Diplomatic Career – Richard (Dick) Grant

Joyce Barry: Welcome everyone. [I] had great pleasure in asking Dick along tonight, and he’s got a very small CV, [curriculum vitae] so I am going to run through it ‘cause it will give you a background. He grew up in Havelock North when there was fifteen hundred people; he graduated from Victoria University, received his Doctorate from the Université of Clermont-Ferrand, in mid France, I think, is it Dick? He became a visiting scholar at the John Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; he was the 204 [2004] visiting fellow at Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. He’s had a distinguished diplomatic career over forty years, working for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Trade in the Pacific, Europe, Australia and Asia; former US Ambassador in Bonn and Paris, and a former High Commissioner in London and Singapore. He represented New Zealand at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. [OECD] After leaving the foreign service he was Executive Director of the Asia-New Zealand Foundation for four years, and subsequently, Chairman of the Arts Council of New Zealand for five years. We’re very lucky to have him locally now as he is also the convenor of the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, and for those that are signed up to that organisation Dick organises these wonderful speakers. So I can tell you … isn’t it a pleasure having him? And it’s over to you, Dick, and thank you so much for agreeing to talk. [Applause] Dick Grant: So I recognise a number of people in the audience, and I’m grateful to those that I do recognise for coming, because they’ve probably heard some of this before; they’re subjecting themselves to further indoctrination by coming tonight.

Thank you for asking me to speak to you, and as I understand it the purpose of my presentation is to give some idea of how a local boy ended up representing his country around the world. Before I start, can I just get an idea from those of you who are present – could you raise your hand if you went to primary school in Havelock North? [Cough] About five of us. If you went to primary school in Hastings? A few more. And if you went to primary school elsewhere in Hawke’s Bay? Okay, so you can see from that, roughly about five or six went to primary school in Havelock North; about ten or twelve went to primary school in Hastings; and another ten or so went to primary school in Hawke’s Bay. You can see how populations move, and when you ask somebody like me to speak about my professional life and where I’ve been, you need to reflect on your own experience and realise that you too have lived a lot of different lives in a lot of different places, and you bring that experience with you when you get to the age where – looking round, most of us have [??]. [Chuckles]

But I want to start with some very high level ideas, because as the introduction said, I spent forty years of my life as a New Zealand diplomat, and I just want to make sure that within the framework that I’m going to talk about you have some corner posts, so that you know more or less what I am discussing.

So foreign policy, which is the thing that diplomats love to talk about, is really about protecting the security and the economic well-being of a country as it deals with the outside world. Foreign affairs to a person of my profession, is the outside world. And diplomacy and what diplomats do is the means by which governments manage their relations with the outside world and with other governments. So there are frameworks for international relations, and they are determined by governments, and those governments make decisions based on what they perceive to be the national interest. And their national interest on the left hand may not be the national interest of the country on the right hand. In the middle you have diplomats.

The second point I want to make is that small countries are always put upon in international affairs. They do not fake the running. This doesn’t mean that they are always reacting to events; a good foreign policy should in some ways anticipate what is going to happen and allow governments to make some decisions about policies without doing it on the hoof. But by and large, big countries determine what happens and small countries lump it. And that might sound quite crude, but history shows that it’s the best way to bet.

The United Nations [UN] currently counts a hundred and ninety-three member states, and depending on how you define ‘small’, probably about sixty percent of that membership is small in what foreign policy people call ‘small states’. Now that can range from a small country like the UAE [United Arab Emirates] … Dubai … which is enormously wealthy, to Kiribati, the island state in central Polynesia which has the second largest economic zone in the world. So Kiribati with a hundred and twenty thousand people is a small state; it’s probably got a budget about a thousand to that of the UAE. New Zealand has always regarded itself as a small state, and small states face more uncertainty than other states. It’s the nature of the beast – as I said, big countries determine; small countries lump it.

I remember Harold McMillan, the British Prime Minister of many decades ago, when he was asked by a journalist about the difficulty of making British foreign policy, responded, “Events, dear boy, events”. And it is the unforeseen and the unpredictable, and the thing that happens that makes foreign policy an art rather than a science. I mean, if you had thought in the middle of January last year that the fact that a Chinese suffering a respiratory disease in a city you’d never heard of in the centre of China, would you have realised then that it was going to turn into the greatest pandemic the world has seen since 1918? No, you wouldn’t have, and as we know, most governments didn’t either. So from the New Zealand perspective we’re a small country a long way from the rest of the world, and the world is a very competitive place. John Mulgan, one of our greatest writers, said, “New Zealanders spend their lives wanting to set out across the wide oceans that surround them in order to find the rest of the world”. Very true! So why did I, on leaving school and going to university, choose a career path that took me all over the world? Well a part of it was an ability to learn languages; a part of it was parental guidance; and part – and this is a very major part – was curiosity about the outside world. You have to be curious to be a diplomat; you have to try and see why states and governments and countries and people act the way they do. And that requires a certain amount of application.

