You have to love Dame Jenny Shipley. Not only was Jenny the first female Prime Minister of a nation that first gave women the vote in the world! But…Jenny is still a consummate politician, long after she’s not been in an official political position.
Here’s a Dame in action diplomatically denying the fact that China totally wants New Zealand’s minerals rich land. Who wouldn’t… the views are amazing and the land is fertile too. This report as guest commentary written by NZPA as shared via :
“The Chinese don’t want New Zealand land, former prime minister Dame Jenny Shipley says.
She runs a consultancy for businesses dealing with China and is a director of the China Construction Bank.
“The Chinese don’t want land, the Chinese want the resources and protein,” she said on TV One’s Q&A programme today.
“Their middle class is exploding and the one thing the Chinese government and Chinese companies worry about is disappointing the middle class, so they have to get good quality food and they have to keep providing steel and copper and coal and oil to fuel their economy.”
Asked whether there were great opportunities to trade with China long-term, she said: “Yes, if we don’t keep insulting them…If we don’t get over this, we should get used to wearing jandals.”
Dame Jenny said she wasn’t familiar with the latest Chinese bid to buy the Crafar farms but she knew the Chinese wanted long-term contracts when they did business in other countries.
“If you ask why they are doing that, it is their anxiety over the long-term,” she said.
“They’ll come in and say `I don’t want a three-year contract, I want a 40-year contract’…and the reason they’re saying 40 is they’ve got 1.3 billion people and if they run amok and the middle class implodes, that’s a big problem for the Chinese.”
How about this solution. Let’s give the Chinese a written agreement saying we will honor a biz union for 40 years, as well as a piece of jade greenstone to seal the promise. That should be all that’s needed to seal a trust agreement, while we keep the land. I do agree with Dame Jenny though, we are totz learning not to offend China.
It’s a growing process we’re up for I reckon. Maori kids in New Zealand were wearing black karate shoes to school twenty years ago. We do still like our jandals too. :)
[Photo of Jenny Shipley Coming Soon]
~Posted by Horiwood.Com, Hollywood California USA. 4.20.11~