Discovering Asia: John McKinnon outlines the work of the Asia New Zealand Foundation in 2013.

• Author: McKinnon, John
• Position: Organization overview

In the last twenty years the Asia New Zealand Foundation has played an increasingly important role in educating New Zealanders about Asia. The foundation's purpose has been to 'equip New Zealanders to thrive in Asia'. Its efforts are focused in three target areas: the population as a whole, the school population and opinion-leaders. The first aims to provide information that renders what is happening in Asia intelligible from a New Zealand perspective. The second is approached through three lenses: cultural competency, preparedness for the workplace, and language learning. The third, which has been a staple of the foundation's work since its establishment, includes supporting journalists, teachers, artists, and others to travel to Asia.

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For the Asia New Zealand Foundation 2014 is our twentieth anniversary. It was established at one of those seminal moments, which seem to occur about every ten years or so, when New Zealand 'discovers' Asia. Or, put more correctly, when the political leaders of the time recognised that there was a gap between our interactions with Asia and our knowledge of it, and by 'our' they meant not just, or even mainly, the official community which engaged with Asia but the broader New Zealand world who were caught up in it, whether they knew it or not.

The foundation was, therefore, established deliberately to occupy a space in parallel but distinct from government. The government contributed, then as now, a substantial part of the foundation's funding, as well as appointing its non-partisan board on the recommendation of the minister of foreign affairs. Many distinguished New Zealanders have been members of the board over the 19 years of its existence. In addition, the foundation enjoys the support of a panel of honorary advisers, selected from amongst prominent individuals in the countries of Asia.

The foundation's work was focused on three main activities: education; culture, including media and sport; and business. This is still largely the case, although the emphasis has changed over the years. But the purpose has not. In terms of summing this up in a snappy phrase, I say that we 'equip New Zealanders to thrive in Asia'. We do so mostly by working with and through partners and stakeholders. The foundation is large in ambition but small in resources so necessarily much of what our very able staff do is to prompt, facilitate, and catalyse others to act.

Our benchmark, if I was to identify one, would be the familiarity which many if not most New Zealanders have with Australia, North America and the United Kingdom, on the one hand, or with the South Pacific, on the other. By that I mean that New Zealanders have a very rich array of experiences and information to draw on when they move to or do business in or otherwise interact with those countries. They have family and personal networks, professional and business associates, and thus a variety of ways to evaluate and interpret what is retailed through government pronouncements or the global media. This is much less so with Asia, let alone with other parts of the world. Clearly this is changing--more of this below--but part of the foundation's work is to level this up. This does not mean that doing business in Asia instantly becomes 'easier', whatever 'easier' means. To be honest, doing business in Australia or the United States is not always easy either. But what it should mean is that the New Zealander entering Asia is better placed to do business there than otherwise--'better equipped to thrive in Asia'.

Does this matter? Let us look, for instance, at the situation in 1994 when the foundation was established and at the one in 2013.

Larger profile

If we look at the pattern of trade--the mode with which we are most comfortable in evaluating our external relationships--we can see that the Asian economies now loom much larger in our external profile than they did then. Much of this is the story of China, but it is not only China. In 1993, New Zealand's major trading partners were, in order: Australia, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Community (excluding the United Kingdom), Asia (excluding Japan) and Oceania. In 2013, New Zealand's major trading partners are, in order: Australia, China, the United States, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Germany, Malaysia and Thailand. In 1988, for another example, 5 per cent of New Zealand's goods exports went to China...