At the time I left university there were very few options for a young New Zealander that allowed any sort of international career. Only a handful of New Zealand [coughing] businesses had offices overseas – I mean the Meat Board, the Dairy Board; Air New Zealand had an office in the United States; one or two of the banks, the South British Insurance Company had an [cough] office in Hong Kong, but you didn’t go into a business world expecting to go overseas. And OE, [overseas experience] which I’m sure all of you have done, was a rite of passage that involved at that time, about two years away working in a pub or cafe or restaurant somewhere in the UK [United Kingdom] for three months; going down to the Strand, buying a Kontiki bus and spending three months in Europe; going back and doing some more job[s] or sharing, and then coming back down to the Strand and buying another Kontiki bus and then doing another trip. You didn’t go overseas really to make your living – I mean, there are obvious exceptions to that.

So the Foreign Service loomed very large in my life, and in the international diplomatic world New Zealand has a reputation for producing competent diplomats who can be trusted and who know their stuff. So that was an attraction; you weren’t becoming … I don’t know what, but you know, there are some unattractive careers out there; this one looked rather good. And if you look at some of the international indices you can get an idea of what other people think about New Zealand, which is also very important. So in the Transparency International which does the world’s studies of corruption, New Zealand is first – it is the least corrupt country in the world. If you go to Freedom House, which is the American non-governmental organisation [NGO] which values freedom and democracy and democratic practice, New Zealand is in the top four. The other three are the Scandis [coughing] – Finland, Sweden and Norway. [When] you get a bit in the sort of touchy-feely area, there’s a thing called the World Happiness Index – started in Bhutan, may I say – but never mind, I mean it’s a reputable international measuring stick, and so New Zealand comes eighth in the World Happiness Index. And then finally, in the really touchy area there’s a thing called the Portland Soft Power Index – and I’ll talk a little bit later about soft power – and New Zealand comes seventeen out of a hundred and ninety-three countries in that Index. So it looks quite good, and this is really reassuring for our self esteem. New Zealanders like to be liked, but that is no guarantee that other governments will listen to you whatsoever. Simply because New Zealand is a nice country is not a reason for diplomatic success. So my career ran in the Foreign Ministry for forty years, and fits into a period, so that you’ve got a framework, from the middle of the Vietnam war to the signing of the China-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement, and the great financial crisis of 2007 to 2008. In 1968 when I joined the Foreign Ministry, as now, the international scene was dominated by large countries and by the geo-political realities of the post World War II era … the Cold War. You will remember probably as children, watching the National Film Unit news from the United States of American children learning to hide in the basement in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack; most of you will probably remember the Cuban missile crisis; some of you may remember the recognition of China by the United States and by New Zealand. But these were days of fairly strict international relations where your stance on international issues was determined by whose camp you were in. And some of you may even remember the Non-Aligned Movement, [NAM] that wonderful collection of countries started off by Nehru [India] and Tito [Yugoslavia], which [at] one stage [cough] had a very large vote in the United Nations, and which today is almost completely forgotten. Economic diplomacy was a distant reality, and I’ll come back to that a bit later.

At that time after the war, New Zealand was one of the forty-five original signatories of the United Nations Charter; we had signed the treaty at the end of World War II on the second day that they were open to signatures. We had a recognition factor in the world of international diplomacy; Peter Fraser had fought very hard at the San Francisco conferences to limit the veto of the great powers. And New Zealand diplomats today, particularly those who serve at the UN in New York, periodically dust off the Peter Fraser speech and go out in protest against the veto of the great powers, and told to go away and think again, and they do. [Chuckle] We were recognised as committed internationalists, and to a degree we still are today. But we were very small – our diplomatic network, the number of posts we had overseas in 1968 when I joined, was tiny. The four embassies we had in Western Europe … Brussels, Bonn, The Hague and Rome … had only opened in the 1960s because of British negotiations to join the EC. [Economic Community] Paris was the only long-standing embassy in Western Europe; there were no embassies in Beijing or Moscow; there were no embassies in Latin America; there were no embassies in the Middle East; there were no embassies in Africa, and there were no embassies at all in the South Pacific except in the case of Samoa, which was the only place where we had a diplomatic office in the entire Pacific. And in the head office when I joined the main policy work was preparing instructions for the New Zealand delegation to the annual General Assembly of the United Nations. That was where our foreign policy focus was, and we used to write these briefs for the delegation on what attitude New Zealand would have towards the breach of the customs agreement between Uruguay and Argentina if it ever came onto the floor in the UN. We had no sort of active policy engagement with the outside world beyond some very, very strict and clear issues, and young diplomats didn’t travel until they got posted.

