The dragon in the room: Cooks v NZ v China

Later today the Cook Islands Prime Minister, Mark Brown, will be back in Rarotonga and will reveal the hitherto secret deal that he has signed with China in Harbin on Friday. Also today the Cook Islands parliament will meet and he will face a motion of no confidence put up by the Opposition. Apart from China, keenly watching these events will be New Zealand, Australia and the United States. The Cook Islanders themselves will be wondering about the fine print let alone what can be read between the lines of a deal described as a “comprehensive strategic partnership.”

Any secret deal conducted the way this has been cannot be benign – the secrecy is necessarily a circumvention of scrutiny. Speculation is the Cooks PM has taken a bribe – it would surely not be the first time Chinese chequebook diplomacy in the Pacific has been accompanied with other ones given to certain individuals and made out to cash. The former Mayor of Auckland, Len Brown, after he got into a spot of bother concerning a Chinese lady on the table of the Town Hall’s Ngati Whatua room soon thereafter flew to Hong Kong for undeclared business. He refused to say what he was doing. China pay, obviously. The former Minister, Chris Carter, after he got into a spot of bother and was demoted soon thereafter flew to Tibet (with his partner) at the invitation of the Chinese government – another China pay with added propaganda white wash. China’s cultivation of politicians is a fact – and sometimes, like the Nat’s Chinese spy school MP (Dr Jiang Yang) and Labour’s twin (Raymond Hou) in their caucus, they are simply transplanted directly. A Chinese businessman purchasing former PM John Key’s Parnell mansion for well over valuation soon after Key left office also comes to mind when we look at exit packages.

Bribery – secret commissions – are merely a subset of “influence” as far as foreign affairs goes – it’s all fair in love and war and belt and road. Which is why a few back-handers to Cook Island MPs is not an unreasonable assertion to make in these murky circumstances. Despite PM Brown’s batting away of criticisms by bland reassurances the deal was economic only with no security implications the murkiness is undeniable. It seems the basis of Winston Peters’ anger – and it is anger, not just concern, you can hear that in the agitated, exasperated tone of his voice – is a matter of trust. He doesn’t believe them, he doesn’t trust them, evidently. If it is benign and there is no security and defence issues then why not allow New Zealand to view the document? Indeed, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) would in any normal course of events have been asked for assistance in that engagement in the first place, so to be excluded deliberately, including after direct requests, is a serious breakdown in relations.

The Left have had on the whole a rather naïve response to this rift. I have heard commentators claiming New Zealand demanding to know the contents is tantamount to colonialism and I’ve heard that China is a friend to all and should be welcomed. Both critiques are lacking. The colonialism claim must be seen primarily in constitutional terms (put aside the recurrent NZ budgetary funding which plainly doesn’t have any effect on politics as this episode bears out). The Cooks were made self-governing by a 1965 Act of New Zealand which provides for the terms of “free association” and the various exchanges of letters between the respective Prime Ministers over the years refines that further. The problem arises precisely in that evolution and – in my opinion – the typically sloppy MFAT handling of it, letting it drift, indulging contradictions and allowing the grounds for a rift to exist. The NZ Governor-General – despite the lofty title declaring they are Commander-in-Chief of the “Realm of New Zealand” which includes the Cooks doesn’t even have any command there because that has been delegated (or rather ceded) to the Cook’s own “King’s Representative.” Over the last 60 years increasing trappings of statehood have been acceded to by New Zealand. The Cooks are members of several UN bodies, they have signed several treaties with other states, they have established their own diplomatic relations.

The latest set of manoeuvres by the Cooks as a well telegraphed prelude to this crisis was the trip to the White House in 2023 where the Cooks (and Niue) were officially recognised by President Biden as independent sovereign states with no reference whatsoever to New Zealand in that official statement. If MFAT had been doing their job a short explanation of the unique constitutional and historic relationship to New Zealand would have found its way into that statement – and it did not. This was a failure of MFAT and whatever clown was foreign minister in Labour (I can’t even remember who that was! – oh that’s right Nanaia Mahuta lol). The consequence of that official statement by the United States government is that they recognise the Cook Islands and Niue as having no relationship to New Zealand and therefore no necessity exists now in the US having to consult NZ. For example, the maritime demarcation between the Cooks and the US territory of Eastern Samoa was negotiated in the 1980s with NZ assisting and assenting because the US explicitly recognised the NZ relationship with the Cooks. But not so after 2023 it seems. The purpose of this 2023 US recognition was ostensibly to allow the Cooks to receive funding from the US for various fishing and maritime related aid that could not be given to a dependent entity. That was the official reason at any rate, but if we look at what has transpired with Mark Brown’s premiership we can see a different trajectory being charted.

My Official Information request for “MFAT documentation regarding the United States recognition of Cook Islands and Niue as sovereign independent states” can be found here:

It seems there was a lot of correspondence between MFAT and the US embassy in Wellington on the matter well before the 2023 recognition but it is heavily redacted and thus difficult to make out what may have been the points under discussion – but there were certainly a few points of contention judging from the to and fro. The alarming aspect of this is that publicly the NZ government made no comment on the US recognition – which is why I requested the information. From what I can ascertain MFAT kept saying we have this relationship and the US kept saying, meh.

The 2025 outreach to China is the latest leg, the 2024 passport row being another. If we put the 2023 US recognition in that scheme we have three legs of the sovereignty treble.

Once again MFAT is to blame for the passport row in my opinion. The status vis a vis NZ and the Cooks and Niue is equivalent in a great many respects to the status of the UK vis a vis the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. In the British context the UK government has no problem making Manx and Channel Island passports for those governments – they may have a different coat of arms on the cover but under citizenship it says the holder is a UK citizen. So, why then could MFAT not have offered the exact same thing to the Cooks and Niue? They should have, but instead they over-reacted and told them to f- off. My instinct tells me consistent with the general complacency of Wellington MFAT were simply too lazy to want to do this. Would MFAT risk a row, a rift, a blow up just because they are too lazy… of course! The Cooks are effectively a “free state” and so consistent with that I see no reason why they cannot have their own citizenship as well as holding New Zealand citizenship, but the above proposal should solve that dispute. However, if PM Brown is really after full sovereignty then maybe he was angling for that dual citizenship scenario in which case MFAT should have still made that offer.

You see the tensions here? The New Zealand government has agreed – or acquiesced – into allowing the US to recognise the Cooks as fully independent and yet that fully independent state has no citizenship of its own. This is not a credible situation – and something is bound to give as the contradictions cannot be bridged. It seems as Wellington will not budge on certain issues and Avarua seems unwilling to budge on pursuing a course of full independence. Now enter the Dragon.