McCully: ‘We’ve got to lift the intensity of our effort in the Pacific’

New Zealand’s opposition foreign affairs spokesperson Murray McCully says a National Party government will further ramp up the country’s focus on the Pacific, address barriers to trade, and consider extending the regional seasonal employment scheme should they win the elections.
New Zealand goes to the polls on November 8.
McCully told ISLANDS BUSINESS his party “saw the need for a much higher level of engagement with the Pacific nations.”
“We believe that if you apply any kind of objective standard of measure to what we [New Zealand] have achieved, then it’s just not good enough—however generous we’ve been, however hard we’ve worked in the Pacific. We’ve got to lift the intensity of our effort.”
McCully said that New Zealand must address its massive trade imbalance with the islands.
“The trade figures are not figures that should give us any pride whatsoever. And I think we have to ask ourselves some very difficult questions indeed about the focus of some of the aid and support delivered, whether we can do a lot better at providing infrastructure that is going to make it possible for smaller countries to trade more profitably with us, or looking carefully at some of the barriers to trade.
“If you don’t provide a basis for a substantial improvement in self-sufficiency and don’t provide a vehicle for increased trade back to New Zealand, then I think we’re not working toward a long-term, sustainable solution.”
McCully said his party had endorsed the government’s Pacific aid commitments for the next few years.
But he said the National Party would gear New Zealand’s aid even further towards the Pacific.
“There should be more focus on the Pacific, compared to other parts of the world,” McCully said.
“If you look at the numbers at the moment, about 35 percent of our bilateral aid [goes to the Pacific] and up to 50 percent if you throw in funding of a regional focus. We think we need to lift the focus.”
McCully said the National would also seek greater value for money and accountability in aid programmes.
He also indicated the party might ramp up the regional seasonal employment scheme which enables Pacific Islanders to work in New Zealand in areas of labour shortages.
His comments followed the release of the National’s immigration policy, which proposed a temporary work visa of upto six months for any visitor with a guaranteed seasonal job offer.
“We have an open mind about it. We’re very mindful of the fact that the intended beneficiaries, the smaller islands nations that receive the remittances, are doing something they’re enthusiastic about, ad it’s also something that tends to relieve pressure in the labour market.”

The New Zealand election
For more than a year, Nationals have held a lead over Labour of 10 to 15 percentage points.
The two latest polls, commissioned by the nation’s largest newspaper and broadcaster, have the National Party at more than 50 percent of party support, compared to Labour’s at about 35 percent.
Winston Peters’ New Zealand First Party registered around three percent.
New Zealand has a multiparty system of government, in which several parties must constitute a majority of seats in the 120-member House.
Under MMP, neither of the major political parties have ever scored more than 50 percent of the vote. National’s leader John Key has said he expects the party’s poll lead to erode slightly.
In 2008, Prime Minister Helen Clark is aiming for an historic fourth consecutive term in power.
She said her campaign would be about trust.
Key has presented himself as a moderate, pragmatic leader. He said his campaign would not be obsessed with the politics of the past—a reference to the domestic political battles of the 1980s on which Clark and her allies cut their teeth.
Commentators regard Key as a leader who is positive and fresh-faced.
Key’s colleagues speak positively of his business experience and his rise from a tough childhood in a state house to a multi-million dollar fortune.
But multi-party government is also about partnerships. Key is barring Peters from any government he might form come November. He also accused him of being unfit for office.
So Key is left with only one substantial coalition partner: New Zealand’s indigenous Maori Party. That party is expected to win at least five of the seven indigenous Maori seats.
But Clark is courting that party as well. —By Duncan Wilson