Women couldn’t join as diplomatic officers and if they got married they had to resign. I got married overseas and I had to get permission from the Minister to get married because although I was marrying a New Zealander, I was marrying overseas. I met one foreign diplomat in my first nine months in the Foreign Ministry in Wellington. He was a Canadian … very nice guy; took me out to lunch, gave me a glass of wine, asked me questions. I gave him all the answers; he went back, probably wrote a telegram to his people in Ottawa and said, “This is what New Zealand thinks on this issue”. I shudder to think what I said. [Laughter] It was a very closeted life. And at that point – I was twenty-two – I couldn’t really tell you what diplomats did. [Coughing] As I saw it, New Zealand diplomats abroad provided information back to Wellington, [coughing] and somehow or other by some alchemy the Foreign Ministry turned that advice into advice for the government to make policy.

In those days the Foreign Ministry was on the top floor of Parliament, in the building – well really they weren’t even buildings, they were sort of huts, like Nissan huts that had been put up on the top floor of Parliament during the war to house the War Cabinet. So you went into Parliament buildings, you went up in the lift and you then went into this warren of corridors with rather sort of seedy-looking wallpaper and indistinct lighting, and into rooms which were like sort of study rooms at high school with big safes up against the wall, where you worked in groups of six as young diplomats. And the Minister of Foreign Affairs at that time was Sir Keith Holyoake; and you went up in the same lift … well, Holyoake used the same lift as you did … and one of the things that you learned on about day two was, ‘the Minister arrives for work at eight-fifteen; for God’s sake make sure you get here at eight-thirty, otherwise he’ll talk to you in the lift.’ Once I forgot this and I breezed in at eight-thirty, and there was the imposing figure of Keith Holyoake getting into the lift ahead of me, and I thought, ‘Well, do I leave the lift?’ And he said, ‘Boy, come in with me’. [Laughter]

I couldn’t have explained to you the work I was doing on the Vietnam war. I mean, the Vietnam war at this stage – this was at the end of the Lyndon Johnson presidency, before the Richard Nixon presidency – and when you read the histories today you realise they were bombing the hell out of Cambodia and Laos, and they were interdicting freight into Hanoi. I had no idea that was going on. I mean I was just sort of, you know, reading telegrams, and occasionally somebody would say, “What do you think?” And I thought, ‘Oh, it’s all very confusing’, and it was.

And then I got posted. I can see at least two people in the room who know what I’m going to talk about – in the Foreign Ministry, when you get posted it’s like being taken to the end of the diving board when you can’t swim, [chuckles] and the headmaster comes along or the head prefect comes along, and he pushes you. And it’s the Foreign Ministry’s way of deciding whether you are a foreign service officer or you’re not; whether you can swim or whether you drown. And for reasons that still escape and puzzle me, we don’t have training programmes for young diplomatic officers. A lot of the other foreign services that we admire do, but we don’t – we follow the Brits, you know, the Brits just sort of took you there and put you on the diving board and pushed you in, and you sank or you swam. And you realise as you get on a bit in life, that it’s that first cycle … your first job in head office and your first posting … that enables you to either sink or swim; to decide whether you like it or not, and probably more importantly, for your bosses to decide whether you like it or not. [Chuckles]

So when I arrived in Paris in December 1971, I realised very quickly – and this goes back to the question about small countries – I realised that one of the first things a New Zealand diplomat did was not just represent his or her country, it was to fight to get his or her country recognised. Paris was then and probably still is today one of the great diplomatic capitals of the world. [In] 1971 we had very little access to anybody who counted. The general public was not at all interested in New Zealand; the French media occasionally wrote stories of ‘Man Bites Dog’; ‘Whale Dies on Beach’; and then accompanied it with a map which showed most of the southern hemisphere with a big Australia, a big Antarctica, and a dot; and that was New Zealand. That was to help their readers remember where it was. I mean, I can remember when I went to study in France and said that I came from New Zealand, at least for the first month my room mate was under the impression I came from New Guinea. [Chuckles] French universities had no courses whatsoever on New Zealand. There was one course at the University of Toulouse on Commonwealth literature that focused mainly on Africa and Canada. Some people in the south of France where rugby was played had heard of the All Blacks. Far fewer people had heard of Katherine Mansfield although she lived and died in France.

