Tim is regarded internationally as a leader in trade policy and international climate change negotiations. After graduating with first class honours in economics and economic history, Tim started his career as a junior economist in the NZ Treasury.

In the early 1980s he became Foreign Policy Adviser to two NZ Prime Ministers (Muldoon & Lange) and in 1985 was appointed Chief Trade Negotiator where he led our team in the last successful multilateral trade negotiations.

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 MFAT, Tim developed and negotiated the first steps towards what became known as the ‘CPTPP’ (the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement) which is today a foundation stone of our trade strategy.

In 2002, Tim was appointed as NZ Ambassador to the WTO. In that capacity,  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 Trade Minister, he oversaw the expansion of the TPP process.

As Minister of Climate Change Negotiations from 2008, and after the collapse of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, the Mexican Foreign Minister, Patricia Espinosa invited Tim 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’. The US and China then endorsed the ‘NZ Proposal’ and the NDC became the core commitment of the Paris Agreement.

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. He is now Chair of the NZ Advisory Group on Supercritical Geothermal, responsible for coordinating the world’s first coherent attempt to prove the engineering viability of this vast source of renewable energy.

Tim has three adult children, four grandchildren and speaks competent French and Indonesian and is in the early stages of studying Te Reo, given his responsibilities in geothermal and working closely with iwi in that capacity.