“When you are in that position – you represent the government and the policies of the day. You’re not able to free-think. You are the face of New Zealand,” he added.
You’re goddamn right. So why did you fire him?
Coz NZ elected right wing nut jobs to represent them.
Silencing those who talked about concerns publicly was also a thing back then.
Yeah I like how they basically proved his point.
“Hey guys it’s time to stand up for what’s right, we are losing our safety. There are clear parallels for how dangerous this is.”
“Whoa whoa whoa that sounds super dangerous. I mean talking about it. No talking about it. That might be dangerous.”
He had courage, which is apparently not something New Zealand has. Quite publicly, they wish us to know they don’t have it.
Ok, so there seems to be some confusion about diplomats and their roles.
A diplomat is a representative for a country and it’s government, this means that what they say can and should be taken as the will of the nation they represent.
This in turn means that while serving as a diplomat you can’t really express your own opinion about any political subject.
Diplomats have immunity against legal punishments, this is needed as some nations may not like what a diplomat says as they represent another nation.
This means that the only real punishment a nation can give to another nation’s diplomats is declaring them “persona non grata”, sn unwanted person, this means that the diplomat is required to leave the country.
This is an extreme reaction and doesn’t happen a lot between western countries.
This is due to the follow on effects, expelling diplomats will often be followed by that country expelling your own diplomats, now, both countries are normally allowed to replace the diplomats, but it causes a big disruption to their work, and can ruin contact networks, in short it is a mess for both parties.
Now, a country can choose to remove their diplomats from a country themselves instead, this is a signal that what the diplomat did was not acceptable and should not be seen as representing them as a nation, this causes way less disruption.
So what happened here is that while what the diplomat said is true, it harmed the relationship between NZ and US.
Now, sometimes the relationship needs to be harmed, simply because other relationships are worth more to the country.
Diplomacy is the art of working together, especially in difficult times, sometimes diplomats can negotiate conditions that goes against the leadership of the nations, but if the end result is better, the nations can and often do allow those conditions to stand.
What I mean is that diplomats have the power to work around the system in some cases, but if you harm the relationship between nations that is less likely to happen.
TD;DR:
What the diplomat said was true, but inconvenient.
Well… you’re not wrong, but there does come a point when it is time to stop obeying the dictates of your designated role. Everyone’s here by accident. Anyone standing in an office has the option of doing literally anything, on any given day, depending on how they see their duty to human beings in and out of their organization. At a certain point, I think it is okay to be ahead of the people who are supposed to be your “leaders” in terms of telling you what you are and are not allowed to care about or speak out on. The humans in government above this person would have been perfectly within their abilities to say “You know what, he’s not supposed to say that, but he is right, and fuck anybody who tries to tell us as the official government of New Zealand that he is not.”
Everyone involved in Vichy France was following the rules. So, for that matter, were most of the people involved in the Wehrmacht.
As a human being, absolutely, but as a diplomat it isn’t as easy.
You need to expect that your life/carreer will be over if you go off script for too long.
Not everyone can be a Raoul Wallenberg, in the past it seems like it was easier as nations was less interconnected and less dependent.
Being a Raoul Wallenberg also made him lose his job due to speaking his mind, albeit a bit more drastically
What the diplomat said was true, but inconvenient.
Doesn’t sound very diplomatic
Which is fine if he had got permission, he did not so it wasn’t
I am pretty sure this decision by NZ will not age like milk at all…
