KEY POINTS:
It is a long way from the rarefied negotiating rooms of Geneva to New Lynn, where Tim Groser can be found these mornings, standing on a windy traffic island waving his National Party placard to the passing cars.
"Such are the delights of retail politics," says the urbane
trade diplomat whose name is well known in the higher echelons of Wellington but probably not known - yet - to many of the Aucklanders who wave back.
At 58, Groser says he is enjoying the work of a list MP, and is plainly enjoying making a new home in the trees at Titirangi, which he remembers visiting with his parents.
They were actors in Wellington's Downstage company and so was he, once landing a small part in the television soap Close to Home.
Emigrants from Scotland when he was 8, they were Labour to the core. He thinks he was about 21 when he decided, "No, this isn't right." But he kept his political leanings quiet for the next 25 years, as serious civil servants must.
"The public doesn't believe this but it's true. I have had conversations with almost the entire top tier of the New Zealand public service for a very long time. I know most of them deeply well. Maarten Wevers, Simon Murdoch, Murray Sherwin - I genuinely have no idea what their vote would be.
"We have talked about everything under the sun but we never talk about domestic politics. We talk about it in terms of policy, of course, but never personally. That subject is strictly off limits."
With a first-class honours degree in economics, Groser went to the Treasury in 1972. Britain had just entered the European Community and New Zealand was "on the road to economic disaster".
The Treasury was already urging the sort of adjustments that were to wait another 12 years.
"We could see what we needed to do and we had the Australian bureaucracy on our back saying to us, 'Don't you realise you have to do what we did in 1960? Get rid of import licensing for a start'."
Groser's specialty has always been external economics, not domestic policy. In 1975, he started work on transtasman trade liberalisation that was to culminate in the Closer Economic Relations agreement. "CER took seven years, people don't realise that."
He transferred to Foreign Affairs and was posted in 1976 to Canberra, where he stayed until the singing of CER in 1982.
On his return he was seconded to the Prime Minister's advisory group to work on Sir Robert Muldoon's pet project, a reform of the world monetary system along the lines of the post-war Bretton Woods agreement.
It was a perverse proposal at a time of market and currency liberalisation by our major trading partners. Groser has a fund of stories about his Muldoon years but he is in the National family now
He stayed in the advisory group under David Lange for a short time, then returned to Foreign Affairs and Trade, having decided his future direction.
"I wasn't interested in the political foreign policy side, I was interested in the economic side. I never wanted to be a generalist and I don't want to be a generalist in politics either. I think knowledge is very difficult to acquire and I just ain't bright enough to acquire it deeply across a variety of fields."
In the mid-1980s, agriculture in Europe and the United States had been exempted from the liberalisation drive and its protection was getting steadily worse. New Zealand trade ministers were still making regular trips to the European Community, "begging on their knees for the right to sell", as Groser puts it.
"It was humiliating, morally wrong and economically disastrous for New Zealand. 'Degressivity' was the word for our access. It was a euphemism for 'we're going to strangle you slowly, and then we are going to pursue you in your alternative markets with our export subsidies'. It was just vicious."
When the Gatt Uruguay Round was launched, Groser went to Geneva in 1986 as New Zealand's chief agricultural negotiator.
He describes the next seven years as "a gut-achingly difficult negotiation but hugely successful".
The eventual agreement, giving birth to the World Trade Organisation, "established some international law around issues strangling New Zealand", he says, and also "established a bilateral relationship with Europe, got rid of huge restrictions Americans put on our beef exports, called voluntary export restraints.
"Lovely, isn't it, the way people conceal economic crimes with euphemism."
Returning to Wellington, he sensed "pressure on me to become more generalist".
"Momentarily my willpower weakened and I accepted the post of ambassador to Indonesia. I was there from '94 to '97, just before Indonesia crashed [in the Asian currency crisis]. I learned a lot about a fascinating country but realised quickly I wasn't the slightest bit interested in being an ambassador. I'm a policy wonk."
So Groser left MFAT to head the Asia 2000 Foundation and, "never intended to come back into the bureaucracy". But then the Doha Round was launched and "the Secretary of Foreign Affairs offered me a custom-made job, something I'd been advocating for 15 years".
"The WTO is a 24-hour task, or you are a bit player. I went back there and served as ambassador and was appointed chairman of the agricultural negotiations.
"That went petty well and it has been the highlight of my life ... until, if things go well of course ... something might be down the track, I don't know."
So coy. At 15 on National's list, Groser is a shoe-in for trade minister if the Government changes. He might land an associate finance or economic development portfolio too. He enthuses about the potential niche industries in this country's food, tourism, education and creative sectors.
National approached Groser to stand for Parliament at the last election. He decided elective politics would be a happy combination of two abiding interests: public policy and acting. Not that he has sought the limelight during the past three years. He subscribes to the Holyoake dictum for first-term MPs, "breathe through your nose".
It is a caution reinforced by two decades in international politics where, he says, there are always two currents going on - "one on top of the table and one underneath" - and he never saw a newcomer work it out first time.
Meanwhile, the Doha Round has foundered but he believes something will come of it next year. It will, he predicts, be part of the world's response to the financial crisis.
"We have learned the lessons of history. Governments are acutely aware that beggar-thy-neighbour trade protection in the 1930s turned a banking problem into a great depression."
If a deal is done, he could be the one who signs it for us.