And there were only eight hundred New Zealanders resident in the whole country, which led to events which no longer really take place; but in those days if you were a New Zealander and you registered at the Embassy – every year you wrote them a letter or you signed the [cough] Visitors’ Book – you were entitled to be invited to the National Day reception … Waitangi Day, as it is now. So just after Christmas the Embassy would look at the list and send out the invitations to the eight hundred New Zealanders who were on the list. The Ambassador would gear himself up – my first Ambassador was a very distinguished Ambassador with plenty of experience. And I can remember going to my first one and saying to my colleagues, “What’s this like?” And they said, “Well, it’s very hard to describe.” [Coughing] So receptions in Paris in the seventies started at seven o’clock at night – none of this sort of cocktail stuff; and you opened the doors and here was [were] at least half of the New Zealanders standing at the door waiting to come in. Most of them had caught trains from all over the place, and they came in. Then the next group what were called the ‘qui passent’. ‘Qui passent’ is a French word for really, a sort of a queue jumper. But there was a group of largely women who used to look up the French Foreign Ministry handbook which listed all the National Days at the back; so on the appropriate day they would dress up and stand outside the Embassy in the hope there would be a National Day and they would come in. And they would just head straight for the buffet, eat and drink, shake the Ambassadors hand and go. [Laughter]

There were also some rather interesting New Zealanders who lived in Paris. Anybody here remember the de Montfort family from Havelock North? Okay, well there’s a very famous member of that family named John [?] de Montfort who lived in Europe before the war, and stayed in Europe after the war and lived in Paris. And he claimed that he was the hereditary king of Poland. So he would turn up at the National Day with a big cape on which when you pulled it back, had a sort of a row of Polish medals. And he was always accompanied by a bevy of young women, and his sole purpose was to come to the National Day, grasp the Ambassador; have the Ambassador make representations to the French government about his claim to the throne of Poland. And having done that he would then eat, drink and go.

So National Days were really sort of … it was like a parish pub, you know, it was great. The Ambassador had a lot of experience, so the grog ran out at nine-thirty, [chuckles] and people … New Zealanders, particularly those from the provinces, were sort of looking round, opening cupboards to see [laughter] if they could find some more. But he was not put off by this at all, and at ten o’clock he turned out all the lights, [laughter] and the job of the young diplomats like me was to make sure that there were no strays left in the residence overnight, and you threw them out. Those days I think, are long since gone.

You might say ANZAC Day, but ANZAC Day was unknown really to the French in the sixties and seventies, largely because of their very unfortunate experiences in World War I and World War II. I remember going to ANZAC Day in the two towns in the north of France which have a large New Zealand memorials, Le Quesnoy and Longueval; Longueval is the memorial to fifteen hundred and sixty New Zealand war dead. Le Quesnoy is the only town captured from the Germans in World War I without any of the inhabitants losing a life, done by New Zealanders. At the first ceremony there were fifteen people present of whom five were New Zealanders, and at the second there were ten … same five New Zealanders. I went back with Helen Clark in 2006 to Le Quesnoy for ANZAC Day, and there were fifteen thousand people present. So these things which we regard as part of our heritage and we think that other people might know about and share, which might give you some connection with them, are not always the case.

And at the time there were two major issues we were dealing with France on, and the first was the consequences of British entry to the EU. [European Union] This wasn’t a public diplomatic effort, it was an intense government effort. You’ll recall that this was negotiated in the late sixties, and Britain joined the EEC [European Economic Community] in January 1973. It is, and I say this quite frequently, one of the major international economic negotiations which New Zealand has ever done, protecting our trade to the EU, and we were not part of the negotiation. People do not know or do not remember, that the negotiation was between the Brits and the Europeans about New Zealand trade. It wasn’t between New Zealand and the Europeans, it was between the Brits and Europeans. Jack Marshall used to go along and bite the Brits regularly in the ankle, until they paid attention. On the other side countries like France were desperately opposed to this trade agreement. They didn’t want New Zealand to continue to be able to provide butter and cheese and sheep meat to the UK. I mean, it wasn’t a question of entering the EU – this was all about trade with the UK. So we were doing a lot of work making sure that the French weren’t being very devious – they were pretty devious, but not being very devious about stopping that trade.

The second thing was the French presence in the South Pacific; so the French had territories … New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna.

And at that time in the early seventies, having seen the Australians, the New Zealanders and the Brits give their colonies independence, the French were desperately opposed to doing that, partly out of a deeper strategic belief that they needed a large empire still. But we were always in the bad corner, because the New Zealand government policy – didn’t matter what government it was here – was that the French should join this movement towards independence. And although most of this was centred in the Pacific itself, either in the South Pacific Commission in Noumea or at the Pacific Forum in Suva, a lot of this came back to the politics in Paris, and every now and then the French would jump up and down on us and tell us to the Hague. I can remember going to a meeting at Noumea where my chief delegate, [a] very senior diplomat at the time, suggested that we might invite French Polynesia to a meeting, ’cause French Polynesia’s policy was determined by France. And the senior French delegate got up, slammed his briefcase, turned off his microphone and walked out of the room. So it was difficult.

