President David Adeang used last week’s address to the United Nations General Assembly to commit to building stronger relationships around the world while creating new opportunities at home, declaring Naoero a “friend to all and an enemy to none”.
He told the assembly that while the government continued to strengthen and diversify the economy, international partnerships play an important role in attracting investment, improving infrastructure and connectivity, and creating new opportunities for dei-Naoero.
However he also said that small states are increasingly being asked to “choose between partners, between blocs, between competing visions of the world,” stating categorically, “Naoero will not be made to choose.”
“We will work with every partner who respects our sovereignty and our right to decide our own future,” he said, while clarifying that this position was not neutrality but independence.
Pointing out that “partnership does not mean agreement on everything,” President Adeang said Naoero would remain open to working with partners around the world.
“Naoero’s partnerships are not all of one kind.
“Some are born of kinship, some of shared interests, some have been built through decades of cooperation, and some are grounded in the conviction that when a wrong persists it must be named and addressed.”
He reminded his audience that each relationship matters.
“None is a substitute for another, and none comes at the expense of another.”
Alongside these relationships, President Adeang affirmed the government’s commitment to continue prioritising the economy, and updated world leaders with the significant advances Naoero has seen in recent years, including the Naoero Trust Fund, fisheries, the seabed, joining the Egmont Group, new revenue through the Naoero investment and residence programmes, and a virtual asset regulator built with full due diligence obligations before the industry it regulates.
“And behind all of it, investment in health, education and sport, so that our people are not only better off but healthier and better prepared,” he said.
The President called on the international community to continue to “invest in our people, invest in an economy that rests on more than a handful of arrangements, invest in institutions that will outlast my government and the next, invest in the infrastructure, connectivity and opportunities that distance has too often denied us.”
He said Naoero offered “not dependence, but participation; not expectation, but contribution; not a beneficiary, but a partner.”
For dei-Naoero, stronger international partnerships mean greater opportunities at home while ensuring decisions about the nation’s future remain firmly in Naoero’s hands.
