Mayor's negotiating skills will be tested on trade, defence and immigration – when a country 20,000km away is the last thing on the minds of Britain's new King and Prime Minister
Phil Goff likes to tell how his first job, as a raw 16-year-old, was in a freezing works. But soon he'll be telling that to hostile Welsh sheep farmers, trying to block the ratification of the NZ-UK free trade deal.
Goff used to say how once the Queen died, New Zealanders would need to think about our own head of state. Soon he can make that point directly to King Charles III, at Buckingham Palace.
Goff was accused as foreign affairs minister of gifting senior Labour MP Jonathan Hunt the "sinecure" of the UK High Commission; now the 69-year-old is set to accept that role himself.
The peril of a long political career is that one is always haunted by one's past words and actions, and Goff's career has been longer than most. He was first elected to Parliament in 1981, aged 28. He served 32 years in total as an MP, then another six years as mayor of Auckland.
This week Goff sat down with Newsroom in his mayoral office on the 27th floor of the Auckland Council building. Neither he nor the Government is confirming his pending posting to London, but it's believed to be slowly working its way through the oft-archaic protocols of the diplomatic corps.
"I think the main issues on the high commissioner’s agenda should be keeping high visibility for New Zealand as a nation with many shared interests and values with the UK, and many people-to-people ties." – Helen Clark, former PM
His name needs the agrément of the new British administration headed by Liz Truss. It would be understandable if the piece of paper requiring her signature took some time to reach the top of the pile waiting on her new desk at No 10 Downing St.
"I can't comment on what my future might be in that respect, because that's not my statement to make," he says. "But if you look at me, do you think my mind is still active? That my body is capable?
"I've said many times over my career that the day on which I think I can't give 100 percent to a job, I'm out of it. I think that probably my days of doing 80-hour weeks are over – that's not something I want to continue doing.
"As long as I'm in this job, I'll give it everything that I've got, and I have done that. But I'll only take up a new job if I think I can do justice to it and add value to New Zealand."
"I feel terrible about this, because my family keeps saying you keep finding reasons not to retire and start to enjoy life. But I think I've built up a level of experience and skill, that I still want to contribute to my community." – Phil Goff, Auckland mayor
Avoiding confirming his career plans is a well-practised dance. In 2014, the veteran Labour MP talked about how his wife, Mary, and their three adult children would like him to return home to their 8ha farm in Ardmore, south Auckland. Mary would not be "at all" enthusiastic about a whole new political career in the town hall. "Frankly, it's not particularly the lifestyle that I want to choose and that's why I've said no, at this point, to it. When pushed I'll say I'll consider it, but I've got to say that's not my preference."
Of course, he did consider it, and he went with it, and he ran for it, and he won it, and he served six years as mayor. Now, just days from clearing his mayoral desk, he again dances around taking up the London posting.
"I feel terrible about this, because my family keeps saying you keep finding reasons not to retire and start to enjoy life," he says.
"But I think I've built up a level of experience and skill, that I still want to contribute to my community. And I'll do that, if I can do it in any other way."
That community, he acknowledges, isn't just Auckland – it's New Zealand.
'Keeping high visibility for NZ'
Phil Goff and Helen Clark entered Parliament together in 1981, in the neighbouring Auckland electorates of Roskill and Mt Albert.
While they weren't necessarily regarded as closely aligned within the Labour caucus (Goff was further to the right and led a failed leadership coup against her in 1996!) they certainly worked closely together, ultimately as Cabinet ministers in the fourth and fifth Labour governments.
Clark has some insight into what it takes to be successful in diplomacy; she was Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme from 2009 to 2017.
She believes her old colleague would do very well as high commissioner to London. "He is a hard worker, he has a capacity to relate to the widest range of people, he understands the UK political system well, and he has significant international experience as a former Foreign Affairs and Defence Minister," she tells Newsroom.
"I think the main issues on the high commissioner’s agenda should be keeping high visibility for New Zealand as a nation with many shared interests and values with the UK, and many people-to-people ties.
"There appears to be extremely little in this New Zealand trade deal to benefit British farmers. UK farm businesses face significantly higher costs of production than farmers in New Zealand, and margins are likely to tighten further in the face of rising input costs, higher energy bills and labour shortages." – Minette Batters, National Farmers Union
"The new trade agreement needs to be implemented, and over time, no doubt improved on. Keeping good access for New Zealanders to the UK as visitors, working holiday makers, students, business people, and in other categories – including via access to ancestry visas – is important."
That's on the negotiating table right now: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her former counterpart Boris Johnson signed an agreement in July to extended the visa term and raise the age caps, but there is still a lot of detail to be agreed on.
