Author: Robert Ayson, Victoria University of Wellington
Visitors to New Zealand during the uneventful general election in November 2011, which returned John Key’s National Party to office, would be forgiven for thinking things were running smoothly.
This was helped by the fact that a few weeks earlier, New Zealanders gained the greatest prize they could wish for. This was not a Nobel Prize for their leading scientists; nor a temporary seat on the UN Security Council, which Mr Key’s government wants to secure; nor the competent hosting of the Pacific Islands Forum in Auckland, which came and went without much trace. Read more…
Authors: Malcolm Bosworth and Greg Cutbush, ANU Enterprise
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her Government’s ‘Trading Our Way to Prosperity’ statement (in response to the Productivity Commission’s Report on Bilateral and Regional Trade Arrangements) is commendable.
It rejected Australia’s regrettable preoccupation with preferential trade agreements (PTAs), and heeded the Productivity Commission’s advice that trade policy should be reviewed against the ‘principles of unilateralism, non-discrimination, transparency’, and ‘the grand unifying principle of trade policy as an indivisible part of overall economic reform’. Read more…
Author: Vikas Kumar, Bangalore
Threatened by geographic and demographic factors, the sovereignty of Oceania’s microstates has been precarious from their inception.
Each of these states has a small but highly diverse population spread over a very large area — their exclusive economic zones (EEZ) are comparable in size to EEZs of some of the world’s largest countries. Read more…
Author: Sandra Tarte, USP
Recent claims in the media that Australia’s foreign minister has ‘ignored’, ‘neglected’ and ‘taken his eyes off’ the Pacific islands have underscored a number of policy dilemmas facing Australian diplomacy in the region. These have been evident for some time and centre primarily around the approach to Fiji’s post-coup government, led by Commodore Voreqe (Frank) Bainimarama.
Like other western democracies, Australia imposed diplomatic, military and political sanctions on the military-led government after the December 2006 coup. Read more…
Author: Bill Kaye-Blake, NZIER
Statistics New Zealand recently announced that New Zealand posted 0.2 per cent growth in the fourth quarter of 2010, narrowly avoiding a double-dip recession.
Forecasts for 2011 are scarcely better: the IMF has lowered its forecast growth for the year to 1 per cent, while the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research (NZIER) is forecasting only 0.3 per cent growth. Read more…
Author: Mukul G. Asher, NUS, and Rahul Sen, AUT
As part of a broader objective of deeper economic integration with Asia, New Zealand embarked last year on negotiating a preferential trade agreement (PTA) with India, one of the rapidly growing emerging markets in Asia.
Three rounds of negotiations have now been completed, with the fourth round of negotiations scheduled in New Delhi this month. Read more…
Author: Deborah K. Elms, NTU
Trade officials across nine countries will meet in Singapore from 28 March 2011 for the latest round of Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.
This is the sixth time officials have met for the TPP — pitched as a ‘21st century, high-quality’ agreement — with the goal of completing the agreement by the November APEC meeting in Honolulu. Read more…
Author: Gary Hawke, NZIER
The prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand met earlier this month. Former prime minister Rudd never quite completed a visit to New Zealand. Julia Gillard was a substitute on one occasion and another was disrupted by the party coup which coincided with his last attempt.
The main tangible deliverable outcome from the summit was no more than an increase in the limit for Australian investment in New Zealand and New Zealand investment in Australia, without satisfying extra requirements for overseas investment. This is hardly a major achievement. Read more…
Author: Luke Nottage, University of Sydney
The over-sensationalising of Australia’s alleged ‘Secret Dealing on Whale Hunts’, in Australian media reports last week drawing on documents released by WikiLeaks, has been correctly criticised by Tim Stephens. Yet his contribution has engendered further public debate over whaling, including the case recently initiated by Australia against Japan (with New Zealand also intervening) before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The Japanese government appears confident about winning the case, basically because the Whaling Convention was set up to permit (sustainable) whaling. Read more…
Author: Sandra Tarte, USP, Suva
In 2010, Fiji marked 40 years of independence. Significantly, the Prime Minister, Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama, chose to celebrate the anniversary at the World Expo in Shanghai, rather than at home.
In many ways, this choice underscored the focus of Fiji’s leadership in 2010, which was to diversify and broaden international partnerships. Read more…
Author: Andrew MacIntyre, ANU
Australia continues to enjoy markedly better economic performance than most other wealthy countries. But problems are accumulating.
The 2010 federal election yielded a hamstrung, minority government. Neither of the major parties shows any real appetite for large-scale policy reform. Read more…
Author: Gary Hawke, NZIER
At home, New Zealand marked time in 2010. Public commentary remained dominated by apprehension about the international economy. The Governor of the Reserve Bank published a memoir about the very reasonable worries over what could have happened but didn’t. The financial crisis in Europe and North America, which triggered a trade crisis in Asia, ultimately had only a moderate impact in New Zealand, which was also true for much of Asia. New Zealand’s insecurity is due to investment exceeding national saving and that is domestically driven.
After 24 years of sound government accounts, government expenditure has been allowed to exceed revenue and this is expected to continue for some time. This is partly attributable to the government’s response to the global financial crisis but more much to decay of the effective expenditure control, which was one of the least-heralded but most important of New Zealand’s economic reforms in the eighties. Read more…
Author: Stephen Howes, ANU
Ever since the 1980s, Australian academics and official reports have called for Pacific Islanders to be given better access to the Australian labour market. To its credit, the Rudd Government introduced the Seasonal Worker Pilot Scheme in August 2008. The scheme allows Pacific Islanders to engage in farm work in Australia for up to seven months a year. Unfortunately, the scheme has never taken off, with less than 100 Islanders participating in the two years since its launch. Theories for its failure abound ranging from excessive red-tape to the prolonged drought.
In stark contrast to Australia, New Zealand has always offered preferential migration treatment to its Pacific neighbours. Read more…
Author: Gary Hawke, NZIER
For domestic consumption, the New Zealand government frequently trumpets the success of the China-New Zealand FTA in terms of short-run economic gain. So Foreign Minister McCully told the Foreign Policy School in Dunedin on 25 June 2010, ‘During the darkest economic days of the global downturn, but in the early stages of the implementation of New Zealand’s Free Trade Agreement with China, our exports to China for calendar 2009 increased by a massive 43 per cent.’
Prime Minister John Key told his National Party conference last weekend, ‘At the heart of our trade push are living standards and jobs.’ Read more…
Author: Robert Ayson, Victoria University, Wellington
New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key recently returned from a major visit to three of East Asia’s most important countries. He visited China, with whom New Zealand already has a Free Trade Agreement, the Republic of Korea, with whom Wellington is seeking to conclude FTA negotiations, and Vietnam, another growing Asian economy which New Zealand would like to see become a full partner in the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
It is no surprise that Prime Minister Key’s message to the New Zealand public was in tune with his own earlier career in foreign exchange markets: the big issue is positioning New Zealand so that it is best able to participate in Asia’s economic expansion. Read more…
