| Politics: DON’T CENSURE THE ISLANDS --PETERS |
NZ aid to continue without strings
Duncan Wilson
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Winston Peters (centre)... at the Elections Office in Suva, Fiji.
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Japanese aid to the Pacific, boosted in May to NZ$660 million over the next three years, is thought to have played a major part in several islands countries’ sudden support for a pro-whaling resolution at the IWC in late June.
New Zealand’s Conservation Minister, Chris Carter, said several Pacific countries broke assurances they would not support a return to commercial whaling.
The resolution labelled the 20-year moratorium “no longer necessary”, and called for the commission to resume its regulatory role.
Carter described the move as “disturbing” and told AP news agency that Japan’s victory was the result of “a long, expensive campaign”.
Japan reportedly spent NZ$400 million on aid to countries that joined the commission, including a reported NZ$22 million over two years to Tuvalu.
Prime Minister Helen Clark also said the government would express its sadness to those countries who voted with Japan, including the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Nauru the Marshall Islands, and Palau.
But Peters, who heads the country’s NZ$160 million Pacific aid programme, said New Zealand will “respect Pacific Islands countries as sovereign nations who make their own policy decisions.”
“Our preference is to talk with countries to understand their perspectives, rather than simply telling them they are wrong,” he said.
The IWC vote caused outrage in whale-loving New Zealand.
New Zealand’s opposition spokesperson on Foreign Affairs, Murray McCully, accused the government of being “naïve” in refusing to link New Zealand aid to voting at the IWC.
He said New Zealand was entitled to expect better standards of governance from its “so-called special relationships” with the Pacific.
But Peters, who has signalled he wants New Zealand to concentrate more of its aid in the Pacific, said it was dangerous and hypocritical to censure those countries or tie aid to political agreements.
“Making aid conditional on countries complying with the political whim of donor countries is the exact thing we have been seeking to fight against.”
It would also harm Pacific people and spark unaffordable chequebook diplomacy, he said. “If we were to withdraw our aid to Pacific nations because of their position on whaling, we would give the whaling nations even more leverage in the Pacific.
“There would be some countries that would clap their hands all the way to the bank if we were to depart from the scene,” Foreign Minister Peters said.
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