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Well, the delegate from New Zealand beat him to it. Sir Donald McKinnon, the former Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand and Secretary General of the Commonwealth of Nations told us last Friday that he visited the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister asking for their support:..

Sir Donald Charles "Don" McKinnon, Special Envoy - New Zealand Prime Minister
"I am here to hopefully get the support of Belize and I had a very good discussion with the Prime Minister, I had a very discussion with the Foreign Minister and I can only say that we hope they will support us. It's really important that smaller states like New Zealand, like Belize, like Trinidad get an opportunity to sit on the Security Council. Yes there is the P5; China, Russia, US, Britain and France do have a dominant role, but it's important that the other 11 nations on the council play an active part."

There are 192 countries with votes in the UN.

And while we had McKinnon, we asked him to dip into his vast trove of experience to discuss New Zealand's indigenous peoples. They are the Maori's - and they've been on the island from at least 1200 BC. But Europeans arrived there in the 1700's and the two sides signed a treaty in 1840. But over a century later, it's still not settled. Mackinnon explained.

Sir Donald Charles "Don" McKinnon, Special Envoy - New Zealand Prime Minister
"Signing a treaty is one thing, implementing a treaty is another and we've been wrestling with the implementation of this treaty for more than 100 years and we continue to do so because as long as we see elements within our indigenous community that are more proportionally represented in the poorest areas we still have to do something. So yes we pursue it with an education, but more recently we have been dealing with a tremendous amount of compensation; compensation that is due to those people as a result of the acquisition of land and fishing rights and other rights over a hundred years."