Pundit

On 12 September 2001, Air NZ put its Australian arm, Ansett Australia, into voluntary liquidation. The next morning, Helen Clark happened to be sitting in Air NZ’s Melbourne Airport lounge, checking messages and chatting wearily to her accompanying staff, waiting to board the morning flight back to New Zealand.

The tiredness was due to the events of the previous 50 hours. Clark had left Auckland on 11 September, heading for a two week European trip to visit Italy, Sweden, France and Britain. During the trip, the terrorist planes hit New York and Washington. No sooner had she arrived in Rome after a 22 hour flight, than bookings were confirmed to return home a few hours later. The hastily arranged return flight meant transiting through Melbourne.

Ansett’s Melbourne Airport staff weren’t aware Clark was waiting to board the Air NZ flight. But outraged at what had happened to their jobs, they decided to blockade the Air NZ plane sitting on the tarmac, shifting one of the massive plane-moving machines behind the craft’s tail. Clark and her staff watched this unfold from the lounge, at first bemused then realising what was occurring as the Ansett worker jumped off the plane-mover, pocketed the keys and sauntered off. Clark’s police minder was immediately dispatched to reclaim the party’s bags from the plane’s hold. Having secured the luggage, Clark was unable to transfer to another flight – the workers, having heard of their trophy scalp, promised to block any plane carrying her.

Eventually Clark escaped by helicoptering out of the airport to an air force base on the other side of Melbourne (some of her staff were smuggled out of a side door of the airport, breaking Customs laws as their passports happened to be in a briefcase on the helicopter), where a RNZAF Orion could pick her up and fly her home. After a five hour plus ride on a proud-but-ancient-propeller-driven plane without any passenger seats, Clark eventually touched down back in Auckland. She and her staff had spent about 60 hours travelling to get back to the place they’d left a few days earlier.

Had New Zealand a prime ministerial plane, Clark could have turned around in mid-air and returned home as soon as news of the enormity of the 9/11 attacks came through. All of which adds to why we should heed Colin Espiner’s column on the need for New Zealand to grow up and buy a prime ministerial plane. It is a perennial issue which crops up whenever our leaders are inconvenienced. As Espiner notes, New Zealand looks like the country hick cousin when its leader arrives at international summits on some cut-price airline.

New Zealand prime ministers endure, arguably, greater travel demands than virtually any other head of government. We are one of the remotest countries in the world, but we’re also a developed nation expected to show our face and participate in international issues. Talkfests they might be, but it’s the way of the world and one New Zealand Inc must take seriously.

A feature of Helen Clark’s tenure, and one John Key is sensibly adopting, is, where feasible, taking business delegations along on official visits. These can be quite significant to New Zealand Inc, providing the business leaders with privileged access to otherwise unreachable politicians. They can cut through layers and layers of bureaucratic tape as they look to overcome cumbersome rules denying access to foreign markets for New Zealand goods. The trade delegations are rare due to the difficulty of organising them when everyone must travel independently. A ‘New Zealand Inc’ plane would make the task significantly easier.

A plane would also mean that New Zealand taxpayers would get a better idea of just what their prime ministers get up to when they’re away. Prime Ministers nowadays travel so much that NZ news organisations simply cannot afford to accompany them on every trip. Significant visits are made to foreign capitals which go largely unreported (imagine the stuff ups we’re missing out on). The media wouldn’t get a free ride on a prime ministerial plane, but the costs would be far less than the commercial equivalents.

It would also mean we would cease to be bludgers. When Clark visited the Philippines in 2006, she arrived and left on commercial flights. While there, however, the Philippine President loaned Clark one of her two (that’s right, not just one) Lear jets for the internal travel from Manila to Cebu and Bohol. Even the solitary New Zealand reporter, NZPA’s Grant Fleming (now ensconced as a press secretary in Bill English’s office), managed to freeload on the deal, much to the relief of his employer’s bottom-line.

So, please, let all political parties (yes, you too, Rodney) unite around the purchase of a decent plane for prime ministerial and other official travel. We expect our prime ministers to represent us overseas – and represent us they have to do, performing at press conferences, speeches, state meetings, and in international fora. The only people who might be unhappy would be the travelling staff, no longer able to collect air points (not that they do, of course, for that would be wrong). Though, at least they'd know they'd get to the rugby on time.