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This week, the New Zealand deputy prime minister and minister for foreign affairs, Winston Peters, came to Ireland to open the first ever New Zealand embassy in Ireland. We have reciprocated by opening an Irish embassy in Wellington, the New Zealand capital.
The exchange of diplomats is symptomatic of much deeper changes.
Traditionally, New Zealand hitched itself to the British star. During the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, New Zealand was among the top three richest countries in the world. It supplied Britain with cheap, high-quality food from its efficient dairy and sheep farms.
Ireland was a competitor on the British market and while there were many of Irish extraction who had made their homes and livelihoods in New Zealand, there was no question as to which was the mother country.
Ireland was serviced from the New Zealand High Commissioner’s office in Haymarket in London. While British EU entry in 1973 changed the trade dynamic, the forthcoming departure of Britain and the change of government in New Zealand has provoked a sea-change in attitude.
Ireland, in the size of its economy, has long passed out New Zealand – a much larger country but with much the same population.
Minister Peters and New Zealand now view Ireland through a different prism – as a country with similar democratic values and in favour of an open, multilateral trading system – a country nervous as big states become more inward-looking but also with an intense agricultural interest in the climate change debate and both with a need and aspiration to add value to their agricultural exports. Both countries’ milk powder provides the base for the booming international infant formula business.
Ireland is now regarded as one of New Zealand’s closest allies in Europe and it wants our insights as to how to do business in Europe.
In return, it would welcome jointly working with us in the huge developing markets of southeast Asia – New Zealand was the first to negotiate a free trade agreement with China.
It will be interesting to see how realistic such a joint approach turns out to be.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand itself, this new government is reining in the extreme free market, anti-state involvement stance of the recent administrations in the country.
Rules on foreign ownership of farms and houses have been dramatically tightened and the role of the State in fostering economic development is being fundamentally reassessed. Interesting times.
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