Selling New Zealand to the US - Did PM Jacinda Ardern tick off her to-do list on her US trip?

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has wound up the business segment of her US trip - a sprint around five cities in the US in as many days on a mission to get tourists back to New Zealand and goods from New Zealand to the US.

It took her and a business delegation to New York, to Washington DC to meet a raft of senators, to San Francisco to meet California Governor Gavin Newsom, to Harvard's graduation ceremony, and to meetings with the bosses of big tech companies in Seattle.

The business delegation travelling with her have now flown home while Ardern prepares for her big White House visit and meeting with Joe Biden.

That will take place early Wednesday morning, New Zealand time.

Ardern had said opening business opportunities and persuading Americans to come and holiday in New Zealand were as critical a reason for the journey as Harvard and the White House were. She also wanted to further a few of her own missions on climate change and the Christchurch Call.

Did she tick off everything she had wanted to do?

The Star Quality:

In the US, Jacinda Ardern is better known than most New Zealand PMs for three reasons: her daughter, the Christchurch mosque attacks and Covid-19.

Outside BlackRock in New York a woman stopped to ask who we are waiting for.

She got quite excited when she heard and hung around to wait for a look. Asked why, the first thing she mentioned was Ardern's response to the mosque attacks. The second was the Covid-19 response.

They were the two issues raised in The Late Show, and again at a reception in Seattle. At Harvard University, there was loud applause when Ardern said she was only the second leader to give birth while in office – the first was Pakistan PM Benazir Bhutto. There was a standing ovation when she said New Zealand had banned military assault rifles.

At Harvard University, she sat next to feminist icon Gloria Steinem – but Ardern was the one speaking.

Getting Americans on the plane:

Ahead of the trip, Ardern promised she would be "shameless" in promoting New Zealand as a tourist destination.

She certainly did that. On The Late Show she even wrote Stephen Colbert an invitation to her wedding, handwritten on an advertisement for Air NZ's new direct flights from New York to Auckland.

She pointed out the country's high vaccination rates to try to dispel Covid fears.

And she had some help: Colbert too urged Americans to get to New Zealand.

And at a Seattle event, Microsoft boss Brad Smith saved Ardern the job - so fulsome was his praise for all New Zealand had to offer that Ardern joked she would trade in Trade Minister Damien O'Connor for him. It could take a while before people are ready to travel widely again, but Ardern can't be accused of not trying.

Taking care of business:

When Ardern went onto The Late Show, she presented host Stephen Colbert with a chilly-bin of beef.

She had just come from an event to officially launch Silver Fern Farm's Carbon Zero beef and the company's CEO, Simon Limmer, had dared her to take some to the show.

He did not think she would actually go ahead with it – but she did, live on air.

PM Jacinda Ardern and Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. Photo / CBS

It is beef from farms which are effectively "in-setting" their own emissions on-farm – and the US is the only market it has so far been launched in. Limmer said that was because there was a demand for sustainably produced products in the US.

It was a pilot of about 20 of the 13,000 farms in Silver Fern Farms - "but the demand in market looks to be moving really quickly, and farmers are wanting to move in this area."

Demand could now be moving a lot more quickly as a result of the PM's efforts. "To help us launch it and then promote it further on The Late Show and other speeches has been remarkable."

It resulted in a surge of interest – Silver Fern Farms was mentioned more than 400 times in news articles with a combined reach of more than 300 million people. It's online profile in the US jumped 235 per cent on the day after the launch and The Late Show.

"We couldn't have spent marketing money anywhere near as effectively as what that did for us. We were really pleased."

Businesspeople are not always great fans of the Labour Government and Limmer acknowledges that. "But I have been nothing but impressed with the Prime Minister this week. She's kicked open doors, in fact she hasn't even had to kick. They've swung open everywhere. There have been incredible opportunities."

Those doors included getting the business delegates into the same room as BlackRock, an investment management company with more than $10 trillion in assets, and the US Chamber of Commerce.

After that event, Chamber executive vice president Myron Brilliant (a most excellent name) spoke to media, saying he completely agreed with Ardern's call for the US to join the CPTPP trade deal.

And Microsoft's President Brad Smith sang the praises of New Zealand's technology innovation.

The US is New Zealand's third-largest trade partner, even without a free trade agreement.

Being green has become good business as more corporates try to get the carbon zero tick, so Ardern has focused on pushing New Zealand's environmental and sustainability credentials.

The high percentage of renewable energy is a big selling point - Amazon Web Services cited it as a reason for its $7.5 billion investment in cloud data centres.

A few business deals were finalised and announced over there: including Parkable's deal with Meta for a system for Meta staff to park more efficiently, and NZ Merino Company's deal with Silicon Valley's Actual which gives its farms tools to monitor and measure their carbon footprint. Those supply the merino for brands including Ice Breaker and AllBirds.

Climate Change:

Covid-19 came close to scuttling the PM's meeting at the White House - and it also came close to scuttling her meeting with California Governor Gavin Newsom.

On Sunday, Newsom announced on social media that he had tested positive for Covid-19.

On Saturday, Ardern had met with Newsom, the Governor of the richest state in the US, to ink a climate change accord. It was an entertaining press conference in which Newsom flattered Ardern, Ardern apologised for the flat singing of the business delegation's waiata and then commented on the large size of Newsom's economy.

Ardern hopes the agreement will help New Zealand build up its emissions-free transport fleet - and the infrastructure needed to run it. Its greater importance may end up being in tying New Zealand to the massive economy and technology powerhouse that is California in the future.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and California Governor Gavin Newsom in San Francisco Botanical Gardens. Photo / Supplied

Newsom's event also had a bit of a West Wing twist to it: one of his economic advisers was Dee Dee Myers, the former press secretary to President Bill Clinton. Myers was the model for CJ Cregg on The West Wing TV series.

The Christchurch Call:

Ardern used the very high-profile occasion of her speech at Harvard University to lay down the gauntlet to social media companies to do more to stop disinformation and radicalisation happening online.

The issue of gun reforms dominated as a topic during the PM's visit because of the horrendous shooting at a Texas school and the earlier shootings in Buffalo.

Ardern was clapped and applauded on The Late Show and at her Harvard speech when she mentioned her move to ban military-style assault rifles. But Ardern was focused on the other prong to her response to the Christchurch terror attacks: the Christchurch Call initiative to get social media companies to act to stop terrorism, radicalisation and violent extremism spreading on their platforms.

In her Harvard speech she told social media companies that it was time to take more responsibility for the power they had - and to work on the algorithm models they used to direct users to other content.

Ardern did that the day before she was due to meet with the social media giants she was pointing at - the likes of Twitter and Amazon.

Microsoft's Brad Smith - an early and energetic adopter of the Christchurch Call - picked up that challenge the next day, saying at a Seattle reception that the job indeed was not yet done.

Ardern said the crisis response set up to deal with violent events being livestreamed on social media was working - that gets the platforms to share information to try to block or stop livestreams and videos being shared and viewed.

It had been used after the Buffalo shooting was livestreamed on Twitch, an Amazon platform.