Correspondence.

• Author: Woodfield, Ted
• Position: Letter to the editor

Sir,

May I contribute some observations on the report by Sir Con O'Neill, referred to in Peter Kennedy's address 'Whither Brussels' published in the last issue (vol 37, no 2), and the conclusions Kennedy drew from them, regarding the context in which agreement was reached in the negotiations on access for our butter and cheese when the United Kingdom joined the European Community in 1972.

Given that New Zealand access and the United Kingdom contribution to the community budget were two of the last issues to be decided in the negotiations, it is not surprising that the community representatives--especially the French--linked them and sought to extract UK concessions. However, it is clear from O'Neill's report that the negotiations on financing had been hard fought throughout, with the British resisting to the end moving from the very low base figure in their initial proposals. I suggest that the linkage between issues and the final results was due as much if not more to the British negotiating strategy than to the position they adopted on New Zealand access.

During the continuing negotiations over the next two decades, decisions needing to be taken by the EC Council of Ministers on our access were more often than not linked to other issues on the EC agenda unrelated to New Zealand. However, to the best of my knowledge, at no point was British support for our case adversely influenced by the financial issues that were the subject of major dispute from time to time. in discussions I attended between Prime Ministers Bill Rowling and Harold Wilson in 1975, and Robert Muldoon and Margaret Thatcher in 1980, 1982 and 1984, and between New Zealand ministers of overseas trade and British ministers in many meetings, we were never subject to pressure relating to the 1972 outcomes on Community Finance. O'Neill may have contended that New Zealand was the cause of a 'high price' Britain had to pay in terms of its contribution to the community budget, but that view did not have any observable impacts on us in subsequent years.

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