Business leaders such as Philip Wood argue that ensuring the changes in the youth mobility schemes function in both directions would really enhance the opportunities for young people moving between both countries.
Trading places
UK-born Wood is the president of the British New Zealand Business Association. He's been listening carefully to Goff's messaging over the past few months, at trade-focused functions. "I've been to events which involve the British government, and people in British business," he says.
"And Phil Goff has been there and said a few words sometimes. And he's always been a very enthusiastic supporter of the UK-New Zealand relationship. You could read too much into that – but he's been kind of gushing in his praise for the relationships."
Wood says the new high commission must, first and foremost, maximise the opportunities for New Zealand from the new free trade agreement, signed earlier this year and awaiting parliamentary ratification. It is good for New Zealand dairy exporters, and other agricultural products such as honey, onions, and kiwifruit, as well as embracing the need to promote Māori businesses in the UK.
But there's a catch: "UK farmers are obviously not keen on more competition."
Indeed, British National Farmers' Union president Minette Batters says the UK-New Zealand deal, as with the one signed early this year with Australia, has little benefit for British farmers.
"The Government is now asking British farmers to go toe-to-toe with some of the most export-oriented farmers in the world, without the serious, long-term and properly funded investment in UK agriculture that can enable us to do so; the sort of strategic investment in farming and exports that the New Zealand Government has made in recent decades."
Although there is little likelihood the UK Government will abandon the deal, there are fears in New Zealand that UK politicians with farming constituencies could slow the agreement's progress through Parliament next year. Already, there have been robust questions in a hearing in Westminster's international trade select committee.
Wood argues the way through that impasse is to further develop areas such as agritech and innovation, where the climate and farming methods are very similar, and UK and New Zealand farmers can work together.
There is also some "door opening" that can be done for NZ tech companies, he says, as the UK market is very attractive to many of them because of its economic scale, common language and similar regulatory approaches.
Wood says the new high commissioner should pursue greater collaboration in areas such as science and innovation, where the UK has very strong research and development capabilities, globally leading universities and is one of the top global tech centres. Ardern and Johnson also signed an agreement in July to commit to greater collaboration in the areas of science and innovation, but the details are still being finalised as to how that will work.
Former diplomat Stephen Jacobi worked for Goff when he was Minister for Trade. He says the high commissioner's priorities should be getting the UK-NZ free trade deal ratified and implemented – there are fears that Britain's ratification timeframe could slip further beyond Easter 2023, as Liz Truss and her minister's embark on unorthodox, dramatic and diversionary economic reforms.
That bilateral deal is a stepping stone to helping the UK accede to the 11 nation Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. China is also seeking to join the trade deal; Jacobi believes New Zealand could help the UK and China better understand how the nations can work together.
A common future
Observers such as Jacobi and Wood seem in broad agreement that Goff's previous comments about the future of the monarchy won't harm his ability to build relationships in London. "It’s up to us to determine who our head of state is – I’m sure that is the view of the UK Government, and quite probably of the King himself," says Jacobi.
Neither should the high commission play any particular broker's role with respect to New Zealand's constitutional status, Helen Clark says.
Indeed, Goff has now softened his position and concurs with Jacinda Ardern's comments: that while New Zealand may not adopt its own head of state quickly, Aotearoa will become a republic in her lifetime.
Where he may be more influential is in helping re-energise the Commonwealth of Nations, which is wider now than just British realms such as New Zealand, and even wider than the former British Empire. "The high commissioner sits on the Commonwealth’s Board of Governors," Clark says. "Life could be breathed into that connection."
Wood agrees, to an extent: "The Commonwealth really doesn't get spoken about in the UK very much. If you asked the average person in the UK to name a few Commonwealth countries, they'd run out pretty quickly.
"The UK is the sixth-largest economy in the world. It does business with India, the fifth largest economy, but not because it's part of the Commonwealth. I think the relationship between UK, Australia and New Zealand is not a Commonwealth relationship, but a relationship with history."
Wood says the UK-New Zealand relationship waned, and dropped away further when Britain entered the European Community in 1973, at the same time Asia was starting to boom again. "If the region on your doorstep is booming, it distracts you from somewhere 10,000 miles away."
But since Brexit, he says, the relationship has changed for the better. "You only have to look at the appointments the UK Government's made as high commissioners here, where they've appointed a series of younger people, people who are much more energetic in the roles. I think it's probably a message from the UK that they are looking to kind of energise the relationship. The relationship probably is better than it has been for a very long while."
