Irish P.M. sidesteps butter access issue

Press, 19 July 1988, Page 4

Irish P.M. sidesteps butter access issue

Political reporter The Irish Prime Minister, Mr Charles Haughey, neatly sidestepped yesterday the vexed issue of butter access to Europe. He said at an end-of-visit press conference that New Zealand should be “slightly optimistic” about the future of the international butter trade. But when pressed about his Government’s stance on the forthcoming butter access talks with the European Community, Mr Haughey was less forthcoming. He said that his Government was committed to future New Zealand access, but he insisted that the level of that access was an issue to be determined between New Zea-

land and the commission. Ireland would support a fair rate, was all he would say. Earlier, Mr Haughey had sat in on a Cabinet meeting and discussed the butter issue with Ministers. He said he gave the Cabinet a “reasonably reassuring and slightly optimistic message.” This was that the internal limits and restrictions of agricultural production within the Community could only have a beneficial effect on the international market. ' Mr Haughey argued that well managed international markets were more important for New Zealand than achieving any particular level of European access.

For those who put the suffering of New Zealand farmers to him, Mr Haughey had a ready answer: “I can also say that for the last 12 months or two years our farmers at home are taking a great deal of pain and agony.” This resulted from the rigid disciplines imposed within the Community, designed to bring balance to its supply and demand. If anything, Ireland was more dependent on dairy farming than New Zealand, said Mr Haughey. Yesterday’s press conference was so heavily dominated by butter access that at one point Mr Haughey said, “There must be more to life than just butter.”

New Zealand is a nation enamoured of California but resentful of the United States and disappointed about the American disregard for the Rarotonga Treaty, according to a San Francisco writer who travels among Pacific nations. Frank Viviano, in a long article written for the “San Francisco Chronicle,” said that “nowhere in the Pacific is California’s influence more striking than in New Zealand.” But he also found great discontent in New Zealand over American policy, and said that New Zealand officials have reasons to conclude that “it is misguided, if not inexplicable.” Remarking that the Prime Minister, Mr Lange (“the enfant terrible of trans-Pacific relations”) blames the American defence establishment for the A.N.Z.U.S. split, Mr Viviano goes on to say: “What I never reckoned on is that David Lange is unabashedly, even embarrassingly, crazy about Califor-

From JOHN N. HUTCHISON in San Francisco

“He could barely contain himself when the subject was raised. He craved the food. He admired the freeways. He loved — there’s no other word for it — he loved Los Angeles.” Mr Viviano then quoted Mr Lange as follows: “Actually, California has — I’m not being disparaging to the rest of the United States — California has a higher profile in New Zealand than the United States does.” The Prime Minister dreams of the possibility that what he called the United States “West Coast ethos” might be cultivated in New Zealand, Mr Viviano reported. Mr Viviano wrote that during three months of recent travel in the South Pacific he was repeatedly reminded that “the American popular culture — as invented and served up in California — still calls the shots in the twentieth-century fantasy life.”

But throughout Oceania, he

remarked, “the flip side of California’s immense, spontaneous cultural reach is an official United States policy so consistently out of synch with contemporary Pacific sensibilities that it borders on the irrelevant — or worse.”

The South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone “is not a figment of the peacenik imagination,” Mr Viviano said, “it is a response to a deeply felt, pervasive sentiment.”

“To ignore such sentiment is to forgo a leading role in the last area of the Pacific where spheres of influence remain unfixed. Like most of the region’s leaders, David Lange figured that Washington would grasp this point — that it would find ways to accommodate the sentiment without actually endangering its own security interests.

“Lange figured wrong. The United States would have no truck with the Rarotonga Treaty, and in short order, the fate of A.N.Z.U.S. was sealed.”