If the Ardern government’s flirtatious two-step with the Chinese Communist Party hasn’t got its hands dirty enough, there’s no shortage of brutal, authoritarian regimes they can roll in the mud with for a few sweet bucks. Like Saudi Arabia. They’ve got lots of money!
Joe Biden’s controversial fist-bump with Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the Saudi crown prince, may help New Zealand to forge its own new direction in the Middle East.
Biden and his predecessors might at least have the politics-of-dirty-hands excuse of strategic reality. Saudi Arabia might be a mediaevally brutal theocracy where public beheadings and stonings are the order of the day, but it’s also a stable regime that’s kinda-sorta pro-Western (if you ignore its citizens flying planes into skyscrapers now and then).
The strategic relevance of Saudi Arabia to New Zealand interests is… well, anyone’s guess.
But they do have money. Lots of money. Jacinda needs money, badly. Kindness, be buggered.
After all, New Zealand has also been trying to rekindle its own relationship with the Gulf. Foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta visited New Zealand’s lavish, $NZ60m pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on her inaugural overseas trip in November last year – and she also managed to fit in a side-trip to influential Qatar while she was in the region […]
The wealthy Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – a six-country grouping made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – is already New Zealand’s eighth biggest trading partner.
It holds the potential to become an even more significant market for New Zealand exports, especially in the key areas of meat and dairy.
Indeed, the very modest gains achieved by New Zealand for meat and dairy in its recent free trade agreement (FTA) with the European Union mean that improving trade with other key markets – such as the Middle East – is more important than ever.
In other words, the FTA, for all the Ardern government hype, is a typical dud deal with the shifty EU. So, now Ardern has to sell NZ’s soul elsewhere. A full-on BRI deal may be a bridge too far, so why not a middle-eastern theocracy? After all, National already laid the groundwork, making this a bipartisan act of unprincipled greed.
To that end, trade minister Damien O’Connor embarked on a major mission to the Gulf in March to try and restart New Zealand’s troubled free trade negotiations with the GCC.
A deal with the bloc was signed in 2009 but remains unratified from the Gulf side […]
Around the same time, the ill-fated “Saudi sheep deal” was devised by Key’s foreign minister, Murray McCully, in an unsuccessful bid to appease a prominent Saudi investor who was upset by New Zealand’s ban on exporting live sheep by sea. The deal involved New Zealand sending significant amounts of cash and air-freighted sheep, but it largely ended in embarrassment – and did not deliver the FTA that New Zealand sought.
Despite O’Connor successfully re-starting FTA negotiations, the Ardern government has been awfully low-key about dealing with Saudi Arabia. No press release, no public report. I wonder why?
Another reason for keeping a low profile domestically almost certainly relates to the sensitivities over the involvement of Saudi Arabia, the most populous country in the GCC by far and its driving force.
In addition to New Zealand’s own concerns over the Khashoggi killing in 2018, a political firestorm erupted in early 2021 when it was revealed that Air New Zealand – of which the NZ Government owns 51 per cent – had been repairing engines for the Saudi military, despite Riyadh playing a leading role in the war in Yemen.
At the time, Jacinda Ardern called the arrangement “completely wrong” and said it did not “pass New Zealand’s sniff test”.
But now Jacinda’s sniffed a pile of desperately-needed foreign cash, so she’s clearly willing to hold her nose and take the money. So much for her vaunted human rights principles.
Of course, New Zealand has considerable experience in balancing human rights and trade issues from its careful handling of the China relationship.
What some call “careful”, others might call “duplicitious”, “unscrupulous” or “sordid”.
Will Jacinda Ardern now follow Joe Biden’s lead – and give MBS a fist-bump of her own?
The Australian
When it comes to grabbing money from brutal dictators, history says she’ll metaphorically bump a whole lot more than fists. Defenders might point out that she’s not the only one doing it, but she is the one who sells herself as the Queen of Kindness.
Her actions continually give the lie to her words. There’s a word for that: hypocrite.