Tim GROSER

Tim is regarded internationally as a leader in trade policy and international climate change negotiations. After graduating with first class honours in economic history, Tim started his career as a junior economist in the NZ Treasury’s external economics division and spent a number of years in Wellington and Canberra putting together NZ’s first comprehensive trade agreement – the CER Agreement between Australia and NZ, regarded at the time as ‘the gold standard’ for bilateral FTAs.

In the early 1980s he became Foreign Policy Adviser to two NZ Prime Ministers and in 1985 was appointed Chief Agriculture Negotiator for NZ and Minister (Economic) in the NZ Embassy in Geneva. Promoted later to overall Chief Negotiator, Tim became one of a small group of professional negotiators that put the last successful set of multilateral negotiating ‘Rounds’ together (the Uruguay Round).

In the mid 1990s Tim was Ambassador to Indonesia and returned to run a think tank, the Asia-NZ Foundation. In 1999, as Principal Economic Adviser to the NZ Foreign Ministry and concerned about growing opposition towards liberal trade policy in the lead up to the proposed ‘Seattle Round’ (which was never launched) Tim wrote the key strategy paper for the Singaporean Government that led to TPP – its first step being a comprehensive FTA between the two countries to be followed quickly by its expansion known as ‘P4’ (or Pacific Four) when Chile and then Brunei joined in. This would later prove pivotal to world trade strategy when Tim became NZ’s Trade Minister.

In 2002, Tim was appointed as the first ever NZ Ambassador to the WTO and was immediately appointed Chair of the Rules Negotiating Group (subsidies, anti-dumping, CVD, safeguards). In 2003, after the collapse of the Doha Development Agenda in Cancun over agriculture, Tim was asked to shift to being Chair of the DDA Agriculture Negotiating Group. In July 2004 Tim authored the successful ‘Framework Agreement on Agriculture’, widely believed at the time to open the door to the successful conclusion of the DDA overall. Unfortunately, many years of lost momentum later meant otherwise.

In 2005 Tim left Geneva to enter NZ politics and was elected to Parliament. After three years as Shadow Trade Minister, Tim became Minister of Trade, Minister of Climate Change Negotiations and Associate Foreign Minister. As Minister of Trade and following two years of intense discussions, President Obama approved the application of the United States to ‘join’ P4 (Tim was the formal ‘administrator’ of the agreement). This represented the culmination of the strategy the two small states had put into play some ten years later: to bind the world’s largest economy into an open, plurilateral trade agreement in the Asia Pacific. This prompted Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia and others to join TPP in the wake of the US decision. In 2012 Tim stood for Director General of the WTO. He got to the ‘semi-finals’ but not the final choice between the Mexican and Brazilian candidates.

As Minister of Climate Change Negotiations from 2008, and after the collapse of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, given Tim’s decades of negotiating experience, in 2010 Tim was asked by the Mexican Foreign Minister, Patricia Espinosa, to facilitate private discussions between China and the United States at Ministerial level to try to find a new way forward. Tim evolved the hybrid political/legal Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) from those (and wider) negotiations into the ‘NZ Proposal for the Long Term Climate Change Agreement’. In October 2014 President Obama’s Climate Change Special Envoy, Todd Stern, indicated that the NZ Proposal was the only proposal the US could accept as the basis of the new global agreement. Some weeks later, Minister Xie Zhenua, China’s Climate Change Minister indicated the same thing at the COP meeting in Lima.

In December 2015, following US signature (Mike Froman) of the TPP Agreement in Auckland in December 2015,  Tim was appointed NZ Ambassador to the United States. He returned to NZ in late 2018 and is now an independent consultant advising on trade and climate change.

Tim has three adult children, four grandchildren and speaks competent French and Indonesian.