told of men being recruited by manning agents in Java and signing two contracts, one to be shown to NZ authorities and the other for a fraction of the proper wage. 

Indonesians who work overseas are known as National Heroes as though working overseas is dangerous.  It is. Not all the millions who venture abroad to clean, care and labor survive unscathed.

They remit US $6.6 billion a year according to the World Bank, but the cash is often bloodstained.

Some return with the scars of judicial whippings and employer torture from nations like Malaysia.  A few go home in coffins, killed in workplace accidents or executed in places like Saudi Arabia. 

But few would expect mistreatment in an advanced and well-regulated democracy like New Zealand, a nation concerned for minorities and serious about its international obligations.

This image took a heavy battering in the coronial inquest.  It highlights the crude and hypocritical relationship we have with our closest Asian neighbour.

Mr Key took 26 people with him to Jakarta for three days selling our education system, geo-thermal energy skills, dairy products and meat.  The team rightly trumpeted the quality goods and services we can supply to a nation with a population 60 times larger than ours.

Our schools and universities can offer world-class education that will help Indonesia advance while our engineering know-how and hard-won disaster responses can help save lives and property in a nation prone to natural disasters.

Not on the agenda of the Jakarta meetings was any analysis of labour conditions in the South Pacific.

International long-term relationships have to be based on more than selling cheddar and chicken wings.  We’ve offered a few post-grad scholarships and working holiday visas, but that’s about all - unless there’s a swag of secret goodies yet to be announced.

Much is said about developing people-to-people relationships, but little is done.  We’ve long focused on China and India, overflying the archipelago while heading for Beijing and Delhi.

We know next to nothing about the world’s largest Muslim country. We don’t teach Indonesian in our schools; most Indonesian experts are in Australian universities. 

If we don’t build our cultural knowledge and language abilities we’ll never be able to understand how Indonesians think and behave, whether we’re doing business or politics.

Through its values, history, religion and outlook the Republic is robustly independent, growing in importance and unlike any other nation.  It’s not an add-on to our other trading partners in the region. 

Not surprisingly there’s been some cynicism in Indonesia about Mr Key padding behind British PM David Cameron on another quickie sales trip.  The West is showing interest now because the Indonesian economy is racing ahead and a cashed-up middle class is developing a taste for our goods 


 

(Cartoon:  The NZ Herald) 

Like ‘old mates’ appearing after a Lotto win, we want to know Indonesians only when their wallets are full.  That’s no foundation for a lasting relationship.

Apart from our natural beauty and pure products we’re famous in Indonesia for being the world’s least corrupt nation and genuine about human rights.

That’s why Mr Key reportedly spoke about West Papua with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.  Although the military-dominated province is off-limits to foreign journalists there have been enough horror stories of extra-judicial killings and torture by the army to justify international concern.

Shouldn’t the same concerns be applied to the way we allow Indonesians – and other crews of foreign charter vessels – to be treated in the ships that work off our coast?

A letter from the widows read to the inquest spoke of “the heart-wrenching loss of our loved ones, yet we still do not know what happened to cause their demise.”

Should the two leaders ever meet again Mr Key can tell Mr Yudhoyono why the fishermen died and how human rights abuses in NZ’s seas are being handled.

Duncan Graham is a Wellington-based journalist writing on Indonesian issues.

(First published in The NZ Herald 25 April 2012)