New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has canvassed the terrific idea that New Zealand could join the non-nuclear Pillar Two of the AUKUS agreement.
This shows the revolutionary genius of AUKUS. It can be a military technology agreement even for countries, like New Zealand, effectively without a military at all.
A defence industry technology agreement that embraces nations which don’t have technology, or even industry, to speak of.
If you don’t have a military what would you need hi-tech military technology for? And what possible contribution could you make to such hi-tech technology?
For Australia, the inclusion of New Zealand would nonetheless have obvious benefits.
We would cease being the shirker and the dunce in the AUKUS class.
After all, we’re not doing very much at all to acquire or produce defence capabilities over the next 10 years, but compared with the Kiwis we are the Prussians of the Pacific.
In terms of defence, we are, compared with New Zealand, Godzilla, Hercules and Arnie Schwarzenegger all rolled into one. But only compared with New Zealand.
It would also elevate geo-strategic incoherence from a difficulty into an operating principle if AUKUS included a nation which holds as a matter of dearest principle the doctrine that no AUKUS submarine would ever be allowed to visit its ports, because of its outdated and positively weird ban on nuclear-capable or nuclear-powered ships passing through New Zealand.
Given that the US and UK operate exclusively nuclear-powered submarines, that means that none of their submarines at all can visit the Kiwis.
Thus New Zealand’s entry into part of AUKUS would also help Canberra by providing a further rationale for maintaining our six Collins-class subs more or less forever, which is what we more or less plan to do anyway, given the fleet of AUKUS subs doesn’t get completed until the 2050s.
The Collins subs would be the only AUKUS subs allowed to visit the AUKUS member, New Zealand, if Wellington joins AUKUS.
The big story in Australian defence is not how much money we might one day spend on AUKUS. Nor is it the technology which might one day come to us under Pillar Two of AUKUS, although we have so very few defence platforms on which to put any of this technology anyway, and indeed most of them couldn’t operate much further away than New Zealand unless under the protective wing of the Americans.
Indeed, while Anthony Albanese in opposition mocked Scott Morrison for announcing a future east coast nuclear submarine base without nominating its location, the internal messages in Labor are that the Left shouldn’t worry about such a base because it won’t even be identified until 2030. This demonstrates, I suspect, a fundamental lack of seriousness about the whole project.
Even necessary work to expand Stirling submarine base in Western Australia to accommodate visiting US and British nuclear-powered submarines, and then the first of the Virginias which Australia will buy from the US, shows no sign of progress.
But NZ membership would surely insulate AUKUS, and the Labor government’s participation in AUKUS, from criticism from the Left. It would have been even better if it could have happened under Jacinda Ardern – a blessing for AUKUS from the queen of woke.
New Zealand joining AUKUS in any meaningful way is a kind of fantasy idea. When our defence traffics too much in fantasy, it’s time to get worried.
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