Speeches and Articles
Address by Rt Hon James Bolger ONZ on the occasion of the 60th Anniversary of Fulbright New Zealand,
07 June 2008
Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you here today on such a wonderful occasion.
Ambassador Ferguson, my thanks for hosting us here this evening. It is always a pleasure to return to my old stomping ground!
To Thomas Farrell, Rob McIntosh, and Fulbright New Zealand’s Executive Director, Mele Wendt, I offer my sincere congratulations on Fulbright New Zealand’s 60th Anniversary. On behalf on all those in the room who have benefited from the Fulbright programme, I offer you, your Boards and staff so many thanks for your continuing hard work in offering exchange opportunities for New Zealanders and Americans to experience life in each other’s countries.
A special welcome to all of the Fulbright, Axford and Eisenhower grantees and alumni here this evening. You represent just a small percentage of the 2,500 alumni of New Zealand’s Fulbright programme, and of the many Axford and Eisenhower Fellowships alumni who have been lucky enough to travel and live abroad, and to share your intellect, culture and values with people of another country. Your presence here tonight is just one measure of your support for these exchange programmes, and as always it is a delight to hear of the life-changing experiences you had as grantees. It is always a pleasure, too, to see New Zealanders and Americans come together in such cordial and mutually-respectful auspices, especially here in the corridors of power. Tonight we can rejoice in a truly positive relationship between our countries, which has been helped in no small part by the Fulbright programme and other similar initiatives.
Encounters between New Zealanders and Americans go back to the late 18th Century when sealers and then whalers ventured into the South Pacific, leaving quite an impression on the locals, I’m sure. For many Americans and New Zealanders though, their first significant contacts with one another were on the fields of war, where our young men fought gallantly as allies in Europe and the Pacific.
Many Kiwis encountered American soldiers stationed in New Zealand during the Pacific war, or invalided to our country to recover from injuries sustained on the Pacific front. Those wartime visitors were welcomed as friends with our renowned New Zealand hospitality. Bound by shared values, the enduring relationships that were formed during the war years prefigured the success of the Fulbright programme in New Zealand.
The importance of New Zealand building and maintaining a strong relationship with the United States is a goal that I have had the privilege of working towards in a number of capacities. As a global superpower, New Zealand’s second largest trading partner and an essential partner for New Zealand in the Asia Pacific region, the US was an obvious priority during my years as Prime Minister. I was then fortunate to be appointed New Zealand Ambassador to the US from 1998 to 2002 which gave me the opportunity to work directly on NZ US relations across a wide spectrum of issues. This work included core diplomatic issues on New Zealand’s political, security and trading relationship with the US, as well as encouraging wider links such as the important work US and New Zealand scientists are engaged in both in Antarctica and elsewhere and educational links exemplified here tonight in the work of Fulbright.
Since returning from the US it has been a great pleasure to me to chair the NZ US Council, an organisation that has worked in close co-operation with government and business to ensure that New Zealand has the strongest possible relationship with the US. Central to the Council’s work has been organising two US NZ Partnership Forum events, the first held in Washington in 2006 and another in Auckland in September of last year. Bringing together high-level government, business and other leaders from both sides these Forums have provided opportunities for discussion and engagement on a range of issues of mutual interest and built constituencies in both countries of influential advocates for the relationship. It is no accident that as a result the relationship between our two countries has been taken to a new level.
It is my hope that the coming year will see these links further enhanced by a decision on the part of the US to join the P4 Trans Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership, a free trade agreement that New Zealand is already a part of with Chile, Brunei and Singapore. The US has already begun negotiations with the P4 on financial services and investment and is consulting with Congress on the possibility of joining the wider P4 trade agreement.
