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Prime Minister Christopher Luxon brought up New Zealand’s frustrations over China’s engagement with the Cook Islands in his meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing yesterday. 

Relations between New Zealand and the Cook Islands are strained after Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown signed a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with China without consulting the New Zealand Government. 

New Zealand believes this breached a consultation duty from a 2001 declaration that helped to define the rules of New Zealand-Cook Island relation. 

New Zealand has paused $18.2m in aid funding as a result. 

“I raised with Premier Li a number of issues that are important to New Zealand. In particular, the need for engagement in the Pacific to take place in a manner which advances Pacific priorities,” Luxon said after the trip. 

Those remarks appear to echo the words of Foreign Minister Winston Peters, who this month urged the Pacific to stand together and stressed the importance of the centrality of the Pacific Islands Forum in conducting Pacific affairs. 

“As we face external pushes into our region to coerce, cajole and constrain, we must stand together as a region – always remembering that we are strongest when we act collectively to confront security and strategic challenges,” Peters said. 

“Not all partners have followed this model in recent meetings,” Peters said. 

The day before meeting Li, Luxon told media the Cooks bust-up was an issue between New Zealand and the Cook Islands. His remarks after the meeting suggest he sees it as an issue for China as well. 

Christopher Luxon inspects Chinese troops on his recent visit. Photo / Thomas Coughlan 

Luxon was extremely cautious not to give away any details about his closed-door bilateral meetings with the Chinese leadership, revealing almost nothing of his meeting with Xi, including whether he raised the issue of the Cook Islands. 

As Li, Xi’s number 2, is Luxon’s opposite number in China it would be normal protocol for him to have the more detailed discussion. The pair also had dinner on Friday night at the Great Hall of the People. 

Brown, meanwhile, told the Cook Islands Parliament the relationship between the “Cook Islands and New Zealand is defined by partnership, not paternalism”. 

“Decisions to unilaterally pause core sector support reflect a patronising approach, inconsistent with modern partnership,” he said. 

Luxon left Beijing for Europe, where he will attend the Nato summit in the Netherlands. 

In 2022, the first year that a New Zealand prime minister attended a Nato summit since Helen Clark’s prime ministership, Nato updated its cornerstone strategic concept to single out China as a security threat for the first time. 

Luxon was asked what he thought of Nato’s increasingly hawkish position on China. He appeared to disagree with comments from Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte, who this month warned China was part of a four-nation effort to wage war against Ukraine. 

“China is working together with North Korea, Iran,” Rutte said. 

“They are supporting, as we all know, Russia’s war effort against Ukraine. So, these four working together is, of course, a relevant development,” Rutte said. 

Luxon disagreed, saying that the countries could be disruptive individually, but were not actively collaborating. 

“We haven’t seen evidence of those four powers coordinating actively against the west. We’ve seen bilateral associations, say, with Russia and North Korea with respect to Ukraine. 

“We’ve seen bilateral arrangements with, say, Iran and Russia as well, but we haven’t seen those countries come together against the West in that way, so that may be a difference of opinion,” Luxon said. 

“I’ve seen different remarks from different leaders. Mark Rutte, a friend of mine, has been pretty direct with his Dutch directness as you would understand. We’ve seen no evidence of China collaborating with Russia or Iran and other countries to coordinate with the West at all,” he said. 

Dame Jacinda Ardern, attending the Nato summit in 2022, named China in her speech, saying, “China has in recent times… become more assertive and more willing to challenge international rules and norms”. 

However, she added Nato should “resist the temptation to simplify the increasingly complex world in which we live”.