Asia Forum: NZ Trade Strategy – Navigating Our Way Through More Turbulent International Waters
The Southeast Asia Centre of Asia-Pacific Excellence, in collaboration with Asia Forum, invites you to attend this upcoming session at Victoria University of Wellington (Pipitea Campus), featuring the guest speaker – Hon Tim Groser, Former NZ Ambassador to the US, Former Minister of Trade, and Former Minister Climate Change. The forum moderator is Gary R. Hawke, Emeritus Professor, Victoria University of Wellington and Senior Fellow, NZ Institute of Economic Research.
The in-person option for this event will be preceded and followed by refreshments and networking.
Synopsis
In recent years the world has been through global pandemic, uncertainty of geopolitics, the Russia-Ukraine war, worldwide inflation, disruption of global supply chains and the very real and growing climate catastrophes. All of these weigh heavily on the prospects for New Zealand’s trading economy. New Zealand has recently concluded free trade agreements with the UK and EU, and the UK is now a member of Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership. On 21 August 2023, New Zealand also signed the Upgrade to the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (AANZFTA). How would these economic mechanisms stack up against the macroenvironment uncertainties? Would New Zealand benefit from more of these free trade agreements? What’s next?
Keynote speaker
Hon Tim Groser has been involved with the politics of international dairy for four decades, going back to his appointment in 1985 as New Zealand chief agriculture negotiator in the last successful multilateral trade round, the Uruguay Round. As people involved in dairy know, dairy is the one area of international trade where New Zealand is not a small country.
Serving as Chair of the (now defunct) International Dairy Agreement in Geneva, he saw through the most disturbed post-war period of international dairy commerce and the stabilisation of many aspects of the global trade rules affecting world trade in dairy in 1993 at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round. He was the initiator of the TPP Agreement (why NZ is the Administrator of the Agreement, now called CPTPP after President Trump’s decision to withdraw).
As Ambassador to the WTO, Tim was Chair of the WTO Agriculture Negotiations 2003-2005 working closely with USTR Bob Zoellick and EU Commissioner Pascal Lamy. Tim was Minister of Trade 2008-2015 and then appointed Ambassador to the United States. He was also Minister of Climate Change and established the Global Research Alliance on Agriculture Emissions which now has 67 member countries. NZ and the Netherlands lead the research on dairy emissions.
Tim has worked closely with American agriculture leaders over many decades – in dairy, going back to a strong personal relationship with the late Tom Carmelo, former Chairman of DFA.
Moderator
Gary R. Hawke was Head of the School of Government and Professor of Economic History at Victoria University of Wellington. He held visiting appointments at Stanford University, All Souls’ College, Oxford, the Australian National University and a number of institutions in Japan. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Distinguished Fellow of the NZ Association of Economists and Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration of New Zealand.
He was a member of the board of the New Zealand Committee of the Pacific Economic Co-operation Council, NZPECC, 1987 -2022, and is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia. He is now Emeritus Professor, Victoria University of Wellington; and Senior Fellow, NZ Institute of Economic Research.
He has seldom found it necessary to distinguish between work and pleasure, but in addition to reading and thinking about economic and social development, especially as it has been experienced in New Zealand, he attends music concerts and looks at modern painting, engages in armchair criticism of almost anything, avoids exercise other than that associated with attending cricket matches or walking albeit now without his dog – the “only slightly hairier Duff” – and, a reluctant non-smoker, he speculates on the potential of a book exploring the parallels between the modern campaign against smoking and seventeenth century attacks on witchcraft.