The United States can find no better ally than New Zealand in its quest for more open markets and fairer trade rules. Our continuing co-operation not just in expanding trade but also in promoting democracy, building human rights and ensuring sustainable development is a reflection of the deeply held values that we share and which arise from our historic attachment to the goals so well espoused in the document which gave birth to this great country - “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
Tonight, once again, we stand together in the cause of peace, and in the name of Senator J. William Fulbright, who in the aftermath of two world wars sought a means of preventing further war by promoting mutual understanding between the peoples of the world. Himself a Rhodes scholar, Fulbright knew an educational exchange programme to be the ideal vehicle, and by slipping an ingenious piece of legislation through the senate without opposition, redirected war reparation funds into international educational activities, funding the exchange of students, teachers, professors and research scholars between the United States and other participating countries.
Today the Fulbright programme is active in over 150 countries globally, and administers more than 6,000 new grants annually. Since its inception over quarter of a million participants have experienced life and academia abroad as Fulbright grantees, and the programme has been described as one of the largest and most significant movements of scholars across the face of the earth. New Zealand was the fifth country to join the programme, in 1948, and we boast 1,400 New Zealand and 1,110 American alumni, not to mention the additional Axford, Harkness, Eisenhower and Kennedy Fellows that Fulbright New Zealand has so capably helped on their way.
The pursuit of knowledge and academic excellence is another one of those common values important to New Zealanders and Americans. As the basis of the Fulbright programme it was this pursuit that drove the first Fulbrighters back and forth across the Pacific sixty years ago and still does today. The first Fulbright New Zealand Graduate Students left New Zealand in August 1949 and their American counterparts arrived down under soon thereafter – New Zealand’s Fulbright commission was the first in the Southern Hemisphere.
One of the programme’s most notable New Zealand alumni was Sir Bill Rowling who was a New Zealand Labour member of parliament from 1962 to 1984. He was Prime Minister from 1974 to ’75. After leaving parliament he was appointed Ambassador to the US here in Washington, DC from 1985 to 1988. This was a most appropriate appointment, not only because of Bill Rowling’s political experience and stature, but also because as a young teacher, he and his wife Glen had spent two years (1955 and ’56) in Seattle, Washington on a Fulbright Teacher Exchange.
This proved to be a significant and life changing experience for Bill and his family. When he was Ambassador, speaking at a luncheon gathering of Fulbright interview committee chairpersons in 1986, Bill Rowling said of his Fulbright teacher exchange, and I quote,
“that it was one of the smartest and most valuable moves I ever made … The experience also played a part in moulding my philosophy of life, a philosophy which took me into the NZ Parliament for 22 years and in a way almost predestined that I would return to the US as New Zealand’s Ambassador….The Fulbright programme provides understanding through direct experience. I am reminded of a quote I saw somewhere – ‘The test of courage is when you are few, the test of tolerance is when you are many’. The Fulbright scheme has in my view achieved extraordinary success in providing both understanding and tolerance.”
Bill Rowling’s perspective is mirrored by almost all other alumni who have been on an NZ-US exchange or fellowship – and there are many alumni here tonight – who agree that the experience brings many benefits academically and professionally but also personally and in a small way contributes to increased mutual understanding between peoples of our two nations.
As has been mentioned, I am the Chair of the Ian Axford Fellowships in Public Policy and it’s been a real pleasure to be involved in this public policy exchange programme. It was initiated by the former NZ Governor General, Sir David Beattie in 1995 as a reverse of the highly successful Harkness fellowships programme. He and I then established the programme in 1996 upon my return to New Zealand after serving as Ambassador to the US. In these 11 years there have been 29 Americans who have lived in Wellington for six months researching and learning about a particular public policy area as well as sharing their own knowledge and expertise with their NZ counterparts. We can confidently say that the Axford programme has helped improve the practice of public policy in New Zealand and the United States by the cross-fertilization of ideas and experience, and helped develop ongoing policy exchange between New Zealand and the United States.
It is my pleasure to be here tonight, along with my wife Joan, to celebrate both this auspicious event and the values and principles which we share as two peoples. We look back very proudly and positively on the educational exchange relationship between NZ and the US over the last 60 years. We thank all those people that have made these programmes possible. We hope that the next 60 years, and beyond, will be as fruitful and beneficial, and will continue to foster mutual understanding between our two countries.
