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Ryan Bridge: Are trade missions worth it? · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Did you see the comments yesterday from Malaysia's deputy prime minister.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: If you didn't, he was talking to a Kiwi delegation
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: often Kuala Olympa for Arsian, this will be your new
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: market and we welcome any halal product from New Zealand great.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: I've always been pretty skeptical about these trade missions, if
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: I'm being honest with you, whether they actually do anything,
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: whether they actually achieve anything, or is it one big
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: giant junket. Truth is they're a little bit of both.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: On a trip to Ladder of Ostok and Russia back
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: in twenty eleven, our Prime minister was in. John Key
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: got to sit down with Vladimir Putin. Putin turned up late.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: The journos were out waiting in the rain for hours.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: He came and he sat down, he spoke in Russian
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: and then he booted us out with his bodyguards. But anyway,
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: he and Key spoke for about an hour. And at
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: the time New Zealand was trying to cut a free
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: trade deal with Russia, including a bunch of other like Blarus, Kazakhstan.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: And you don't get that sort of access every day.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Of course, you wouldn't be doing that till a deal today,
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: and we ended up spending talks with the Russians in
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: twenty fourteen after they went into Ukraine, so it was
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: all a waste of time anyway. But I grew to
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: accept that these meetings actually do achieve something. Besides the
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: hotels and the accommodation. They're not actually what you think
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: that might be cracked up to be. The schedules pretty graeling,
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: and the flight over is a bit crap too. They're
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: not always glamorous, is the point. Great fun though, back
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: to the Malaysian Deputy Prime minister. If a Kiwi politician
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: said that to a foreign company wanting to export here,
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: for example, it wouldn't mean much to importers here, but
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: there it's different. There's anything I learned about Asia, it's
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: that politicians have sway. They often control large contracts, have
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: close relationships or control over parts of the economy that
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: you wouldn't see in a more Western style democracy. So
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: when a leader in a country of thirty five million
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: people in a region with seven hundred million people says
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: something like that, probably worth the trip. For more from
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: early edition with Ryan Bridge. Listen live to news talks
• 2:06
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• 2:09
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