The Prime Minister’s habit of announcing policy off the cuff has seen some New Zealand diplomats start some not-entirely-diplomatic whispers.
The scuttlebutt inside both MFAT and DOC has been that John Key has now doubly-humiliated his officials with his muddled proposal to restart commercial whaling.
To recap: In January the Prime Minister was looking forward to a visit from the US Secretary of State. He blithely announced a grand new initiative to stop Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean – the details of which he’d fully reveal only once the Secretary was on the ground and our Press Gallery were paying maximum attention.
Concerned that the PM was demonstrating no real understanding of the polarised politics of whaling, officials rushed to ask Key what his proposal was. After a bit of too-ing and fro-ing the policy, apparently, Mr Key struck on was legalising limited commercial whaling. Essentially killing the endangered whales as a sop to the Japanese whaling industry might paradoxically save the whales.
Lo and behold our representative to the International Whaling Commission, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, was dispatched to Florida to make Key’s vision a reality. I can only imagine how Sir Geoffrey must have felt; a long-time champion of whale conservation, respected Chair of the IWC, and former Labour Prime Minister to boot, he now had the unenviable task of selling a pro-whaling message on behalf of Key’s National Government!
I found out about the inside story almost immediately. Our diplomats knew they were breaking basic principles of diplomacy (and they knew their negotiating partners knew it too); the NZ side was conceding to the vested commercial interests of Japan’s whaling industry without any concrete promise of reciprocal concessions whatsoever. The many Conservation NGO organisations with branches in New Zealand phoned me from Florida as the farce was unfolding.
