NZ relationship with India in trouble
Geoffrey Miller writes:
New Zealand’s relationship with India is not in good health.
That’s the underlying message from a rare visit to New Zealand by India’s external affairs minister, Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.
Jaishankar met with his New Zealand counterpart, Nanaia Mahuta, last Thursday – but only for an hour.
At a press conference with Mahuta in Auckland, Jaishankar was publicly critical of New Zealand’s unwillingness to renew visas for Indian students who had left New Zealand during the COVID-19 pandemic and called for ‘fairer and more sympathetic treatment’. …
Despite the usual pleasantries, there was a sense that India had lost patience with New Zealand – a sentiment that was underlined by Jaishankar’s later observation in Wellington of ‘there is a larger world out there’.
Even more troubling from New Zealand’s perspective was the extraordinary admission by Mahuta that a free trade agreement was ‘not a priority for New Zealand or India’.
Instead, Mahuta could only point to potential economic cooperation in ‘niche areas’ such as digital services and ‘green business’ – a seemingly underwhelming approach that was endorsed by Jaishankar.
It is a far cry from the bold and ambitious India strategy that was launched by New Zealand to much fanfare in February 2020, when the then foreign affairs minister Winston Peters travelled to India.
The strategy, called ‘Investing in the relationship’, listed a free trade agreement as one of the major goals. …
Trade figures demonstrate the difficulties New Zealand’s relationship with India is facing.
While New Zealand’s exports to India were approaching $NZ2 billion annually in 2017, they have since collapsed to under $NZ800 million.
The impact of COVID-19 – which stopped Indian tourists and students coming to New Zealand – explains much of this slide, but by no means all of it. The initial decline actually began in 2018.
In fact, the deterioration has been so dramatic that India now ranks only 15th place in the list of New Zealand’s biggest trading partners.
As recently as 2016, India was New Zealand’s 10th biggest trading partner.
For comparison, New Zealand now sells less to India than it does to the United Arab Emirates.
This is great analysis which I have not seen elsewhere in the media.
India is a country with 1.3 billion potential consumers and we sell less to them than the UAE!
They are expected to overtake China next year as the world’s most populous country.
To find a contrast with New Zealand’s experience, one only needs to look to Australia, which hosted Jaishankar this week.
A press conference between Jaishankar and Penny Wong, Australia’s foreign minister, seemed particularly warm.
Wong was keen to point out that she had already met her Indian counterpart some seven times since she became foreign minister in May.
And from the Indian side, there was no parallel in Canberra to the criticisms Jaishankar had expressed about New Zealand’s government while in Wellington and Auckland.
We need to fix the relationship.