New Zealand shows how trade and openness to investments can serve local community’s interests
It seems the commitment to kaitiakitanga could produce a balance, where local best interests can be served by trade and investment openness.
David Parker, New Zealand’s newly anointed trade and economy minister, likes to quote Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century – a clear sign of his political leanings.
Once upon a time, that would have sent shivers down the spines of APEC business leaders who he addressed in Auckland over the weekend during the first 2018 meeting of the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC). Instead, Minister Parker met angst and introspection.
So too, did Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Fletcher Tabuteau, when he talked to ABAC about the need to understand two concepts at the fundamental heart of Maori culture and New Zealand politics: kaitiakitanga, and manaakitanga.
The first basically means the task of guardianship: humans are a part of the web or fabric of life, and the health of a community is reflected in the health of the environment. The second means the obligation to be hospitable, to welcome and to share.
Over the past year, as ABAC business leaders have wrestled with questions over why so many communities across the world have lost faith in globalisation and the multiple benefits of open trade and investment, Piketty’s call for an attack on inequality, and the Maori ideas linked with kaitiakitanga, deserve closer attention.
As books like Janesville, about the Wisconsin hometown of the original General Motors auto plant that was closed in 2008, give a dispiriting glimpse into the tragic impacts of the “great recession”, the huge challenges linked with changing mindsets and reskilling communities after such a collapse, and the inevitable reflex to scapegoat trade and imports, so ABAC’s own 2017 study by the Marshall School at the University of Southern California shows the complex roots of public disillusion with globalisation.