There were a few other things; Civil Aviation, could you fly planes; access to French universities for New Zealand students; Antarctica – always an important subject. But there wasn’t that much going on. And then all of a sudden it hit the fan. French nuclear testing changed the dynamics completely.

This happened just as I arrived in France with the election of the Kirk government. So the Kirk government did two things, you will recall; it sent frigates to the testing site in French Polynesia to protest against the tests, and it took France to the International Court of Justice to test in international law the legality of French testing in the atmosphere. And from one week to the next all of a sudden New Zealand became known to people in France. We got attention whether we liked it or not. Senior civil servants who had always up ‘til then thought that thinking about New Zealand was detrimental to their careers, suddenly had to start thinking about New Zealand ‘cause it could actually be helpful to their careers. And French Ministers who had never before [cough] seemed interested in talking to New Zealand Ministers, suddenly did want to talk to New Zealand Ministers. So we had a very interesting time.

And I wanted to say … because back here in New Zealand we tend to see this from our perspective, and you need to see it from the French … and I can remember because I interpreted for Hugh Watt, the deputy Prime Minister, when he came to Paris in April 1973 at the request of Norman Kirk to ask President Pompidou to stop nuclear testing in the Pacific. There was a very strong wave of anti-nuclear sentiment in Australia and New Zealand and some of the other countries that border the Pacific and we were seen, largely as a result of Kirk’s actions, as leading the charge. And Watt went in and said to Pompidou, “This is what we want, and we didn’t think that it was necessary”, etcetera, etcetera. And Pompidou gave him a major serial lesson in French history, starting with the defeat of the Franco-Prussian war; [chuckles] the results of World War 1; the results of World War II; the uncertainty of the Cold War; the distrust of the American security guarantee; the fact that at that point they had spent something like $100million on developing a nuclear weapon; and said, you know, “Sorry, it’s not going to happen.” And it didn’t. What did happen, and New Zealand has got a large part of the responsibility for it, was that we moved the French from atmospheric testing to underground testing, and from underground testing to computer simulation. The French didn’t like it, but they did it. And we took the French to the International Court of Justice three times in the space of twenty years, and we won all three cases; and we are the only country to have a perfect slate against the French in the International Court of Justice. So in some ways the reputation of New Zealand in France changed dramatically because of the way in which we managed our diplomacy. The cocktail party circuit … everybody, when you talk about the diplomats, says, “Oh yes – tight trousers, champagne cocktails; very, very exciting.” Cocktail parties are as boring as sawdust, [chuckles] but you have to look at them as the trade fairs of the diplomatic world. This is where you go – John Buck’s here, I mean, he’s gone to international wine conferences, international wine shows – you go along because this is where your speciality is discussed and where you meet people. Cocktail parties for diplomats are like that; that’s where you go along and you might meet somebody who may become useful to you, ‘cause you’re not going to meet them out in the street. And after a while you think, ‘My God! I don’t want to do another one of these.’ I mean I did a couple in Paris that I always remember. I was the junior diplomatic officer, so I always got the worst. So I’ve done Bulgarian National Day [chuckles] which was where the KGB [Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnos (Committee for State Security) 1954-1991] tried to spawn junior Western diplomats. You’d go along and all of a sudden you’d be surrounded by a lot of heavies from the Soviet Bloc who would say, “Welcome to Paris. Listen, here’s my card, come and have lunch with me.” [Chuckles] Or, I went to go to one – which was quite funny – just after we recognised China; we recognised China in 1972. The first invitation dropped through the door from the Chinese Embassy in Paris, and it was for a party for the anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Liberation Army, [chuckles] and we didn’t have a defence attaché in Paris. And the Ambassador came in to me and he said, “Oh, we’ve recognised these people; you’d better go.” So I went off, and I mean I was the only person not in uniform. I was surrounded by Chinese in uniform, and I couldn’t understand a word that they were saying. And all that I had to do was just to give out my card religiously. I mean, you don’t want to do that [coughing] any more. So four years in Paris; and I left much more aware of what I was supposed to be doing and what New Zealand’s role in the scheme of things was. But that’s just the sort of start – it was a relatively uncomplicated period of diplomatic life. And since then, and in my time in the Ministry, the world changed considerably, and I lived through that both overseas and in Wellington. So if I just sort of run through a list of things that I saw, witnessed, participated in over the course of forty years it may give you some idea of how these things change on you.

