In New Delhi, Peters met his counterpart, India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. He also met with India’s Vice President JagdeepDhankhar and National Security Advisor Ajit Doval.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has made securing trade wins with the fiercely protectionist country one of the Government’s key goals, and dispatched Trade Minister Todd McClay to the country before Christmas as a symbol of the Government’s seriousness. Luxon confirmed this week, he intends to make an official visit later this year.
Speaking to the Herald on his travels, Peters said found common understanding with India in terms of the way it put its own interests first in trade.
Luxon had talked about the idea of starting talks on an “early harvest” trade agreement. This is a limited trade agreement, that leaves out one or two contentious things like dairy.
When asked if he had raised this with the Indian side, Peters said he had taken a different tack.
“What I talked about was that there had to be something like 10-15 things we could do right here, right now. Let’s itemise them and let’s see that in the next 12 months we can get them all under way because there’s no time to be drifting and wasting time.
“My message was New Zealand is open for business, but like India, we are nationalists, we are about putting our country’s interests first, just like India is putting its interests first.”
Asked about these 10-15 things, Peters offered examples of areas on which the two sides could agree some common ground.
Peters suggested export education as one example, noting many universities from outside India were setting up campuses in the country.
He said India recognised New Zealand’s “huge advantages” in the agri-tech sector, which both sides could benefit from.
He also mentioned kiwifruit, which is becoming popular in the country.
Peters said for four months of the year India had no supply of kiwifruit.
“That’s where we step in, hopefully with supply with massively reduced tariff on our product coming in.”
He said if those 10-15 things could be ticked off soon, New Zealand would be on the right path with the country.
While Peters was in India an enhanced air services agreement between the two countries came into force, which will make code sharing easier. Peters said he believed that this would mean “direct flights between New Zealand and India are within sight in the next couple of years”.
“Being able to fly directly from Auckland to New Delhi would be a game-changer for the cultural, people-to-people and commercial ties between our countries,” he said.
Peters noticed one positive sign on trade. India’s new Parliament building, recently open to much fanfare, features carpets made from about 20,000kg of New Zealand wool.
Mumbai is India’s largest port city and centre of trade. Picture / Areez Katki
India is doing better than New Zealand in this regard. NZ First has long sought to get New Zealand government departments to use more local wool, with only limited success.
The visit also had a security component, with Peters discussing the situation in Gaza and Ukraine on the trip. India has sat on the fence during the Ukraine conflict and has supported the Russian economy by purchasing energy exports that Russia cannot export to Ukraine-aligned countries.
Peters implied he did not criticise India for these decisions.
“We don’t go and tell other countries what to do. We tell them what our concerns are and how we might better work with them,” he said.
He said that on Gaza, “India shares our concerns and has a similar view and on the long term solution”.
Peters was coy about the extent to which the two countries discussed China. He mentioned that he had spoken about Aukus, and New Zealand’s contemplation of aligning itself with the non-nuclear pillar 2 aspect of the agreement, which is currently exclusive to Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
“We talked about defence and how we could work more closely together on the challenges going forward and how in the defence sense, we could be better connected with the progress of countries who are like-minded with us and our concerns about these issues without mentioning what those issues are,” Peters said.
“We have started the Aukus 2 two conversation and negotiations and discussions.
“There’s also, behind that from our perspective and theirs as well, the Quad,” Peters said, referencing the security dialogue between Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, widely seen as a grouping of Indo-Pacific democracies that have come together in opposition to China’s influence.
When asked what the Quad had to do with Aukus, apart from some shared membership, Peters said, “These are putative days in terms of where we are going. We’ve only had these discussions in over a matter of weeks compared to years so to speak - where the new government is concerned”.
Peters said it was “clear that New Zealand and India share common strategic perspectives about the security challenges our Indo-Pacific region faces as well as a commitment to do more together to meet them”.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
