5AA Australia: Across The Ditch – Key’s China Visit Secures Trade Reward

In this week’s Across The Ditch, Selwyn Manning and Peter Godfrey discuss:

NZ Prime Minister’s trip to China, and, how did NZ escape Cyclone Lusi’s wrath.

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key is in China where he has met with Chinese Premier Li, where they jointly announced a duel currency trading agreement.

But it was to the Chinese consumer that John Key pitched his message yesterday, getting frontpage coverage in the China Daily newspaper, where he talked up the duel currency trading announcement and said it showed how New Zealand was “open for business”.

Key was also keen to impress on China’s parents that New Zealand dairy products are of the highest quality – despite the Fonterra contamination botulism scare in 2013.

That false alarm caused millions of dollars worth of infant dairy product to be pulled from supermarket shelves all over the world. The damage to New Zealand’s reputation was serious, especially in China.

Key admitted that fact in China yesterday and was keen to demonstrate that the New Zealand Government had taken Fonterra to task over the fiasco.

He said: “At a political level they understand the issues, what they have done and they’re comfortable with the actions we’ve taken. At a political level, that has been appropriately handled. But it’s one thing for the politicians to know that, we have to square it off with the consumers now.”

He added that in China, a culture which predominantly has a One Child policy, that one child is incredibly precious to those families. He said he takes the responsibility to supply high quality food very seriously (see the NZHerald for more).

John Key also met President Xi Jinping over night where they jointly announced a huge increase in two-way trade volumes.

President Xi Jinping and John Key said they plan to increase two way trade between New Zealand and China up to $30 billion by 2020 – that’s a significant increase above current volumes of around $18.26 billion per annum.

Two-way trade was projected to reach $20 billion by 2015, this is now expected to be a benchmark minimum.

It is also likely New Zealand’s security/defence relationship with the US was discussed. But on exiting the meeting Key said the NZ-China relationship “has never been stronger”.

Also discussed in this bulletin: The Weather… Last weekend saw New Zealand come through the threat of Tropical Cyclone Lusi relatively unscathed.

The Cyclone hovered about 50 kilometres above NZ’s North Cape for what seemed an age on Friday night, and then shuffled to the west and tracked down the length of the North Island before being downgraded to just a storm.

In Northland, some trees were uprooted, and powerlines came down. In Auckland the gale force winds brought huge swells, in the outer gulf area up to 5 metres high, and thousands went without power for quite a time on Saturday.

But generally, good ole New Zealand was spared a disaster, the weather forecasters were left explaining why, my Greyhound Jacko hibernated on his bed for about a day, and the cynics were saying ‘I told you so…”

Across The Ditch broadcasts live on 5aa Australia and webcasts on TheDailyBlog.co.nz, LiveNews.co.nz, and ForeignAffairs.co.nz.