I saw the arrival of independence in the South Pacific – Fiji and Tonga and Papua New Guinea became independent. In 1971 when I came back from studying in France and I moved back into the Foreign Ministry before posting, Holyoake convened the first meeting of the South Pacific Forum in Wellington, and Ratu Mara [Prime Minister of Fiji], Albert Henry, [Premier of the Cook Islands], Hammer DeRoburt [President] of Nauru, and Tamasese [Lealofi] [Prime Minister] of [Western] Samoa, turned up at a meeting with Bob Cotton, a Senator from Australia; their Foreign Minister was ill. And in the Maori Affairs committee room in the northern corner of Parliament Buildings the first South Pacific Forum meeting took place, which led to the establishment of that network across the Pacific. My job, I hasten to tell you, was to use the Gestetner to run off the communique. [Laughter]

I participated for several years in the negotiations of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which gave New Zealand the fourth largest economic zone in the world. And my part in that was largely fisheries management … just so happened that that’s what I got asked to do. So we led negotiations with [?] and water fishes as the Law of the Sea required us to do, and we had no data; New Zealand had no data on the fish within it’s economic zone. One of the conditions of opening negotiations with Taiwan, South Korea and the Soviet Union was [that] they had to send us their data first before we would agree to negotiate. They thought we were being devilish; we were just desperate to find out what the hell was out there so we knew what our negotiating position was. [Chuckles]

I was in Germany when Germany reunified. I went to the first session in the Reichstag in 1991; the first session in the Reichstag since the Reichstag fire in 1935; Reichstag was never used after that fire. I was on the second Lufthansa flight that flew from West Germany to East Germany because as part of the settlement [of the] Four-Power agreement after the end of World War II, German airlines were not allowed to fly between German territories. If you wanted to fly from West Germany to Berlin you had to catch Air France, British Airways or Pan Am.

I met the men who led the restoration of democracy in Eastern Europe – Lech Walesa, a famous carpenter’s apprentice from the shipyards in Gdansk – I met him when he became President; Josef Havel, the great Czech poet and folk singer when he became President of Czechoslovakia after spending three years in a communist prison; József Antall of Hungary, the man who took the decision to open the Iron Curtain between Austria and Hungary in 1989, which started the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I started the negotiations which led to the China-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement. I had no idea at the time when I started it what it was going to lead to, and I had a very unhappy first visit to Beijing to see my Chinese counterpart, the Deputy Minister of Trade and Commerce in the Chinese government, who told me I was talking a lot of nonsense and that I’d better go away and revise my views. So I went back to the Embassy and I said to the Ambassador, this is what she’d said. And he said, “Oh, hell! I know what’s happened; the Party has made the decision but haven’t told the government yet. You’ll have to come back in three months.” So I did, and we set up it all. [Set it all up]

And then at a different level I played cricket for France against Switzerland in Italy, [chuckles] and not content with that I also played cricket for [cough] Austria against Hungary. [Chuckles]

I attended Evensong in Westminster Abbey on 6th February, our National Day, where every year the Dean holds a Waitangi Day Service. It’s the only church in the world where Evensong has been held every night for over a thousand years. Next time you’re in London when covid allows you to, walk into the nave of St Paul’s Cathedral, and on the right hand side of the nave you will find the New Zealand the Australian and the Canadian flag[s], hanging there according to the plaque, in perpetuity.

So you see some interesting things, and you see some emotional things, and you see sort of business and diplomacy. I met thousands and thousands of people from all walks of life, to whom in most cases, New Zealand was some exotic place of whom [which] they’d heard tell. And I was the first New Zealander that they met, and on that judgment of me as a New Zealander they formed their view of New Zealand. And I met many New Zealanders who were involved in, I suppose, finding the rest of the world.

Diplomacy is, as I said before – it’s an art, it’s not a science. Experience brings greater knowledge. You need curiosity beyond anything else; why is the world laid out this way? And what does that mean for New Zealand and New Zealanders? It’s not an easy life, the posting cycle is always constant. You can spend your life divided between Wellington and overseas. It can be difficult for families having to adjust every three or four years. When you’re overseas you’re never off duty, and of that the forty years that I spent in the Foreign Ministry, I had twenty-eight overseas, which is a fairly long haul.

I just want to finish with just three observations about the world today, because this is what the New Zealand diplomat of today is dealing with.

First is the rise of global economic and interdependence, and the rise in global trade and global economic lows – we’ve never seen anything like this in our life before, and it is just so transformative in the way the world operates.

