Editorial: A chance for Moore to prove his worth

OPINION: The appointment of Mike Moore as the next New Zealand ambassador to Washington is a calculated gamble.

The relationship with the United States is now the best it has been since New Zealand was suspended from the Anzus defence pact for banning nuclear ships from its waters in the mid-1980s.

High-level visits between the two countries are no longer an oddity. Helen Clark visited the White House twice, John Key is expected to visit in March and, but for the Haitian earthquake, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would have been here two weeks ago. Intelligence sharing has increased and barriers to participation in joint military exercises and training have been lowered.

For this, a succession of New Zealand ambassadors to Washington, including former prime minister Jim Bolger and career diplomats John Wood and Roy Ferguson, deserve credit. So too do their US counterparts in New Zealand, who have worked equally hard to decouple the nuclear disagreement from the wider relationship. And so too do the politicians who have laboured to normalise the relationship, including, somewhat surprisingly, Murray McCully's predecessor as foreign affairs minister, Winston Peters. It was Mr Peters who established a personal rapport with Ms Clinton's predecessor, Condoleezza Rice – a rapport that reportedly caused State Department officials to wonder out loud why the most powerful woman in the world was asking them to canvass the views of a minister from a tiny country at the bottom of the world.

However, despite the best efforts of politicians and diplomats, the holy grail of New Zealand diplomacy with the US still eludes this country. That holy grail is a free trade deal improving exporters' access to the world's richest economy.

It is for that reason that Mr McCully has shoulder-tapped Mr Moore for the role in Washington. Mr Moore has impeccable credentials for the position. He is a former trade minister, former prime minister and former director-general of the World Trade Organisation and he comes with an enviable range of international contacts.

But he also comes with baggage. His admirers, and they are many, point to his energy, his knowledge of the byzantine world of trade negotiations, and his willingness to champion new ideas. His detractors, and there are a fair few of them too, point to his irritability, his occasionally erratic conduct and the stream-of-consciousness utterances that earned him the sobriquet "Mad Mike". He has a rare talent for stringing together, and mixing up, unrelated facts and opinions.

Despite his subsequent elevation to the biggest job in world trade, Mr Moore never seems to have quite got over being dumped as Labour leader after the 1993 election. There has been a bitter undertone to many of his pronouncements since.

The Washington post offers him an opportunity to demonstrate once and for all his worth to his fellow countrymen.

It is to be hoped he seizes it.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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