RNZ<\/a><\/p>\nBudget 2026 committed $20 million for this year and the next to host the annual PIF summit in New Zealand, with Peters making the offer at a Forum Foreign Ministers meeting in August of last year.<\/p>\n
The official announcement from the Government came in September.<\/p>\n
But advice to Finance Minister Nicola Willis in March, which recommended excluding a NZ$30m funding proposal to cover the hosting costs in September 2027, said that “Cabinet approval was not sought before announcement of the hosting arrangement”.<\/p>\n
“The value for money of the bid is not clear.”<\/p>\n
A lack of consultation, the Treasury said, made it said made it harder to assess that value.<\/p>\n
“New Zealand has publicly committed to hosting the [Pacific Islands] Forum, creating unavoidable costs,” Treasury said.<\/p>\n
“We consider that it is valuable to host the Forum, but that there is significant scope to manage down the cost in line with the obligations of hosting.”<\/p>\n
In a separate aid memoire, Willis was advised to cut it down to $10m after asking for a funding package adjusted for inflation, more in line with the cost of hosting PIF in 2011.<\/p>\n
“The original initiative included components that are either discretionary or could be scaled, including $6.4m for policy work.”<\/p>\n
The final amount was agreed on “to reflect that the Forum has increased in scope and importance since 2011”.<\/p>\n
Peters’ office told RNZ Pacific that he and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon decided to make an offer “in mid-2025”.<\/p>\n
“The Pacific Islands Forum has expanded significantly in scope over the past 15 years,” a statement read.<\/p>\n
“It is a much bigger and more complicated event than it was in 2011 when New Zealand last hosted it.”<\/p>\n
The Prime Ministers’ office has been approached for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Foreign Minister Winston Peters did not consult Cabinet before making a commitment to host the Pacific Islands Forum…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":596940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,6430,135,40,38,41,39,136],"class_list":["post-596939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-pacific-islands","tag-politics","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-winston-peters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/596940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}