The second is the collapse of the Cold War and the rise of China. You’re looking at a totally different geo-political landscape. We know that China is huge; we thought at one stage – up until 1989 – we thought that Russia was huge and threatening. Is China threatening? Or is China just huge, and being restored to the place that it had in the world in the seventeenth century? And we’re still not sure really where we’re headed. We don’t know what the next ten years are going to bring, and we don’t have power. One of the things that you learn, and I learned it first off in Paris when we were talking about French nuclear testing, is power brings different characteristics to international affairs and negotiations. If you have an American Ambassador who says to you, “If you don’t do this we’re going to cut you off at the knees”, that’s something to worry about. If you have a New Zealand Ambassador who says to you, “If you don’t do this we’re going to cut you off at the knees’, you’d probably laugh, because we don’t have hard power. We have soft power. As I said before, people rather like New Zealand and the art of New Zealand diplomacy is to persuade other people to do something that benefits New Zealand, and convincing them that it benefits them as well.

And then finally, the technological revolution; and again, this is something that … I don’t know where it’ll end. You today have all those devices, all that network; if Facebook was a country it would be the size of the population of China and India combined. When I was at Oxford I did a study on this, so this is nearly eighteen years ago; and at that stage I [coughing, inaudible] which is one of the main intermediaries on the internet, which is the [??]. It was carrying sixteen billion email messages a day – that’s twenty years ago. Other people play foreign policy games today, but it’s not just a diplomat in a government; it’s anybody with a device who sends a message. I mean, how many of you think that US foreign policy is made by the US government? Or that in his day it was made by President Trump with a tweet? I mean, these are circumstances that change so much of international life, and one of the big worries for countries … western democracies like ours … is if the Americans can elect a President Trump once, can they elect a President Trump twice?

But just to let you know that I can remember what your life is like, when I first went to Paris we used to get telegrams … diplomatic telegrams. You’ve read the stuff, you know what it is. And they literally were telegrams. So in the morning the Registrar used to go into the post office on the corner of the Place Victor Hugo, which was about a hundred yards from the Embassy, and she would get given a sheaf of telegrams in envelopes, you know, like we used to get telegrams when Mum sent you happy birthday wishes, or whatever. And she would take them to the Embassy, and there they were, spaghetti tape stuck on pieces of paper, and the first five letters were the code of the day. So she would give them to the communications clerk who would go into a little back room and sit in front of a machine that looked like a cross between a Singer sewing machine and a typewriter, with a sort of rotating drum. And she would sit there and she’d click the first five letters in and the dials would rotate. Then she would copy type the rest of the message, copying the characters from the message, and out the far side of the machine came a decrypted message. So she would then pick out this long tape and cut it into strips; she’d stick it on a piece of A4 paper and by about midday she’d go to the Ambassador [chuckle] and say, “Here are today’s telegrams.” [Chuckles, coughing] And that, you know, that was your moment; and occasionally there would be one which said at the end, “Grateful reaction today.” And you know, it might be something like – “What do the French think about [?] going into the UK?” You got to tell us. You had to ring up somebody and go and see them, and get the answer and come back, and then the reverse process took place. The poor woman would go back in and set her dials to her code of the day, and type our the message, you know, ‘Your so-and-so, the Ambassador today met the Deputy Minister of Agriculture’; and that’d all be typed out, and then she’d cut it into strips, put it on piece of paper, give it to the Registrar and the Registrar would go into the post office on the corner [chuckles] before it closed at seven o’clock at night, hand over the telegrams. And that was foreign policy. Thank you very much. [Applause and laughter]

Dick, you’ve taken us around the world, [we’re] all going to be somewhere else tonight as we try and sleep. That was wonderful, a wonderful summary of a very extensive life.

Question: Dick, do you think the French got their revenge on that process you described over the ‘Rainbow Warrior’, and subsequent events in the Pacific? Dick: I spent two years of my professional life doing nothing but the ‘Rainbow Warrior’. The guy who trained the divers who put the bomb on the side of the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ is a friend of mine, and I send him Christmas cards every year. The guy who paid their bills [coughing] for the twenty-four person French security team who came to New Zealand was a guy I worked with extensively in New Caledonia. The man who leased the yacht that the French brought the bomb into New Zealand from Noumea on, I knew him – I used to play tennis with [him] in Noumea. It’s a very, very small world.

