In a room of dignitaries, New Zealand’s foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta is impossible to miss.
She is the first woman to sit in the country’s parliament wearing a moko kauae, an ancient Māori tattoo form. Koru patterns wrap around her chin, framing it in rich black inks, a visual statement that “I am Māori”.
One imagines this might attract a nervous glance in diplomatic meetings. Or at the very least a quick side eye. But that is a testament in and of itself: a diplomat’s discomfort or intrigue confirms that Mahuta, in aesthetic and in substance, is breaking new ground.
In the Māori world this is equal parts gratifying – it’s always a pleasure to watch your own people crash through glass ceilings – and ironic. Mahuta is, after all, a senior member of the Kīngitanga, the North Island independence movement that fought against the invading Crown in the 19th century. The movement’s founders, such as Wiremu Tāmihana and Pōtatau Te Wherowhero, could scarcely imagine that one of their own would end up directing that same Crown’s foreign policy.
From this perspective Mahuta is a contradiction, a politician who can sit opposite the Crown as the lead negotiator in her iwi’s Treaty of Waitangi settlement, challenging the government to account for its historic wrongs against Ngāti Maniapoto. Yet the next day she can take up a seat with the Crown, leading its Māori development ministry in the Labour government’s first term and heading its foreign ministry in the second. This might seem a little frenetic, as if Mahuta cannot make a political commitment to one cause or the other. But this ability to work every side is the very quality that makes Mahuta the perfect diplomat. At least on paper.
Some of the country’s leading foreign policy analysts doubt the new minister’s experience – as if Mahuta weren’t one of the longest serving MPs in parliament and one of the few ministers in the cabinet to serve in a previous government. Others question her developing commitment to liberal internationalism over the country’s traditional commitment to trade policy as foreign policy. Under the last National government the chief motivation for many, if not most, foreign policy stances and statements was maximum trade advantage. Tim Groser, the trade minister under then-prime minister John Key, was himself a career trade negotiator.
That meant the New Zealand government would often hold fire on certain issues in certain countries, such as political freedoms in China, to preserve favourable trading arrangements. But under Mahuta’s ministership that commitment to saying and doing nearly nothing is changing.
In January she made an intervention on Hong Kong, noting New Zealand’s “serious concerns” at the arrest of activists, and in the same month she made a similar intervention on Russia calling for opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s release from detention. This is a dramatic departure from her predecessor, Winston Peters (the first Māori man to hold the country’s foreign ministership), who famously held back on criticising the Russian government lest it risk a free trade deal.
This development is, at least in part, thanks to new pressure from the left and centre. Thinktanks such as the New Zealand Alternative are reimagining what a New Zealand foreign policy could look like, a move that forces the government to do the same. But more than that, foreign policy is travelling in the same direction as New Zealand’s only real weapon: Jacinda Ardern. The prime minister is the world’s leading “values-based” politician, and our foreign policy is moving in step with it prioritising the values of liberal internationalism over trade, trade, and trading some more.
For most politicians it would seem impossible to work in Ardern’s shadow. She is, and this isn’t an exaggeration, one of the most well-known politicians in the English-speaking world. It might even feel impossible to work as the follow-up act for Winston Peters, someone famous in New Zealand’s foreign policy world for his close relationship to high-status politicians such as former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. Yet Mahuta is cut out for the job in two respects: in her experience as one of New Zealand’s longest-serving members of parliament; and in her person as a visible, impossible to miss, Māori.