New Zealand High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Phil Goff was dismissed over comments about US President Trump. Photo: AFP / Pool
Former New Zealand High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Phil Goff is not backing down from his comments on United States President Donald Trump, and says he would do it again.
Goff is back in New Zealand after being sacked from his role, following comments he made at a speech by Finland's Foreign Minister in which he questioned Trump's understanding of history, and his treatment of Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters wasted no time in sacking the former Labour leader, saying people in Goff's position are not allowed to "free think".
Goff told RNZ's First Up the comments he made needed to be said, and he does not regret making them.
"It was an important question to ask and it needed to be asked.
"And if the price of that was losing my job, well so be it."
Goff said Peters had the prerogative to sack him, and he is not complaining about that.
In fact, Goff said, it was thanks to the minister's response that his comments on Trump received international attention.
"My intention was clear, we'd just had several weeks of one untruthful statement following another from President Trump.
"It was becoming a little bit like a George Orwell novel and I really felt that while these misstatements, these lies actually, were being told, nobody was calling them out."
The former High Commissioner said he was "appalled and astounded by the dishonest comments made about the situation in Ukraine by the Trump Administration".
Goff said Russia was clearly the aggressor in Ukraine, and that saying Ukraine started the war was nonsense.
"It was like the Hans Christian Andersen story about the emperor having no clothes, everybody knew that was the fact."
Goff, who was Minister of Foreign Affairs and Defence in the Fifth Labour Government, believed questioning Trump's understanding of history and the his position on Ukraine would resonate with New Zealanders.
"I think New Zealand is most proud of what we do as a nation when we ask honest questions," he said.
"We have the right to ask honest questions of our allies that we've stood beside and supported when we thought it was right.
"The question I asked was whether President Trump understood the lessons of history, and I know that President Trump is an admirer of Winston Churchill.
"I thought he might be familiar with Churchill's strong opposition to the appeasement of Nazi Germany before the Second World War.
"What Churchill said to Neville Chamberlain, the prime minister that sold out Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia was: 'you had the choice between dishonour and war, you chose dishonour and you will have war'.
"There's a powerful message in that, the message is if you appease an aggressor you don't satisfy them, you only encourage them."
Goff said while successive New Zealand governments have been strong on supporting Ukraine, he does not believe the coalition government challenged the untruths expressed by the Trump administration.
"I don't think we have spoken out in the way that we need to speak out, to challenge things that are simply untrue and to speak the values that drive us as a nation.
"And that value in particular is to stand up for the Ukrainians who are fighting to defend their freedom and their nationhood."
Goff told First Up his experiences with Ukrainian soldiers being trained in England by members of the NZ Defence Force were some of the most emotional experiences he had as High Commissioner to the UK.
"I was looking in the faces of men that I knew may be dead within months after they've gone to the front line, and they were standing up for what they believed in.
"They were the victims of aggression and we needed to stand alongside them.
"And by not challenging statements about Zelensky being a dictator and Ukraine starting the war, we were actually condoning those statements that suggested that it was Russia that was in the right and we had no place in defending Ukraine.
"I strongly and very emotionally disagree with that stance. We need to stand up for what is right. We need to stand up for the victim of aggression and not make excuses for the aggressor."
He also said the diplomatic community in London privately shared their dismay at Trump's treatment of Ukraine.
Goff said Europe may have to deal with the threat of Russian aggression without the United States in the future, and that would require allocating more money to defence.
He said Putin has shown very clearly that the benign international environment we once had no longer exists, and NATO members, as well as countries like New Zealand, need to be putting more funding into defence.
As for the future, Goff said after 40 years in elected roles, he does not plan to do any more.
"I'll be doing a bit of thinking, and hopefully maybe a bit of writing."
A spokesperson for Peters said he had no further comment to make, referring to the minister's last statement on the matter which said the decision to remove Goff was very difficult but his comments made his position as High Commissioner untenable.
He said at the time Goff had dedicated his professional life to serving the New Zealand people and "we continue to hold him in high esteem, and we wish him well".
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