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Visioning a Pacific future

In the early 90’s, Pacific expert and renowned scholar Professor Ron Crocombe told an orientation workshop for Cook Islands scholarship students that the key skills they would need to acquire along with their degrees would include an ability to manage change and a knack for visioning the future.
Fast forward almost two decades, where the skills of change management and visionary innovation are as necessary to development work as planning and funding—although apparently, far more difficult to find.
That elusive duo of qualities gets a timely hinting at in a definitive Pacific capacity development study completed this year by the Asian Development Bank.
In ‘Which Pacific Future?’ ADB economist Stephen Pollard worked extensively with the alphabet list of organisations and Pacific experts linked to aid and development work in the region.
The study gleans examples of successes and failures towards a new ADB profile wanting to beef up effectiveness for its $65 million annual spend in this part of the world.
The findings vindicate what many NGOs and some of the key Pacific organisations have been doing for decades—at its simplest level, letting Pacific communities define their own challenges and development solutions; then coming up with a process that promotes ownership and capacity for the best long-term impact.
On the face of it, the bank easily admits its delivering findings that have essentially already been ‘found’. What it doesn’t admit is that the study is an important self-help process as it negotiates what it needs to do as an institution to engage more, and engage differently, with its Pacific members.
Importantly too, it lays the issues highlighted by Professor Crocombe at the feet of political leadership, encouraging a more inclusive and realistic vision of capacity development a la Oceania.
Pollard, who led the collation, research, and reporting back of the study, noted the commonly held capacity development view of training, skilling, advising and organisational strengthening via processes and management is “totally inadequate and misleading”. Instead, he says, it’s time for political leaders to see themselves at the centre of the development jigsaw, and acknowledge the impact of what he calls political economy, on national development.
“If politicians seek to manage public sector personnel and public services, then there’s not much that donor programmes can do to try to strengthen professional public sector operations,” he says.
Promoting participatory ways for governments and donors to look at development and using a strong political core as a starting point may help to address the long-running problem of why change hasn’t happened in areas which have received decades of attention (they didn’t have the political will needed to ensure success). This has been an especially relevant trend in mainstreaming gender equality as a verb rather than a handy adjective into Pacific nations.
Says Pollard: “The governments of the Pacific have received pretty much the same advice on development reforms and development approaches, and this has been repeated for decades now. But many of these same governments have been either remarkably resilient in not taking this advice or have been unable to raise the social and political consensus or constituency for reform. Some have achieved change, but many have not. So how can we help those who do want to change for the better to build the constituency for change?”
The fact that ADB is asking the question so frankly, and renewing or beginning its engagement with agencies such as the Pacific community and others it has worked with in the past, is the refreshing half of the Capacity Development report.
Still, for some development workers; a healthy skepticism given the bank’s record of ad-hoc regional engagement is behind their wait-and-see attitude.
The ADB report and the moves to grow visibility in the region are a measure of its willingness to change. On the other hand, governments have had to deal with their own budget and donor mindsets and make some sea-changes as well. Understanding the Paris Declaration and how harmonising aid works in theory is all very well but enacting it across the islands’ political systems is where the fun starts.
It only needs one leader who fails to appreciate the differences between budgeting for an activity versus costing for an output; and the ‘core’ weakens. Add to that the penchant for MPs once they take on ministerial portfolios to better the development of their parliamentary constituency rather than their national constituency and the challenges are multiplied.
Development economist Vaine Wichman describes that process of shifting mindsets and harmonising aid, to singing in tune.
“Harmonising aid entails developing a level of trust between stakeholders involved in the process,” she says. And hitting the right notes will take some time. The ADB is a big institution, and change won’t happen overnight.
Which makes it all the more imperative that the bank, when it finally becomes more Pacific in its approach, gets it right. But whether or not the ADB will take on suggested strategies to include civil society consultations through an ‘Eyes on the Bank’ advisory or sounding board setup; given its focus on strengthening state operations, remains to be seen.
The need for the bank to look within its own internal processes is also seeing it follow up in external ways, expanding the Pacific presence from the Sydney office to Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Timor Leste, and soon to the Solomon Islands, Samoa and Tonga.
As well as increasing Pacific nationals working for the bank and recruitment pressure for experts who have actually lived and worked in the region, the bank plans to focus more strongly on helping the so-called fragile states to strengthen state operations.
It will also look more carefully at designing its technical assistance, more consultation and participation in its work, and the delivery of country strategies, something SPC in more than 50 years of regional development, has only started doing in the last five years.
Another area where SPC has been doing well is in its public information role. The ADB lacks a Pacific-led provision for this, one reason for the lack of recognition of what it has done in more than two decades of working with the Pacific.
Captured in ADB’s Pacific strategy is the essence of that cutting-edge experience in the region as a financing institution. That influence is measured not so much in dollars as in advice on policies, research, recognition and support of a healthy private sector, and supporting new approaches to regionalism in line with the Pacific Plan. Much of that, if the report recommendations are enacted, will shape a different kind of development assistance in the Pacific, one that will lessen the emphasis on projects, loans, and investments and put greater weight helping build state operations.
“We have further to go but yes, I see this leading to recognition of a different approach in the islands. The Pacific is not Asia and the Pacific needs a different kind of assistance,” says Pollard. And perhaps, as Professor Crocombe predicted, a different kind of leader as well.