N.Z. may hold puzzles for U.S. envoy hopeful

Press, 7 September 1989, Page 1

N.Z. may hold puzzles for U.S. envoy hopeful

PA Wellington The United States Ambassadordesignate to New Zealand, Ms Della Newman, must puzzle over a number of paradoxes as she prepares to face a Senate committee considering her appointment, the “Honolulu Advertiser” says. In an article titled “Is Bush nominee ready for boiling New Zealand?” a University of Southern California urban and regional planning teacher, Kevin Starr, says New Zealand, along with Australia, holds the key to the South Pacific.

“Without a proper relationship to this Strategic and economic growth area in the early twentyfirst century, the United States will have deep trouble with what is the de facto eighth continent on the planet, Oceania,” he said. President George Bush’s ap-

pointment of Ms Newman, a Seattle real estate broker who admitted she was not even sure where New Zealand was, is one of three to be challenged in the Senate by the Maryland Democrat Senator Paul Sarbanes. In addition, the union representing professional U.S. diplomats, the American Foreign Service Association, says it will sue the State Department to demand the release of competency reports used to justify the appointment of Ms Newman and other diplomatic appointees. It was paradoxical, Starr wrote, that the former Prime Minister, Mr Lange, had led “a Thatcherite revolution” amid “a social-politi-cal system more encompassingly socialistic than any other in the free world.”

Signs of social dislocation arid misbehaviour, such as gang war-

fare, had surfaced

“New Zealand would like to see itself as the Switzerland of the South Pacific — prosperous, sophisticated, militarily disengaged, content to let the Australians do the necessary work of policing the region,” Starr said. In beauty and natural resources, it could be argued New Zealand was “the most blessed environment on the globe,” he wrote.

“New Zealand is a postmodern culture, blending environmentalism and high technology to effect a civilisation that is developed but non-exploitative. “The next U.S. Ambassador will be dealing with a society at once ancient and post-modernist. By defining its own way, New Zealand is, paradoxically, coming closer to, not farther from, the United States.”