O’Connor will be the first cabinet minister to leave these shores since the pandemic began when he travels to London and Brussels for trade talks with counterparts in the UK and the European Union later this month.
Before he gets there, however, Australia and the UK may have already concluded their own free trade agreement.
New Zealand and Australia had been on a parallel negotiating track with the UK after both started talks in the middle of last year.
But Australia appeared to jump ahead after its Trade Minister visited London last month.
Dan Tehan and his British counterpart Liz Truss set a deadline for agreeing a deal to coincide with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s attendance of the G7 summit in the UK this weekend (June 12-13).
British media have reported the UK is getting ready to offer tariff and quota-free access for Australian agricultural imports.
Before he departed, O’Connor said the UK’s offer to NZ remained unacceptable.
“The sensitive areas of dairy, beef and sheep meat are the ones that are always the most challenging,” he said.
“We want improvement on what we have seen so far.”
In the back of O’Connor’s mind, however, will be Australia sneaking ahead of NZ in trade deals with South Korea and Japan in the middle of last decade.
Then Australia was prepared to sacrifice ambitious tariff cuts for earlier deals and gain immediate tariff advantages over their trans-Tasman rivals in both countries’ beef markets.
But if O’Connor is feeling the pressure over the prospect of history repeating itself he isn’t showing it.
“We will hold out for a valuable trade agreement and we will not be pressured by somebody else’s timelines,” he said.
O’Connor rejects the assertion that Australia would automatically gain a tariff advantage over NZ exporters should it conclude negotiations for an agreement earlier.
Once an agreement is concluded it must be ratified by lawmakers in each country before it can enter into force and tariff reductions can take effect.
One former trade negotiator says while any number of factors could hold up ratification of the UK-Australia agreement, the longer it took NZ to conclude its own negotiations with the UK, the less likely it was that it could catch up and the more likely the Australians would again gain an early tariff advantage.
The most obvious area in which NZ would hold out for a better deal than the Australians is the time taken to phase out tariffs.
British media reports suggest the UK’s offer to Australia is to scrap tariffs on agricultural imports over 15 years.
Asked whether that was too long for NZ exporters to wait, O’Connor hedged his answer.
“On the face of it, yes, but any trade deal is a mix of give and take,” he said.
“We are not committing to any one particular point.
“But we want a commercially meaningful outcome and it needs to be realistic and pragmatic for exporters.”
O’Connor will also meet National Farmers Union (NFU) representatives.
The NFU has led the charge in opposing the UK government’s apparent willingness to throw open its borders to Australian agricultural imports.
That’s despite early optimism it would take a different stance following its involvement in the UK Trade and Agriculture Commission, which earlier this year recommended scrapping tariffs on agricultural imports from countries where animal welfare and environmental standards were equivalent to those British farmers were subject to.
O’Connor remained wary of making the link in trade talks despite the similarity in farming systems between the UK and NZ.
“It is an area of a lot of subjectivity … we have to be mindful we don’t get cornered,” he said.
O’Connor’s assignment only gets tougher in Brussels, where he will try to coax a more credible offer out of the EU on agricultural market access.
A leak last July revealed the EU’s offer amounted to a 0.02% and 0.03% opening of its domestic cheese and butter markets respectively.
O’Connor says there has been some small improvement since.
“We are still looking for higher ambitions when it comes to goods access,” he said.
“Again we are focused not necessarily on speed but concluding as quickly as we can on something that is truly commercially meaningful and gives us opportunities.”
