Former player set to join new team

Press, 6 November 1984, Page 19

Former player set to join new team

PA Wellington A former All Black, Mr Chris Laidlaw, will take up his new post as foreign affairs adviser to the Prime Minister, Mr Lange, this week. Mr Laidlaw, aged 40, returned to New Zealand last week. For the last six years he has been an assistant director with the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. He is a former Rhodes Scholar and Otago University graduate, and had previously served New Zealand in diplomatic posts in Suva and Paris. An opponent of the proposed All Black rugby tour to South Africa next year, Mr Laidlaw will specialise in African affairs in the

Prime Minister’s Department. When his appointment was announced in August, Mr Laidlaw said he thought he and his 1970 All Black team-mates in South Africa had been “very misguided.” “Like so many New Zealanders then, I thought it was wrong to get into the business of interfering with this form of contact. But I was wrong, we were all then,” he told' NZPA. Mr Laidlaw said he felt New Zealand had an enormous foreign policy job ahead of it, particularly in “mending fences” with Africa. “There is a bit of confusion about what New Zealand’s place is, not just in the Commonwealth but in the wider world,” he said.