The Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta’s presence in New York today at the United Nations General Assembly is a contempt of New Zealand’s “caretaker government” convention.

Despite the long-standing caretaker convention, Minister Mahuta is today at the UN to sign a highly contentious “Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement”, delivering a national statement on behalf of New Zealand at the UN, and then undertaking bilateral meetings with world leaders and counterparts.

Parliament has risen and New Zealand is less than two weeks from when early voting begins on October 2nd. The caretaker convention has always been that these matters the Foreign Minister is engaged in, should be left to the next government to deal with.

Minister Mahuta claims to be doing this on behalf of “Aotearoa New Zealand”, which to begin with is not our country’s name. What she omitted to explain was why she is signing this agreement now, this close to an election, when this agreement is open for signature in New York for the next two years.

There has been no public announcement or discussion of the Minister’s intention to sign the agreement. In short, the Minister is signalling before the next government is even elected, an intention to ratify.

Labour is putting globalists in charge of the high seas, and from here the NGOs will take over the secretariat and expand the remit of this document, to ensure that all activity on the high seas will require UN approval - such as shipping, fishing, and deep-sea mining.

Labour has no mandate to push forward with this covert agenda, with just weeks out from the election.

As an aside, why is a Minister who has failed so often to travel to secure diplomatic agreement in our own neighbourhood of the “Blue Pacific Continent”, now travelling all the way to New York, and then Washington, when those offshore dealing with her have a certainty that there is little likelihood of Labour being in the next government.

This is circa 2010 all over again when Minister Pita Sharples, without any public notice, travelled to the UN in the dead of night and signed UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) – after the previous Foreign Minister and Government had already declined to sign the declaration in 2007.

This is another example of Labour’s “Pandoras Box” principle – Labour is doing everything they can before the election in the hopes that “once it’s done it cannot be undone”.

This level of contempt shown for the people of New Zealand and our long-standing democratic convention, is an astonishing development that cannot, and will not, go unchecked.

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