The ‘Rainbow Warrior’ if you really want the short of it – it’s not so much revenge, as sheer stupidity. The French were at a stage in their nuclear testing programme where they were trying to make the shift into miniaturisation of nuclear weapons, and the tests in 1985, which was when the ‘Rainbow Warrior’ was, were a vital step in enabling them to move to miniaturisation of nuclear weapons. So they were under tremendous pressure in Paris to get this campaign done; they’d already said they were going to stop testing and they were going to move to lab simulation. And if they’d come to Australia and New Zealand and said, “This is the last time we’re going to do this”, and you know, “you don’t like it, but …”, [coughing, inaudible] I guess there would’ve been a different outcome. But instead, they panicked in Paris; they went to the Secret Service and said, “You’ve got to do something to stop this.” So they launched this extraordinary campaign to stop it, and they made the absolutely very silly decision to do what they did. And it’s quite clear if you look at the history, that this was something that President Mitterand himself authorised. He never admitted it, but there is sufficient written evidence including from the Head of the French Secret Service, to say that he did it. And as you know, he told only his Defence Minister and he didn’t tell his Prime Minister, and it all fell apart. I mean, the case never got to Court in New Zealand because the two people pleaded guilty, but if it had gone to Court the French would’ve been the laughing stock of the Western world.

I mean it was an unbelievable cock-up, and they left footprints everywhere. I’ll just give you a couple of examples – the two Swiss tourists, [Alain] Mafart and [Dominique] Prieur who were arrested in Auckland, had Swiss passports. And the New Zealand police as a matter of routine, not out of any suspicion, through Interpol checked with the Swiss that these passports were belonging to the people they said they were. And the Swiss came back overnight and said, “Those are false passports.” So that was you know, mistake one – might’ve at least given them a decent passport. When they were arrested in Auckland and put in cells, they were given a phone – they were given the right to make a phone call, so they rang up Paris. The number they rang happened to belong to the French Minister of Defence. [Chuckles] His professional address, Such-and-such Avenue Montparnasse – we sent the Embassy round to look at it and it was a building site.

So they suffered terribly; it did nothing for their reputation, and the consequences for them were internationally pretty bad, I mean in terms of reputation. But the interesting thing to me, being on the working end of it – and I go back to what I said in my prepared remarks – not one single European country got up and condemned the French. Not one! And we took them to the GAT [Geneva Arbitration Tribunal] because they started blocking New Zealand exports to France to try and get us to release the prisoners, and we took them to the GAT and the EEC mission and other European missions said not a word. So it just shows, you know, some people react in different ways; but it was extraordinary, really. The police followed the guys in the van with the Zodiac, and how did they find them? Well, the police at that stage were trying to shut down a major marijuana growing campaign in a forest in Northland, and they’d asked the locals to note down all the number plates [chuckles] of vehicles that stopped in the car park. And one of them was the French.

Just sum up in one sentence, Brexit. [Laughter]

Dick: Well I think it’s a disaster. I can’t see anything that will [cough] come out of it that will enhance the British economy or the British body politic at all.

Thank you.

Question: Do you feel that New Zealanders can work beside Australia in trying to curb China’s influence in the Pacific?

Dick: Can I start with a disclaimer? I’m not a China expert. I think on the whole, we have seen the rise of China fairly clearly in New Zealand; I mean, within the senior bureaucracy, and politicians of all political persuasions, have seen the rise of China that’s coming. What is really difficult for us is deciding what are the means of trying to influence the rise of China, and whether it’s in the Pacific or whether it’s in Hong Kong, or whether it’s in Xinjiang, how do you get some change in policy which benefits New Zealand? Because unless you do that you’re not really [coughing] enhancing your interests. [Cough] So it’s really hard, and if you’re going to do it as New Zealand does it all the time, you’re going to have to do it with friends and allies; we can’t do it by ourselves.

Dick, I’m just going to call on Landmarks Executive member, Barbara Brookfield; she’s just going to thank you.

Barbara Brookfield: Well Dick, what an amazing career! And what a wonderful service you’ve provided to your country over forty years, twenty-eight of which were overseas – that’s so impressive. I don’t know how many locations that covers, but I imagine an awful lot. And at such an interesting time with the, you know, the geopolitical scene that’s changing; and the way that you’ve seen it change over that period is quite extraordinary, as well as the way we do business. I think of that poor little lady pasting the … oh, my goodness! And now we just dash off an email anywhere in the world, and [coughing] within an hour, probably at the most, we’ve got an answer. I think, you know, New Zealand is a soft power and a minnow on the world stage. Having had an international business myself which I’m still running, being a New Zealander in business out in many parts of the world opens so many doors because we’re seen as honest, straightforward, nice people. People like dealing with New Zealanders, and it does open doors for us which is hugely valuable. But it’s very much facilitated by people like Dick who were anthropomatic service – they make it possible for a lot of balanced relationships to be built. So – amazing career; fantastic presentation, Dick. Thank you so much for sharing your career highlights with us – I’m sure we could listen for many more hours with great interest. Thank you so much.

Dick: Thank you.

[Applause]

Thanks, Barbara.