A few weeks ago, WikiLeaks published a leaked email from a US diplomat in the Solomon Islands. It said that if RAMSI (the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands) pulled out of the Solomons, the country would erupt into chaos within a week. Given that stability and security are primary concerns for New Zealand in the Pacific region, this would suggest that something’s a bit off in our foreign affairs program. It might even suggest that the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been spent in the Solomons over the last decade have been largely wasted. So what the heck is going on with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and why are they failing so miserably?
The New Zealand government struggles to fulfil its foreign affairs objectives in the Pacific because they tend to focus too intently on their narrow objectives, so intently that they fail to fully appreciate the extent to which their concerns are dependent on wider social development; their enlightened self-interest just isn’t enlightened enough. Our government’s main foreign affairs objectives in the Pacific are, generally speaking, a) to facilitate economic opportunities for New Zealand companies, and b) to ensure regional stability so as to not threaten New Zealand investments in the Pacific and investor confidence in the home economy. They do recognise that there is a link between social development in the Pacific and these economic and security concerns, but social development is very much seen to be peripheral. And I believe there are several reasons for this.
In one sense, this represents an unintelligent reaction on the part of the New Zealand government to the assumption that well developed civil societies in the Pacific don’t benefit, or might even threaten New Zealand’s interests in the Pacific. To put this another way, our senior foreign diplomats, MFAT officials, NZAid bureaucrats and so-on, either don’t see any benefit in Pacific countries having well organised village communities with small-scale commerce and informal but effective and autonomous local governance. Indeed they may even see this as a threat – well-organised and long-sited communities might not agree to host New Zealand mining companies on their land for example, preferring to maintain food security or do the mining themselves. In this sense, it is also a symptom of short-sighted orientation of MFAT whereby the long-term trade and security benefits are subordinated to immediate trade opportunities. This brings us to us to my second explanation of MFAT’s failure, a narrow interpretation of what exactly New Zealand’s interests in the Pacific are.
According to the MFAT position on New Zealand’s objectives in the Pacific – and I’m referring to their position as implied by their actions, not what is voiced by their public relations officials – our interests are: a) current and near-future trade opportunities for New Zealand firms, and b) current and near-future threats to regional stability that might impact on investments by NZ firms in the Pacific or even investments from foreign firms in New Zealand. What is not considered valuable in this schema is social stability and effectively functioning village communities. Development in these fields would undeniably yield sustainable social and economic development from within the developing nations of the Pacific, but not enough and not soon enough to be deemed worthwhile. This is so because New Zealand’s boarders are assumed to be selectively permeable to an unrealistic extent; we cannot expect to keep Pacific migrants out of New Zealand when we decide that it suits us, nor can we expect to prevent social problems in the Pacific from penetrating New Zealand society via already established Pacific migrant communities.
Part of the reason for this is lack of realism, I believe, is a cynical assumption on the part of New Zealand’s upper-middle-class, that they will be able to shield themselves and their children from this social instability that they have effectively perpetuated. And this may well be true, in part, if they/we are able to pursue privatised social services such as private education and healthcare, and avoid contributing to state funded social services by deconstructing the remnants of the welfare state. The points at which they fail to erect barriers to social responsibility, will however, always be areas of conflict. The worrying statistics for violent crime are merely one representation of this. This is where our short-sited, unintelligently self-interested policies in the Pacific turn around and bite us in the back-side. Should we enlighten our self-interest further, or should we privatise security services, construct gated communities and aim to turn Pacific asylum seekers around at the boarder?
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