Goff tries peace chat with Peters

Winston Peters flexes his handshaking muscles with a robot at an IT display in Busan. Picture / Reuters

Cabinet minister Phil Goff phoned Winston Peters in South Korea yesterday to assure him he was not out to undermine him as Foreign Minister.

Mr Goff's call came in the wake of renewed scrutiny of Mr Peter's Apec performance in Parliament, where National MPs asked Acting Foreign Minister Michael Cullen to explain a raft of Goff comments reported in the Herald.

Among the Goff comments: That he had explained to Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer that "policy from Winston will be not policies spun off the top of anybody's head but the policy of the Labour-led Government".

Ironically, Mr Goff's phone call came towards the end of a Herald interview with Mr Peters on the bilateral talks he had with a dozen Asia-Pacific foreign ministers during a four-day sojourn in Busan.

"My colleague Mr Goff has just called me to say that what you wrote in [today's] Herald was a load of inventive bullshit. It's not true," said Mr Peters.

In response to Herald comments that the remarks were on-record, Mr Peters said: "You'd better have it on tape."

The Herald does.

The Foreign Minister, clearly rattled at New Zealand media reporting of his Apec trip, also played down his meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, describing it as simply an exchange of pleasantries, not a pitch for a closer bilateral relationship as reported by the Herald.

A planned full-scale bilateral meeting between the pair had not taken place because Dr Rice's arrival in Busan was delayed by two days.

But Mr Peters did reveal that he had held a substantive discussion with Christopher Hill, the US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

"We were waiting for an event and got into a conversation and spent some time talking about things ... It was a very good discussion, I felt.

"I talked about North Korea ... quite a discussion about how he felt things were progressing and also about our role as we saw it in the Pacific with the obligations we had with our near neighbours."

Ironically, Foreign Affairs officials had repeatedly approached New Zealand journalists on Wednesday evening trying to track down a photo of Mr Peters shaking hands with Dr Rice which could be released to go with subsequent interviews on the issue.

NZPA journalist Ian Lewellyn was called three times, and other reporters in the tiny NZ media contingent were also asked to follow up with the news contacts.

The pursuit reached the point of absurdity when officials who had called Dr Rice's official photographer were told they would have to personally examine a raft of pictures taken of her shaking hands with Apec ministers to determine whether any was Mr Peters.

For a "mere exchange of pleasantries", this was overboard stuff.

But Mr Peters continued to maintain there was nothing more to the story, which his chief of staff, Graham Harding, had earlier promoted as a such big deal to this reporter that he wanted no media mention of the meeting until they had tracked down a photo of the pair shaking hands.

It is clear that the Labour Cabinet - whose policy Mr Peters has to implement - is not happy at his enlisting Australian help to warm the US relationship.

Yesterday, Mr Peters refused to expand on any message that Mr Downer might forward to the Americans during discussions with US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and US Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick in Australia today in response to a personal request.

Mr Goff was not the only minister to appear to undermine Mr Peters' first outing as Foreign Minister.

Dr Cullen was openly dismissive of reports that Mr Peters had sought Mr Downer's help to repair New Zealand's ties with the US, telling Parliament he would rather Australia supported New Zealand's bid to host the Rugby World Cup.

Dr Cullen had previously denied that Mr Peters had asked for Australia's help in the first place - only to be corrected when first Mr Peters and then Mr Downer confirmed that the request had been made during their Apec bilateral.