In a tense world, Ardern’s trip to Singapore and Japan worth it
It is hard to imagine a more bipartisan trip. As the political debate over inflation rages at home and the business lobby gears up for a war with the Government over Fair Pay Agreements, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spent the week in Singapore and Japan promoting things any National or Labour prime minister would.
There were multiple events promoting New Zealand exports to the region – most notably a surreal scene in Tokyo where huge kiwifruit mascots slowly swayed to mournful Japanese classical music.
There were multiple speeches welcoming tourists from these two countries back to our shores. And on the meaty foreign policy stuff, New Zealand’s slow journey to China-ambivalence would likely be made under a National prime minister too. Which is not to say Ardern does not deserve plaudits or that any prime minister could have pulled off this trip.
Ardern retains serious star power overseas. There were many selfie stops, a BBC World interview, and the domestic press in both countries were very interested in Ardern
Victoria University’s David Capie, the head of the Centre for Strategic Studies, said the trip seemed to be broadly successful. ‘‘A lot of it was just about . . . making those personal connections. The announcements were fine as far as they went but the biggest takeaway was just returning to face-to-face diplomacy.’’
Post-pandemic trip still featured plenty of pandemic
As she touched down in Singapore on Monday afternoon, Ardern and her entire entourage immediately had to perform a Covid-19 test.
This test was not required to enter Singapore – she had already done a test for that before boarding the plane – but to be able to enter Japan. By the end of the trip, Ardern had four required tests, as well as daily rapid antigen tests. She got out unscathed and it is clear that for both the politicians and the businesspeople on the trip, getting back face-to-face was pretty important.
Singapore a bit of a bore
In a city-state awash with beautiful views of skyscrapers and jungles, many of the events in Singapore were in corporate function rooms that might as well have been in Auckland. And the content was not much better: The first event of the trip was a roundtable on disruption and sustainability with a Q+A session where no-one wanted to ask a question until Ardern herself stepped in to break the silence.
Her bilateral meeting with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong did not offer the travelling journalists much policy content to feast on. We are already close countries with a recently upgraded free trade deal, so there was little to add to the relationship other than a vague ‘‘pillar’’ about collaborating on climate change. The memorandum of understanding on sustainable aviation is unlikely to deliver a green way to make that visit any time soon but it is worth trying.
Making sure Tokyo does not drift
New Zealand has a long relationship with Japan that has ebbed and flowed.
In the past few years, New Zealand’s position on China has slowly hardened away from the dovish position that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) held in the earlier 2010s.
We are not in the hard-line rhetorical position that Australia and the United States are but we are repositioning a bit, with both politicians and business people keen to make sure we are not quite so economically reliant on a country that is not a democracy and is increasingly assertive in our neighbourhood.
The relationship with Japan has been stepped up as New Zealand has repositioned on China.
The Trans-Pacific Trade Pact (TPP) was a conscious decision to rebalance that economic reliance on China towards the US but the domestic opposition to the TPP in the US means it ended up making New Zealand and Japan closer. This slowly improving relationship will be reenergised by trips like this, Capie said.
Ardern helped open the $750 million kiwifruit season at an utterly Japanese event, organised by Kiwi company Zespri. As sombre chamber music played Zespri’s huge and very cute mascots swayed in unison, in a delightful scene.
Later in the day Ardern piggy-backed on to a Toyota announcement about hydrogen cars in Auckland and got to hit open a barrel of sake several times for the local cameras. But these colourful scenes belied a much more serious political meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, on Thursday night.
Unlike in Singapore, Ardern emerged with a concrete bit of policy – an agreement to share classified intelligence information with each other, all the way up to ‘‘top secret’’.
The pair’s joint statement also mentioned continuing military cooperation, commitments to the rulesbased order, and criticisms of China, both directly and indirectly.
This win comes ahead of what will be a very busy May for New Zealand’s foreign policy. Ardern is off to the US in late May and her visit will come soon after US President Joe Biden visits Japan, where he is likely to lay out the new ‘‘IndoPacific Economic Framework’’ the US has been talking up as a replacement for its involvement in TPP. Some crucial decisions about where New Zealand sits between the two superpowers of the US and China will likely be made.
None of these wins or decisions will bring Ardern much political juice back home. These are relationships that change at a glacial pace, with tiny wins along the way that the public pay little attention to. But that does not mean these trips are not worth it. This one certainly was.