Apec 2021: Room for collaboration

US President Bill Clinton hosts the Apec leaders' retreat in 1993. Jim Bolger is third from the right.

Here's how the story goes: Bill Clinton was leaning over the stern of the ferry taking the Apec leaders over to Blake Island in from Seattle for their retreat.

It was the very first time the Apec Leaders' meeting had been held and a big deal for a prime minister from New Zealand.

So, New Zealand Prime Minister Jim Bolger rocked up and fronted Clinton asking him how New Zealand could rebuild its relationship with the United States.

"I wandered up to him and introduced myself and said there were a few things we needed to address, and that was the beginning of how New Zealand rebuilt its relationship with the United States after the fallout over the nuclear free legislation."

"I'd never met him before and obviously he'd never met me but I took the opportunity when I saw him by himself to say what we were doing and why we were doing it.

"I also explained that we hadn't had an invitation to the White House for 12 years.

"He said words to the effect, 'Jim I haven't looked at the policy. I'm just running with what I inherited. I'll go back and review and you must come and see me at the White House'."

It was almost a decade after the Anzus fallout.

The invitation subsequently came. Bolger went to the White House and laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

"They put on a full dress court rehearsal. They did everything correctly and right.

"It was part of the symbolism of the Apec leaders' meeting. It's not only the agenda. It's leaders being able to get together and say, 'hey I've got a problem you guys are causing' and address it one on one with the leader. Which is often far more effective than addressing it somewhere through the bureaucracy."

It was the beginning of a very long thaw in the bilateral relationship.

When the Bolger Government weighed up joining Apec in 1993, it considered the forum fitted in with the New Zealand perspective of having to work collaboratively together. "Apec was in that space".

He was also at Indonesia in 1994, when the leaders met at Bogor, and announced that they had adopted "the long-term goal of free and open trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific no later than 2020".

"It was very bold declaration on trade policy, opening up and freeing trade," Bolger recalls.

At the time, he had talked about hoping to bring some of New Zealand's free markets and low protection focus into that forum.

"I would have been very supportive of the Bogor declaration when others were somewhat startled by it."

The connections New Zealand forged with Apec's Asian members gave this country additional credibility when the Government developed its strategic shift towards Asia.

"It fitted in very comfortably.

"This was the opening of New Zealanders' eyes to the reality that largest market in the world was next to us when we had focused our eyes for the first 150 years of European settlement on the far distant lands of Europe"