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Speaker 1: Did you see the comments yesterday from Malaysia's deputy prime minister.

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Speaker 1: If you didn't, he was talking to a Kiwi delegation

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Speaker 1: often Kuala Olympa for Arsian, this will be your new

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Speaker 1: market and we welcome any halal product from New Zealand great.

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Speaker 1: I've always been pretty skeptical about these trade missions, if

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Speaker 1: I'm being honest with you, whether they actually do anything,

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Speaker 1: whether they actually achieve anything, or is it one big

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Speaker 1: giant junket. Truth is they're a little bit of both.

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Speaker 1: On a trip to Ladder of Ostok and Russia back

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Speaker 1: in twenty eleven, our Prime minister was in. John Key

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Speaker 1: got to sit down with Vladimir Putin. Putin turned up late.

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Speaker 1: The journos were out waiting in the rain for hours.

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Speaker 1: He came and he sat down, he spoke in Russian

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Speaker 1: and then he booted us out with his bodyguards. But anyway,

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Speaker 1: he and Key spoke for about an hour. And at

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Speaker 1: the time New Zealand was trying to cut a free

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Speaker 1: trade deal with Russia, including a bunch of other like Blarus, Kazakhstan.

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Speaker 1: And you don't get that sort of access every day.

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Speaker 1: Of course, you wouldn't be doing that till a deal today,

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Speaker 1: and we ended up spending talks with the Russians in

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Speaker 1: twenty fourteen after they went into Ukraine, so it was

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Speaker 1: all a waste of time anyway. But I grew to

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Speaker 1: accept that these meetings actually do achieve something. Besides the

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Speaker 1: hotels and the accommodation. They're not actually what you think

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Speaker 1: that might be cracked up to be. The schedules pretty graeling,

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Speaker 1: and the flight over is a bit crap too. They're

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Speaker 1: not always glamorous, is the point. Great fun though, back

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Speaker 1: to the Malaysian Deputy Prime minister. If a Kiwi politician

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Speaker 1: said that to a foreign company wanting to export here,

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Speaker 1: for example, it wouldn't mean much to importers here, but

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Speaker 1: there it's different. There's anything I learned about Asia, it's

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Speaker 1: that politicians have sway. They often control large contracts, have

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Speaker 1: close relationships or control over parts of the economy that

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Speaker 1: you wouldn't see in a more Western style democracy. So

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Speaker 1: when a leader in a country of thirty five million

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Speaker 1: people in a region with seven hundred million people says

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Speaker 1: something like that, probably worth the trip. For more from

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Speaker 1: early edition with Ryan Bridge. Listen live to news talks

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