Politics
Q and A

Talks galore, actual action hard to detect as UN meets in US

September 26, 2021

Craig Hawke is following up Jacinda Ardern's address to the UN by drawing attention to the COVAX programme.

Covid-19 and Climate Change were the focus as world leaders gathered in New York, or beamed in from home, for the UN General Assembly.

TVNZ’s US correspondent, Anna Burns-Francis, told Q+A that it was hard to identify any tangible outcomes from the gathering, but that New Zealand’s Ambassador to the UN Craig Hawke was working to expedite vaccine access in the Pacific.

“The world is a complicated place…and we are all relatively small when you start looking at the 193 members, so we have to be smart, we have to be organised, we have to be focused, we have to be clear what our messages are and we have to be clear what our asks are,” said Hawke.

He added that the concerns were around both vaccine access and the economic hit to Pacific countries.

“They’ve seen huge, huge economic shocks so they’re looking at things like supporting them with concessional finance – what does it look like in terms of debt going forward, how can they have social safety nets for social protections and making sure that, you know, out region remains safe and secure.”

New Zealand has committed both money and actual vaccines to the COVAX scheme, which aims to ensure everyone who wants to be vaccinated can get the necessary shots.

However just this week the World Health Organization has criticised the inequitable access of vaccines, saying that 90 per cent of poor nations had yet to receive a single does, let alone their full COVAX allocation.

Burns-Francis told Jack Tame that places like the US would do a lot of the “heavy lifting” when it comes to pressuring Moderna and Pfizer to release the recipes and get supply through to vulnerable countries, while New Zealand’s focus would be on working to find funding and organising distribution throughout the region.

New Zealand has also come in for criticism on its approach to climate change, with Climate Action Tracker calling the Government’s policies and rollout “highly insufficient”, relying too heavily on the potential for mitigation rather than actually reducing emissions.

Ambassador Hawke said “everyone is grappling with the speed of the rate of the change in climate” describing it as a “big challenging political issue” which requires everyone to do more, even as the goal posts keep shifting.

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