Better late than never
It’s taken him two and a half months to get his act together, but Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff now seems to be taking meaningful action aimed at stopping the Black Caps’ tour of Zimbabwe.
It was in early April that Rod started asking the Government to investigate what it could to prevent the Black Caps’ tour to Zimbabwe in August and September from going ahead. In May, Rod asked Mr Goff in Parliament about whether the Government had sought legal advice on the issue. Their exchange was as follows:
Rod Donald: Has the Minister sought legal advice on what steps the New Zealand Government could take to enable New Zealand Cricket to invoke the force majeure clause of its contract with other national cricket boards, so that its withdrawal from the tour would be acceptable non-compliance and therefore not subject to financial penalty; if not, why not?
Phil Goff: No, because that is a matter for New Zealand Cricket itself.
Well, it turns out that, after Rod’s lobbying, Mr Goff changed his mind. The Herald on Sunday today alludes to legal advice provided by the Foreign Affairs Ministry to Mr Goff on this very issue. Now, in late June, with the tour about six weeks’ away, Mr Goff is pushing for the International Cricket Council to expel Zimbabwe, saying:
Most of us don’t want to see sport being used as a political weapon. But in some cases you just can’t ignore sporting teams going to countries where this sort of thing is happening and pretend nothing is wrong.
Hear, hear. I couldn’t have said it better myself. It’s a shame it took so long for you to come to the party, Mr Goff. It would have been nice for you to take action on this issue as soon as you were made aware of it by Rod in April, rather than waiting a few months to see if you could get away with doing nothing. Alas, it’s heartening that lobbying and embarrassing a Minister does, from time to time, work. Or, as the Sunday Star-Times says in its editorial:
Never underestimate the ingenuity of a politician facing oblivion … The Minister of Foreign Affairs suddenly starts sounding hawkish on Zimbabwe cricket tours, having been previously soft as a marshmallow.
The Herald on Sunday also devotes its editorial to Zimbabwe, saying that the Government cannot get away with its doubletalk on the issue. Noting that Mr Goff is unwilling to use the force majeure clause to stop the Black Caps’ tour of Zimbabwe, the paper writes:
He says that only a “dictatorial regime” like Mugabe’s would deny its citizens the right to travel but that apparently sensible pronouncement is a piece of sophistry that avoids the issue: to ban the Zimbabwean team from touring would equally penalise New Zealanders from going about their lawful business and, incidentally, impose a financial penalty on New Zealand Cricket by denying it the income in gate takings and the sale of television rights the tour would generate.
I agree. Mr Goff may have been thinking that stopping the Zimbabweans from touring New Zealand in December would take the heat out of the issue. However, I suspect it will do the opposite, because all it does is expose a new level of hypocrisy in the Government’s stance. Because, if the Government is prepared to ignore NZ Cricket’s contractual obligations and cost it a lot of money by blocking the Zimbabwean tour here, why isn’t it prepared to do the same with the New Zealand tour to Zimbabwe? You’re not out of the woods yet, Phil.
