After months of bad headlines, Chris Luxon’s trip to India seems to be reaping dividends – and not just economically, writes Catherine McGregor in today’s extract from The Bulletin.
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PM puts wins on the board
Christopher Luxon is having a good week. His trip to India began with a bang – an announcement that New Zealand and India are to restart trade talks, 10 years after the last attempt collapsed. Day two kicked off with not one but two hugs from Narendra Modi, the leader of India’s 1.4 billion people, and ended with a well-received keynote address to the Raisina Dialogue, India’s flagship geopolitical and economics conference. In between, the former Air NZ CEO took a moment to call into Mike Hosking’s Newstalk ZB show, telling Hosking he felt optimistic that growing demand would lead to direct flights between India and New Zealand before too long.
FTA a huge opportunity for NZ exporters
For New Zealand, a free trade agreement (FTA) would mean a big boost to the combined $3.14 billion in annual trade with India we currently do – which is less than a tenth of the trade generated by China. Indeed, “in many ways, India is the new China,” writes Auckland University’s Chris Ogden in The Conversation. The world’s fastest growing major economy, India is “on cusp of becoming a great power, and is being courted by all countries, big and small”. Along with the trade in goods such as wool and wood pulp, there’s a major opportunity for NZ to increase our educational exports to India, Ogden writes, especially given the drop in student numbers from China. “With the US and UK becoming more hostile to immigration, New Zealand can offer a relatively safe and tolerant alternative.”
Whither dairy?
As in 2015, the sticking point for an FTA will be dairy. Should India stand firm on its refusal to open its market to foreign milk and cheese, NZ will need to decide whether that’s reason enough to walk away from the negotiating table. Business leaders differ on whether it would be worth signing an interim, dairy-free FTA, writes Newsroom’s Laura Walter. Stephen Jacobi of the New Zealand International Business Forum says now is not the time to show the world that New Zealand would buckle on its biggest export earner. “Why would you do it right now in the middle of a global crisis for our trading interests?”
Luxon in his element
For Luxon, the India trip has been a rare good news story among a barrage of painfully negative headlines. His speech to the Raisina Dialogue was the prime minister at his best, writes The Post’s Luke Malpass, who is travelling with the delegation. “He has been in front of his people and dealing with issues in the fashion he likes to: big thematic problems and change, not down deep in the detail or dealing with questions about school lunches or his current or future deputy PM,” writes Malpass.
As for the potential FTA, simply announcing the talks “must have been a fillip for any flagging confidence”, writes Toby Manhire this morning in The Spinoff. “The global newswire headline of yesterday, ‘India and New Zealand look to bolster ties after reviving free trade talks’, was a fair bit preferable to that of a fortnight earlier: ‘New Zealand’s economic missteps hasten exodus to sunnier shores’.”
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