Groser Tim: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGroser Tim: General Debate[Sitting date: 10 October 2007. Volume:642;Page:12237. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TIM GROSER (National): It would be tempting I suppose to describe the Labour Party’s reaction to the National Party’s external strategies paper as intriguing but I am afraid it would not be very accurate. The reaction we have had was exactly predicted and predictable. Rather than to understand that New Zealand foreign policy defence policy and trade policy should be guided by New Zealand interests which do not change with the flux of the electoral cycle every 3 years the last thing the Labour Partyactually wants here is an effective consensus between the two major political forces in New Zealand on key long-term external priorities and on how to pursue them.We have to ask ourselves how it is possible that the Labour Party could want to continue to draw controversy out of a large measure of consensus. Well we have actually had that demonstrated this afternoon by an earlier ludicrous attempt by Minister Goff to try to characterise the way in which we describe Iraq as a key issue facing this country. If the Labour Party really believes come the next election in approximately 12 months’ time that the New Zealand public will cast its decision about who will lead this country over an abstract debate about how we characterise the ongoing ghastly process in Iraq then I say good luck to the Labour Party. But I think the New Zealand public will be focused on the real agenda both internally and externally and fundamentally they are linked.We had a disappointment last week as a country at one World Cup. But every week there is a World Cup of an economic sort taking place around the world and New Zealand is not even qualifying. Next week 800 more New Zealanders will leave this country for Australia and 80 percent of them will be under the age of 40. We are not qualifying for that World Cup. That is the issue. That will be the decision that New Zealanders will have in their minds when they come to the crucial point in approximately 12 months’ time; not some abstract debate over false issues about how we describe the situation in Iraq.Let us examine a little more the “Labour-lite” accusation made about this paper. First of all when I was a young foreign service officer 30 years ago we used to talk about there being an effective bipartisan policy in this country on foreign policy broadly defined. I think there was such a policy but it was a fundamentally different bipartisan foreign policy from what exists today and it has taken about two to three decades to come into shape.The idea that this is a tango danced by only one player simply does not stand up to 5 minutes’ serious scrutiny. Anyone who is familiar with the history of the Labour Party on these issues knows that it is inconceivable that the Helen Clark of 20 to 25 years ago would have committed SAS troops—as she should have—to fight alongside US troops in Afghanistan. It is inconceivable. Everyone who knows a little bit about the history of Labour’s foreign policy knows that it is equally inconceivable that the Helen Clark of 20 to 25 years ago—who espoused trade policies that were the polar opposite to the trade policies she is espousing today—would be out there now with the best of them negotiating free-trade agreements with China in spite of and sitting on top of opposition from the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions. It is inconceivable.The Labour Party has made massive shifts I would argue quite correctly in response to the changed strategic environment facing this country. To pretend that this is only a one-way movement does not stand up to even elementary scrutiny.Let us look at the issue of defence. Labour’s front bench comes historically out of the left wing of the Labour Party in the 1980s which was a bunch of people who basically wanted New Zealand to adopt a non-aligned movement position on defence or even to move to neutrality—you know Sweden without the 3 percent of GDP spent on the armed forces. But I think those people have discovered—and I would argue “Thank goodness!”—to their astonishment that for foreign policy causes that they think and I agree with them are important to New Zealand such as intervention in Timor-Leste even that small country needs a highly effective military force. I think they have been astonished by their own changes. So the idea once again that this is a one-way movement does not stand up to any serious scrutiny.Let us move on to the fourth element which we did not develop in this paper because we had already addressed it in an earlier discussion paper put up by Dr Nick Smith. The fourth element is climate change.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.