Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and the Chilean President Gabriel Boric. Photo / Thomas Coughlan
ANALYSIS
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern billed 2022 as the year of reconnection and has spent much of the year living up to that label.
Beginning in Singapore and Japan, Ardern then travelled to the Pacific, mainland Europe, Australia (twice) the US (twice), and the UK (twice). It's not over yet, with three months to go until we ring in election year, Ardern has yet another trip in the works.
She's been keen to bill these trips as "trade missions" - a label that caught the ire of at least some diplomats who saw it as crass mammon diminishing the cerebral world of high diplomacy.
This trip had trade elements too (and it would have had more, had Ardern not been diverted to London for the Queen's funeral). She was the star attraction at an Air New Zealand's impressive cocktail party to launch the route. Her non-attendance might have caused several other stars rumoured to be on the guest list to drop out.
Ardern was able to rearrange a meeting with film industry executives, squeezing them in shortly after delivering her speech to the General Assembly on Friday.
American film producers might have felt jittery by the Government's decision to review New Zealand's generous film subsidy regime, which gives them between 20 and 25 cents back on every dollar they spend here, having enjoyed increasingly generous public funding of their films for a decade (and even longer, if you consider the tax breaks offered in the 1990s).
Her words of comfort would have been welcome: film incentives (to use her language) are here to stay. The Government is mainly interested in giving both sides more "certainty" about what is known as the "uplift" part of the subsidy - the ability to lift the level of subsidy from 20 to 25 cents in the dollar, if a certain threshold is reached.
Ardern sometimes wore both diplomatic and trade hats at once. A meeting with Chile's young, leftist President Gabriel Boric, at which Boric was at pains to point out how popular Ardern was in Chile, turned into a trade talk, with Ardern making the case for Boric's government to ratify the CPTPP agreement. Chile had signed up to the CPTPP, but Boric chose not to ratify it, meaning it has not yet entered into force there. Ardern told the Herald she had shared her Government's experience with the CPTPP - perhaps a reference to Labour's own flip-flop on the deal: it had vociferously opposed the deal's precursor the TPP, but, after winning the 2017 election happily signed up to the renamed and slightly altered CPTPP.
Those excepted, this was possibly Ardern's most strongly diplomatic trip. Of the 150-odd world leaders at in New York for high-level week, Ardern secured at least a brief catch up with about 30.
Some of these meetings were brief - it appears her time with US President Joe Biden amounted to little more than what's known as a "grip and grin" photo op, but it's nonetheless important to see and be seen (and, in Biden's case, she secured a far more important White House visit earlier this year).
Ardern noted the fact that with five years in the gig, she's built a solid network of international relationships (she's no doubt keen to bring this up to remind voters she is considerably better connected at the top table of politics than her challenger). She's not wrong. She enjoys warm relations with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as evinced by his offering of a flight to New York following The Queen's funeral in London.
She also appears to enjoy a cordial relationship with French President Emmanuel Macron through the Christchurch Call.
Leaders, meeting for the first fully in-person UNGA since the pandemic, were keen to see each other again. Ardern was no exception to this. She greeted leaders with a hug on at least two occasions - the world of social distancing well and truly over.
It's unclear whether the dominance of the war in Ukraine was a net benefit to New Zealand diplomatically (it's obviously a net-negative in almost every other sense). It distracted from the issue Ardern most wanted to talk about: climate change, but it gave her the opportunity to talk about two things that have been dear to New Zealand's foreign policy for decades: nuclear disarmament and reform of the UN Security Council.
In both of these areas, New Zealand is fortunate to have the current United States administration singing from a similar, though not exactly the same, song sheet.
President Joe Biden is working constructively on the issue of non-proliferation, supporting efforts at the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty talks earlier this year (which were vetoed by Russia). His speech to the General Assembly was strong on the issue of Security Council reform too. Again, he's still far from New Zealand's ultimate desire, which is the abolition of the veto, but he said the use of vetoes should be rare.
The Ukraine war is useful in another sense. New Zealand's support for Ukraine, despite our distance from the conflict, is warmly received by many countries at the UN (Russia and China did not send their leaders). Ardern secured a bilateral meeting with the highest ranking Ukrainian at the UN this week - something of a coup.
The age of the hermit kingdom is over. If countries thought our Covid-19 strategy weird or unhelpful, it has not hindered our relationships, which remain strong.
As Ardern returns home (she'll attend the state memorial service for The Queen on Monday) she'll turn her attention to a reconnecting strategy of a different kind.
New Zealand is reconnected with the rest of the world there's no question of that now, but Labour's rocky polling indicates it has become disconnected with many voters.
It's trite to note Ardern's differing reception at home and abroad. She's far from being the first leader to suffer from a bifurcated popularity and she won't be the last, but she'll need to dedicate the next year to working out how to domesticate her still stellar international reputation if she hopes to return to deliver New Zealand's address to the United Nations in 2024.